- Email: [email protected]
Editorial introduction to IUI 2000 S.I.
Knowledge-Based Systems 14 (2001) 1±2
www.elsevier.com/locate/knosys
Editorial
Editorial introduction to IUI 2000 S.I.
This special issue of the Knowledge-Based Systems Journal continues the tradition of reporting on the annual ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI). IUI is the premium forum for reporting outstanding research and development by the intelligent interface community. This special issue contains a set of selected contributions from ACM IUI2000 Ð the Fourth International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces held in New Orleans, Louisiana, 9±12 January 2000. Work in intelligent interfaces attempts to understand and develop new technical solutions that improve human performance to work with complex applications and environments that often cause information overload. IUI occupies the currently ªhotº area of intersection between the traditional ®elds of AI and HCI. Both ®elds are, respectively, represented by conferences such as the National Conference on Arti®cial Intelligence (AAAI), the International Joint Conference on Arti®cial Intelligence (IJCAI), the ACM Computers and Human Interaction (CHI) Conference and the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) series of INTERACT conferences. As AI technologies have continued to be more widely used, user interface technologies are increasingly integrating AI functional elements in a range of ways so as to design interfaces that are ªsmarter and more sensitiveº in supporting human needs and interactions. A growing community of researchers is focusing on this work which demands interdisciplinary skills and vision, and the ACM IUI conference series is the premiere venue for this community. IUI2000 was attended by more than 150 persons. The small size of the conference is ideal for numerous personal discussions and exchanges of ideas between IUI attendees ranging from leading international scientists to students. IUI2000 presented a remarkable program of papers, posters, and panels representing a strong international participation with papers from Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Starting off the conference were tutorials, including ªIntroduction to Intelligent User Interfacesº by Mark Maybury of MITRE and ªInformation Filtering, Classi®cation, and Extractionº by Michael Pazzani of the University of California at Irvine. Chuck Rich and Candy Sidner of the Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs led a workshop entitled ªPlans in Intelligent User Interfacesº. This topic is an excel-
lent example of how well studied AI technologies are becoming an important component of future work in user interfaces. The conference program was composed of two keynote speakers and a single track series of paper, poster, and panel sessions. Chris Miller of Honeywell ran a super panel entitled ªOff the Desktop Ð Intelligent User Interfacesº. The panel examined IUIs for personal digital assistants, telephones, PDAs, and many other types of pervasive computing and communication technologies. IUI2000 participants enjoyed two wonderful keynote addresses from Marvin Minsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ernest Edmonds of Loughborough University. Marvin Minsky presented the opening address entitled ªThe Emotion Machineº, discussing some topics from his forthcoming book of the same name. While a majority of scientist in the ®elds of AI, HCI, and IUI toil away on the details of ªprogramming and interfacesº, Marvin reminded us of the importance of the ªbig questionsº. The closing address given by Ernest Edmonds discussed artists augmented by agents. He related some unique interdisciplinary collaboration in his lab, where artists, computer scientists, and social scientists work together. Ernest also related his own experience as a computer assisted artist, showing some of his work. Computer assisted creativity in the arts brings into sharp focus the issues of human±machine collaboration and the value of good IUI work. In this special issue, there are ten papers selected from IUI2000 that provide a good view of the range of quality research problems being investigated in the ®eld of IUI. While there were numerous strong paper contributions in the IUI2000 program, these ten papers should provide a useful and broad representation of the ACM IUI2000 conference. The ten papers in this special issue of the KnowledgeBased Systems Journal are ordered alphabetically by ®rst author name and are brie¯y introduced below: Andre and Rist introduce a new style for presenting information via the notion of presentation teams of animate characters. Rather than addressing a user directly, presentation teams covey information in the style of performances to be observed by a user. The performance of a presentation team is enabled by automated generation of performances. Barbosa and Sieckenius de Souza provide an alternative
0950-7051/01/$ - see front matter q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0950-705 1(00)00095-2
2
D. Riecken et al. / Knowledge-Based Systems 14 (2001) 1±2
framework and approach, other than macro recording or programming by demonstration, by which to ªextend softwareº de®ning the underlying semantic model of a software application. This work examines how via metaphorical and metonymic expressions, a system would infer and abduct meaning from users actions to recognize meaningful constructs beyond existing legal syntactical terms of a software application model. This approach would enable an application to correctly infer a user's intentions and allow the application to ªgenerate extensions to accommodate both repetitive and innovative tasks within a controlled rangeº. Bradshaw and Hammond report on an information retrieval indexing technique that leverages ªcommunities of human expertsº in automated indexing. This approach applies citations from other reference materials about a speci®c document to index that document and which also then leverages similar properties that users use to formulate short queries to access that document. Budzik, Hammond, and Birnbaum address the utility of context to automate the ªprovidingº of task relevant information for a user in a speci®c context and task. This work examines the utility of software processes that attempt to recognize a user's series of actions and the objects (e.g. textual documents) the actions are applied to so as to detect and infer ªrich contextual informationº. This information is then applied in order to support ªjust-in-timeº access to task relevant information for the current context of the user. Cassell, Bickmore, Campbell, Vilhjalmsson, and Yan provide a compelling argument for the embodiment of actual human conversational protocols in the design of an animated character interface. Their work demonstrates the importance of communicative behaviors such as salutations and farewells, conversational turn taking with interruptions, and describing objects using hand gestures. Derthick and Roth introduce an interface that leverages user branching history to enable the user to examine alternative scenarios during data analysis tasks. This work enables users to recognize conceptual branch points for navigation across time and scenarios, and to support selectively undoing/redoing events with a scenario or across scenarios. Jameson, Groûmann-Hutter, March, Rummer, Bohnenberger, and Wittig discuss the role of role of making small decisions by a software system embodied in an IUI. In this
paper, the value of obtaining relevant (empirical) data relating to the IUI functions that will be performed and then developing suitable decision models is considered. There is discussion pointing to the degree of value obtained from empirical data and learning, and the further need for qualitative analysis by an IUI designer in order to de®ne potentially good adaptation policies for decision making in an in¯uence diagram model. Kerpedjiev, and Roth present an approach to integrate system functions that perform presentation planning by reasoning about communicative goals and acts with system functions that design data graphics by reasoning about tasks and the graphical techniques that support them. This papers reports on the translation of communicative goals into conceptual tasks so as to enable generation of graphic data that aids users to achieve communicative goals. Maglio, Campbell, Barrett, and Selker discuss work on a software system architecture that enables what they characterize attentive systems that attend to users. Such systems observe users, gather information about the world a user ªworksº in, generates user models of user interests and behaviors, and enables cooperative functions and services for users (learning user informational interests, facilitating user needs and goals, etc.). Reed reports on a system that provides an interface to assist users in the expert perceptual task of sound equalization. This paper demonstrates the application of inductive learning techniques to enable a system to acquire expert skills in pattern recognition in auditory tasks performing sound equalization. This skill enables the system to assist users to perform perceptual auditory tasks. We hope these ten papers provide a useful insight to a range research in Intelligent. User Interfaces reported at IUI2000 in New Orleans. We are looking forward to IUI2001 which will be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, 14±17 January, 2001. D. Riecken a,* D. Benyon b H. Lieberman c a IBM, T.J. Watson Research Center and Rutgers University, USA E-mail address: [email protected] b Napier University, UK c MIT Media Lab, USA
* Corresponding author. School of Communications and Library Studies, Rutgers University, 4 Huntington Street, College Av Campus, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA.
www.elsevier.com/locate/knosys
Editorial
Editorial introduction to IUI 2000 S.I.
This special issue of the Knowledge-Based Systems Journal continues the tradition of reporting on the annual ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI). IUI is the premium forum for reporting outstanding research and development by the intelligent interface community. This special issue contains a set of selected contributions from ACM IUI2000 Ð the Fourth International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces held in New Orleans, Louisiana, 9±12 January 2000. Work in intelligent interfaces attempts to understand and develop new technical solutions that improve human performance to work with complex applications and environments that often cause information overload. IUI occupies the currently ªhotº area of intersection between the traditional ®elds of AI and HCI. Both ®elds are, respectively, represented by conferences such as the National Conference on Arti®cial Intelligence (AAAI), the International Joint Conference on Arti®cial Intelligence (IJCAI), the ACM Computers and Human Interaction (CHI) Conference and the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) series of INTERACT conferences. As AI technologies have continued to be more widely used, user interface technologies are increasingly integrating AI functional elements in a range of ways so as to design interfaces that are ªsmarter and more sensitiveº in supporting human needs and interactions. A growing community of researchers is focusing on this work which demands interdisciplinary skills and vision, and the ACM IUI conference series is the premiere venue for this community. IUI2000 was attended by more than 150 persons. The small size of the conference is ideal for numerous personal discussions and exchanges of ideas between IUI attendees ranging from leading international scientists to students. IUI2000 presented a remarkable program of papers, posters, and panels representing a strong international participation with papers from Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Starting off the conference were tutorials, including ªIntroduction to Intelligent User Interfacesº by Mark Maybury of MITRE and ªInformation Filtering, Classi®cation, and Extractionº by Michael Pazzani of the University of California at Irvine. Chuck Rich and Candy Sidner of the Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs led a workshop entitled ªPlans in Intelligent User Interfacesº. This topic is an excel-
lent example of how well studied AI technologies are becoming an important component of future work in user interfaces. The conference program was composed of two keynote speakers and a single track series of paper, poster, and panel sessions. Chris Miller of Honeywell ran a super panel entitled ªOff the Desktop Ð Intelligent User Interfacesº. The panel examined IUIs for personal digital assistants, telephones, PDAs, and many other types of pervasive computing and communication technologies. IUI2000 participants enjoyed two wonderful keynote addresses from Marvin Minsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ernest Edmonds of Loughborough University. Marvin Minsky presented the opening address entitled ªThe Emotion Machineº, discussing some topics from his forthcoming book of the same name. While a majority of scientist in the ®elds of AI, HCI, and IUI toil away on the details of ªprogramming and interfacesº, Marvin reminded us of the importance of the ªbig questionsº. The closing address given by Ernest Edmonds discussed artists augmented by agents. He related some unique interdisciplinary collaboration in his lab, where artists, computer scientists, and social scientists work together. Ernest also related his own experience as a computer assisted artist, showing some of his work. Computer assisted creativity in the arts brings into sharp focus the issues of human±machine collaboration and the value of good IUI work. In this special issue, there are ten papers selected from IUI2000 that provide a good view of the range of quality research problems being investigated in the ®eld of IUI. While there were numerous strong paper contributions in the IUI2000 program, these ten papers should provide a useful and broad representation of the ACM IUI2000 conference. The ten papers in this special issue of the KnowledgeBased Systems Journal are ordered alphabetically by ®rst author name and are brie¯y introduced below: Andre and Rist introduce a new style for presenting information via the notion of presentation teams of animate characters. Rather than addressing a user directly, presentation teams covey information in the style of performances to be observed by a user. The performance of a presentation team is enabled by automated generation of performances. Barbosa and Sieckenius de Souza provide an alternative
0950-7051/01/$ - see front matter q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S 0950-705 1(00)00095-2
2
D. Riecken et al. / Knowledge-Based Systems 14 (2001) 1±2
framework and approach, other than macro recording or programming by demonstration, by which to ªextend softwareº de®ning the underlying semantic model of a software application. This work examines how via metaphorical and metonymic expressions, a system would infer and abduct meaning from users actions to recognize meaningful constructs beyond existing legal syntactical terms of a software application model. This approach would enable an application to correctly infer a user's intentions and allow the application to ªgenerate extensions to accommodate both repetitive and innovative tasks within a controlled rangeº. Bradshaw and Hammond report on an information retrieval indexing technique that leverages ªcommunities of human expertsº in automated indexing. This approach applies citations from other reference materials about a speci®c document to index that document and which also then leverages similar properties that users use to formulate short queries to access that document. Budzik, Hammond, and Birnbaum address the utility of context to automate the ªprovidingº of task relevant information for a user in a speci®c context and task. This work examines the utility of software processes that attempt to recognize a user's series of actions and the objects (e.g. textual documents) the actions are applied to so as to detect and infer ªrich contextual informationº. This information is then applied in order to support ªjust-in-timeº access to task relevant information for the current context of the user. Cassell, Bickmore, Campbell, Vilhjalmsson, and Yan provide a compelling argument for the embodiment of actual human conversational protocols in the design of an animated character interface. Their work demonstrates the importance of communicative behaviors such as salutations and farewells, conversational turn taking with interruptions, and describing objects using hand gestures. Derthick and Roth introduce an interface that leverages user branching history to enable the user to examine alternative scenarios during data analysis tasks. This work enables users to recognize conceptual branch points for navigation across time and scenarios, and to support selectively undoing/redoing events with a scenario or across scenarios. Jameson, Groûmann-Hutter, March, Rummer, Bohnenberger, and Wittig discuss the role of role of making small decisions by a software system embodied in an IUI. In this
paper, the value of obtaining relevant (empirical) data relating to the IUI functions that will be performed and then developing suitable decision models is considered. There is discussion pointing to the degree of value obtained from empirical data and learning, and the further need for qualitative analysis by an IUI designer in order to de®ne potentially good adaptation policies for decision making in an in¯uence diagram model. Kerpedjiev, and Roth present an approach to integrate system functions that perform presentation planning by reasoning about communicative goals and acts with system functions that design data graphics by reasoning about tasks and the graphical techniques that support them. This papers reports on the translation of communicative goals into conceptual tasks so as to enable generation of graphic data that aids users to achieve communicative goals. Maglio, Campbell, Barrett, and Selker discuss work on a software system architecture that enables what they characterize attentive systems that attend to users. Such systems observe users, gather information about the world a user ªworksº in, generates user models of user interests and behaviors, and enables cooperative functions and services for users (learning user informational interests, facilitating user needs and goals, etc.). Reed reports on a system that provides an interface to assist users in the expert perceptual task of sound equalization. This paper demonstrates the application of inductive learning techniques to enable a system to acquire expert skills in pattern recognition in auditory tasks performing sound equalization. This skill enables the system to assist users to perform perceptual auditory tasks. We hope these ten papers provide a useful insight to a range research in Intelligent. User Interfaces reported at IUI2000 in New Orleans. We are looking forward to IUI2001 which will be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, 14±17 January, 2001. D. Riecken a,* D. Benyon b H. Lieberman c a IBM, T.J. Watson Research Center and Rutgers University, USA E-mail address: [email protected] b Napier University, UK c MIT Media Lab, USA
* Corresponding author. School of Communications and Library Studies, Rutgers University, 4 Huntington Street, College Av Campus, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA.