Thursday, November 30, Volen 101, 2:00-3.00 pm
Ordinary people already have great difficulty using the advanced features of digitally-operated household devices, and the problem is getting worse as more customization and programming features are continually being added. I will discuss and demonstrate research which addresses this problem by adding a collaborative task guidance capability to complex devices, such as digital home appliances, medical instrumentation, or military equipment.
Concretely, we have developed a reusable Java framework, called DiamondHelp, for building collaborative task guidance systems. DiamondHelp combines a generic conversational interface, adapted from online chat programs, with an application-specific direct manipulation interface. DiamondHelp includes a generic ``a things to say'' facility for use without spoken language understanding, and also supports extensions to take advantage of speech technology.
DiamondHelp is part of a larger research agenda exploring the application of collaborative discourse theory to human-computer interaction, which has resulted in a generic collaboration manager, called Collagen. Collagen is used in DiamondHelp and other applications both at MERL and elsewhere.
Host: Rick Alterman