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Assistive Environments for Successful Aging |
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Sumi Helal, Ph.D.
Professor and Director of the Gator Tech Smart HouseComputer & Information Science & Engineering Department University of Florida |
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An imminent crisis in healthcare and elder care threatens our economy and
quality of life. This year, the first cohort of "baby boomers" will be 60 years old,
presaging a massive wave of aging "boomers" that could degrade American health
care over the next quarter-century. Cost-effective, high impact technologies for
personal health and independent living are urgently needed. I will present our
experience and lessons learned in building "assistive environments" for the elderly
and demonstrate some of the challenges faced in working on multi-disciplinary,
human-centric research. I will also present ATLAS, a middleware architecture and
a sensor platform that supports self-integration (plug and play) and remote
programmability of pervasive spaces. I will show how ATLAS was used as the
foundation on which we built and programmed the Gator Tech Smart House, and
how it enabled pervasive application development, data collection, and analysis.
Biography: Dr. Sumi Helal is Professor in the CISE Department, and Director of its Pervasive and Mobile Computing Laboratory. His research interests span the areas of Pervasive Computing, Mobile Computing and networking and Internet. He has been the Director of Technology Development of the University of Florida Rehabilitating Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Successful Aging, for the past five years. He successfully created technology startups out of his research at UF. He is Founder and Chairman of the Board of Pervasa, Inc. and Founder and President of Phoneomena, Inc. He is co-founder and technical Director of the Gator Tech Smart House, a large ongoing project aiming at creating technological breakthroughs that will allow the Smart Home Concept to be successfully commercialized (creating the "Smart House in a Box"). He is a co-founder and an editorial board member of the IEEE Pervasive Computing magazine. He is the Editor of the magazine's column on Standards, Tools and Emerging Technologies. He is also an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transaction on Mobile Computing. He published extensively and is inventor/co-inventor of 16 patents and pending patent applications. He has been a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) since October 2002. Dr. Helal is Editor of the first Engineering Handbook ever published on the topic of Smart Technology for Aging, Disability and Independence (John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0471711551, Computer Engineering Series, Copyright 2007). Dr. Helal earned his B.E. and M.E. degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from Alexandria University, Egypt, in 1982 and 1985 respectively. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from Purdue University in 1991. Before joining the University of Florida, he held academic and industrial research positions at the University of Texas at Arlington, Purdue University and MCC, in Austin, Texas. |
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Self-Service Troubleshooting Automated Agents |
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Roberto Pieraccini
SpeechCycle535 W 34th Street New York, NY 10001 Tel.: (646) 792 2744 roberto@speechcycle.com |
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The past decade has witnessed the evolution of spoken human-machine
communication from the first research prototypes to commercial high volume
applications. Since the early exploitation of this technology in the mid 1990s, we
can identify three distinct generations of systems of different complexity, scope,
and architecture. Today, the third generation of spoken dialog systems includes
the most challenging applications in the area of problem solving: self-service
troubleshooting is one of them. In order to interact with users using voice and
provide them effective help for the resolution of technical problems, a
troubleshooting automated agent needs to have a deep knowledge of the type of
systems and devices for which it is designed, and of the linguistic variety of
expressions that describe the user perception of problems and observations.
Moreover, any advanced troubleshooting system needs to be integrated with the
available diagnostic tools and user knowledge databases in order to automate
the problem solving problem with minimal intervention from the user's side. In
this talk I will give a short overview of the history of spoken dialog systems, after
which I will concentrate on today's most sophisticated troubleshooting automated
agents. I will show how a good combination of human-computer interaction and
voice user interface, knowledge representation, and integration with external
devices and back-ends, can lead to successful automation of technical support
which, eventually, drives substantial customer care costs and improved customer
experience.
Biography: Roberto Pieraccini graduated in electrical engineering from the "Universita' degli Studi di Pisa," Pisa, Italy, in 1980. From 1981 to 1990 he was a researcher at CSELT (Torino, Italy). In June 1990 he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill, NJ) as a Member of Technical Staff, and from 1995 to 1999 he was with AT&T Shannon Laboratories (Florham Park, NJ). From November 1999 to August 2003 he was director of R&D for Dialog Technology at SpeechWorks International. In 2003 he joined the Human Language Technology department of IBM T. J. Watson Research in Yorktown Heights, where he managed the Conversational Interaction Technology department. In 2005 he accepted the position of Chief Technology Officer at SpeechCycle (formerly known as TellEureka), a company specializing in technical support systems based on voice recognition technology. He is currently the elected Chair of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee. During his carrier he carried out research on speech recognition, language modeling, spoken dialog systems and machine learning, and he authored more than 100 publications on these subjects. |
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Situated Judgment and Ambient Intelligence |
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Tom Rodden
Professor of Interactive SystemsMixed Reality Laboratory (MRL) University of Nottingham |
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Computer systems become embed within the world we inhabit pervading all
parts of our life playing a central role in reshaping our everyday
experiences: mobile phones, digital cameras, satellite navigation,
handheld computers and a host of similar devices are today commonplace
in our everyday activities. The digital infrastructure that underpins
them has supported a shift towards digital forms of work and the
formation of e-Science, e-Learning and e-Government initiatives. These
embryonic forms of pervasive technology have already had a major impact
on the ways that people work, learn, entertain themselves and go about
their daily business.
The accelerating development of increasing powerful digital
infrastructures, every more prevalent wireless networks and an
increasing diverse set of devices will shift computing even further away
from the familiar desktop, laptop and PDA. Computation will be
everywhere invisibly embedded into the fabric of the world we live, both
sensing and impacting many of our actions. It will support our children
as they learn about the world, it will protect our safety and security,
it will manage our transport infrastructures, it will monitor and help
protect our natural environment, it will alter they way in which we
provide healthcare and will have a profound effect on society as a
whole. What remains less clear is how will we live with these
technologies and just how smart these ambient intelligent environments
should be.
In this talk I will present some of the experiences of building
ubiquitous computing experiences within the Equator IRC and reflect on
the implications they for intelligence as a whole. I will particularly
emphasis the ways in which users made sense of these complex
environments in practice and exploited the properties of these
environments to shape their interactions.
Biography: Tom Rodden is Professor of Interactive Systems at the Mixed Reality Laboratory (MRL) at the University of Nottingham and Director of Equator. Prof Rodden?s research focuses on the development of new technologies to support users within the real world and new forms of interactive technology that emerge from mixing physical and digital interaction. This is a multi-disciplinary endeavour bringing together researchers in behavioural and social sciences and those involved in systems engineering, network infrastructures and interactive systems design. This ranges from those with a background in anthropology to those with training in art&design and embrace technologists from software development to the construction of novel hardware. He has published widely in the areas of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), HCI and Ubiquitous computing. Since 2001 he has been director of the Equator IRC that brings together 8 different research institutes in the UK. The Equator IRC is a six-year programme of research to explore new technologies that interweave the physical and digital worlds supported by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). |
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"Do Digital Homes Dream of Electric Families?" - Architecting Consumer Experience |
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Brian David Johnson
User Experience Group, Intel |
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With the increasing complexity of convergent home products and services, understanding
and architecting the consumers' experience is becoming increasing more important and
essential for success. Challenging our notions of the digital home or connected home
provides us with a unique lens into consumers' understanding of the value and promise of
future products and technologies . We'll explore the Consumer Experience development
approach which comprehends the complex ecosystem of a consumer's social and technological
life via ethnographic studies and design research. This process provides multiple inputs
during the research, path finding, design, development and validation of a product,
informing not only hardware and software but marketing, brand, support and business
strategies as well .
Biography: Brian David Johnson is the Consumer Experience Architect for the Intel's Digital Home - User Experience Group. The group's charter is focused on gaining a deep understanding of daily life in homes all over the world and using that knowledge to influence Intel's platform directions, product offerings, investment decisions and strategic planning. For the past two years, the group has conducted a global research project to gain a better understanding of the ways in which cultural practices are shaping people's relationships to new information and communication technologies. It is Brian David Johnson's role to take this rich information and apply it to Intel's product development, future planning as well as a tool to enable key initiatives in the industry. Brian began is career as a copywriter for bill boards in New York City. His advertising and entertainment experience includes directing commercial spots and corporate documentaries for companies such as: adidas, Unilever and HP - to creative director for global integrated marketing and branding campaigns for Visa, FUBU and ESPN. More recently Brian served as executive producer on several interactive television deployments in Scandinavia, Europe and the United States for British Airways, The Discovery Channel and New Line Cinema's The Lord of the Rings. Brian holds a BA from the New School for Social Research. He is the director of two feature films and the author of several science fiction novels. |
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