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28
Statement on National Information Infrastructure Issues
Oscar Garcia for the IEEE Computer
Society
Statement of the Problem
A key challenge facing the information technology community is
to integrate human-computer interaction (HCI) research with that of
broadband communication in an economically effective manner serving
the broadest possible community. Over the next 5 to 7 years, we
expect this issue to become one of the central economic and
scientific drivers of the entertainment industry, as well as a key
influence on how science and education are conducted in
technologically advanced nations. Our organization is particularly
concerned with the latter arena. We want to ensure that scientists,
students, and other serious information seekers are able to exploit
the new technology and, in the case of a large segment of our
membership, also contribute to it. One of the many nontechnical
barriers is the lack of a forum for dissemination of information
about the national information infrastructure (NII), and the IEEE
Computer Society, with its technical groups and wide-ranging
publications, can be a significant facilitator of such a forum. The
deployment should include a strong leveraging of the educational
potential, given the more likely entertainment and business
aspects. Few universities, high schools, and elementary schools are
prepared to profit from the NII deployment, and even fewer
understand what changes in their educational modus operandi are
likely to take place if they participate. These issues are not
frequently included in public policy studies of technology because
the responsible curricula designers and implementors are often
absent. One certain aspect is that usability via good interfaces
must be taken seriously, given the broad spectrum of users.
Areas and Examples
Five key areas of HCI research activity are summarized below,
together with related key developments, enabling technologies, and
capabilities:
1.
Human-computer dialogue. Natural language,
voice, and other modalities (pen, gestures, haptic, etc.) can be
combined to produce dialogue techniques for HCI. These techniques
can be robust enough to tolerate acoustic noise, disfluencies, and
so on. Relevant topics here include speech recognition and
synthesis; natural language processing and understanding;1 lip-reading technologies in noisy
environments;2 and search,
navigation,3 and retrieval from
cyberspace using multimedia.4
Speaker identification can be combined with secure passwords for
use in control of computer access, and language identification may
support improved multilingual interfaces.5 Understanding of natural language and
speech also concerns semantics and prosody (for speech, obviously)
and probably the use of semantic nets and semantic encyclopedias
now under construction. Technologies of understanding beyond
symbolic matching or statistical techniques allow searches invoked
by description of the searched object in a less restrictive spoken
or written form. Roe and Wilpon6
present a thorough analysis of the potential uses of speech
recognition and synthesis, including its use in aiding physically
disabled people. Speech could play a very significant role if used
in the new asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) technologies, which are
designed, precisely, as a compromise between voice communications
and video
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transmission. The use of multiuser dialogue is
likely to extremely useful if there is usable software available,
such as in the case of scientific research and engineering
design.7
2.
Machine sensors for HCI and general I/O to
facilitate telepresence and teleoperation. Current computers
are ''sensory deprived," representing a barrier to both
human-computer interaction and machine learning. Such sensors as
microphones in single and array configurations, infrared and other
means of scanning and computing distances, optical sensors at
lightwave range including charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras of
small size, haptic interfaces, and alternatives to click-and-point
devices should be studied. Fusing sensor inputs to the computer
with intelligent or learned action-response behavior would create a
more realistic approach to machine learning and complex inferencing
techniques, involving symbolic, fuzzy, and probabilistic
approaches. This area has been researched with different
objectives, but seldom with that of trying to improve the
human-computer interface. Standardizing environments (e.g., via a
human-computer interaction workbench; HCI-WB) can improve
measurements. Such an experimental environment is also useful in
the study of human behavior in real and virtual modalities related
to the NII, and provides comparisons in human subject variabilities
between real and virtual environment behavior, navigation, and
orientation. The potential for research in the fusion of the
modalities is enormous.8 The
challenge of this research area is to fuse multiple sensor inputs
to the computer in a cohesive and well-coordinated manner. One such
example would be the integration of a CCD camera input with a
haptic experiment using force feedback and synthesized video
output. Another helpful experiment could involve mechanisms for the
localization of sound in virtual environments9 using the HCI-WB.
3.
Large storage (archival and nonarchival),
database, and indexing technologies, including multiresolution
and compression for different modalities. Video and audio
technologies will require large compression factors and mechanisms
for rapid encoding and decoding and are difficult to index and
access for retrieval, and even then, mass storage database
techniques will be required. This area is also indirectly related
to the speech and video synthesis technologies, since
high-resolution synthesis approaches imply efficient encoding,
possibly at different resolution levels. Similarly, virtual
environment research requires efficient storage and compression
technologies for input and output. There are good reasons to
believe, for example, that high-quality audio can be encoded at
rates of 2,000 bps using dynamic adaptation of perceptual criteria
in coding and articulatory modeling of the speech signal.
Therefore, encoding research should include both generation and
perceptual factors.10 Additionally,
multimedia databases require techniques for providing temporal
modeling and delivery capabilities. A novel interface, called
"query scripts," between the client and the database system adds
temporal presentation modeling capabilities to queries. Query
scripts capture multimedia objects and their temporal relationships
for presentation. Thus, query scripts extend the database system's
ability to select and define a of set objects for retrieval and
delivery by providing a priori knowledge about client requests.
This information allows the database system to schedule optimal
access plans for delivering multimedia content objects to clients.
One more example of an area of concern related to the overall
throughput capability of the NII is the Earth Observing System
(EOS) of NASA. This system is coupled with a data information
system (DIS) in a composite EOSDIS, which is expected, when
operational in 1998, to require transport of one terabyte per day
of unprocessed data and possibly an order of magnitude more when
processed, roughly equivalent to the total daily transport capacity
of the current Internet. The question is, Will the NII provide the
capacity for even a fraction of such volumes of data?
4.
Virtual environments and their use in
networking and wireless communication (tethered and untethered)
networked environments11 will have
an impact on the NII. Virtual environments relate to
telepresence and telecommuting, as well as to personal
communication services for digital voice. The technologies for
telepresence and telecommuting involve a mixture of multimedia and
networking. Wireless communication technology also includes
techniques such as geopositioning measures, local indoor infrared
sensors for location, communications technologies at low, medium,
and high bandwidth, and so on. The technical challenges of wireless
messaging are well known.12 In
particular, the proposed use of ATM LANs will integrate virtual
environment research at different sites with communication
research.13 The concept of virtual
environments is taken here in a broad sense, including both
head-mounted and enclosed CAVE-like environments,14 telepresence, and their human factor
considerations for the real-time and residual long-term
psychological effects of immersion. Strong encourangement for a
research emphasis on the human-computer interface is provided by
the National Research Council's Committee on Virtual Reality
Research and Development, whose final report15 makes specific
