ijcai-99 Home Page

B2 - Intelligent Multimedia Interface Agents

Sunday, PM

Wolfgang Wahlster & Elisabeth Andre

The objective of the tutorial is to provide a survey of a new generation of highly personalized agent-based or assistant-like interface agents which have gained considerable interest both in academia and industries. Personalization refers to the ability of an interface to adapt its behavior to the information needs, interaction styles, and media preferences of individual users in particular situations.

In the context of the World Wide Web it wouldn't make sense to delegate the task of personalizing presentations to the information providers. One reason is that information providers would have to anticipate all possible users and situations in order to provide adequate presentation formats.

In the tutorial, we will discuss recent developments in the design of intelligent multimedia interfaces that go beyond the standard canned text, predesigned graphics and prerecorded images and sounds typically found in commercial multimedia systems of today. We will show that it is possible to adapt many of the fundamental concepts developed to date in computational linguistics in such a way that they become useful for multimedia presentations as well. We will address key applications such as communication assistants for the Internet, multimedia helpware, information retrieval and analysis, authoring, training, monitoring, and decision support.

There is also a peripheral aspect of personalizing user interfaces. By peripheral personalization, we mean that the system personifies itself audiovisually, e.g. as an animated life like character. The tutorial will introduce the technology for the development of animated interface agents which play the role of a communication assistant who explains, comments and highlights the material to be presented. The tutorial will be augmented by numerous videos and interactive demos.

Prerequisite knowledge:
The tutorial is designed for both researchers interested in the basic concepts underlying the development of interface agents and practitioners seeking a thorough overview of the key issues in applications. The tutorial assumes no prior knowledge on multimedia interface agents, but a basic knowledge of AI concepts will enhance the value of this course for participants.

Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Wahlster is the Director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) and a Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Saarbruecken. He is a AAAI Fellow and a recipient of the Fritz Winter Award. In 1998 he was awarded the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa by the Institute of Technology at LinköÚping University, Sweden. He serves as a Trustee of IJCAII and a member of the Executive Board of the AI section of the German Informatics Association (GI). Prof. Wahlster was the Conference Chair for IJCAI-93, the Chair of the Board of Trustees of IJCAII from 1991-1993, the ECAI-96 Program Chair and the Program Co-Chair of ACL/EACL-97. He is currently the Chair of ECCAI and the Vice-President of ACL. He is the Co-Editor of the new Readings in Intelligent User Interfaces.

Dr. rer nat. Elisabeth Andre is a project leader at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH). Since February 1997, she has been the Chair of the ACL Special Interest Group on Multimedia Language Processing (SIGMEDIA). Dr. Andre is on the editorial board of AI Communications and the area editor for Intelligent User Interfaces of Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (ETAI). Furthermore, she has been editing a special issue on Animated Interface Agents of the Applied Artificial Intelligence Journal and a special issue on Information Agents of the German Artificial Intelligence Journal.

Both presenters have been actively involved in numerous industrial projects dealing with various applications of intelligent user interface technology.


Webmaster: Sven Olofsson, sveno@dsv.su.se
Last modified: Mar 16, 1999