Anatole V. Gershman

The future of business services in the age of ubiquitous computing

Redefining the key aspects of the business-customer relationship.

Situated computing: bridging the gap between intention and action

Situated computing represents a new class of computing applications that bridges the gap between peoples intentions and the actions they can take to achieve those intentions. These applications are contextually embedded in real-world situations, and are enabled by the proliferation of new kinds of computing devices, expanding communication capabilities and new kinds of digital content. Three types of discontinuities give rise to intention/action gaps and provide opportunities for situated computing applications: physical discontinuities, information discontinuities and and awareness discontinuities. Several examples of applications that overcome these discontinuities are presented.

Multiple-camera people localization in an indoor environment

With the rapid proliferation of video cameras in public places, the ability to identify and track people and other objects creates tremendous opportunities for business and security applications. This paper presents the Multiple Camera Indoor Surveillance project which is devoted to using multiple cameras, agent-based technology and knowledge-based techniques to identify and track people and summarize their activities. We also describe a people localization system, which identifies and localizes people in an indoor environment. The system uses low-level color features – a color histogram and average vertical color – for building people models and the Bayesian decision-making approach for people localization. The results of a pilot experiment that used 32 h of data (4 days × 8 h) showed the average recall and precision values of 68 and 59% respectively. Augmenting the system with domain knowledge, such as location of working places in cubicles, doors and passages, increased the average recall to 87% and precision to 73%.

Using virtual worlds for corporate training

We present virtual training worlds that are relatively low-cost distributed collaborative learning environments suitable for corporate training. A virtual training world allows a facilitator, experts and trainees communicating and acting in the virtual environment for practicing skills during collaborative problem solving. Using these environments is beneficial to both trainees and corporations. The design of a leadership training course is discussed in details.

Real-World Challenges of Pervasive Computing

At the Pervasive Technology Applied workshop (part of Pervasive 2006), practitioners and researchers discussed how to bridge the gap between academic research and the practical hurdles in pervasive technology. The wide range of submissions demonstrated the great potential of applied pervasive technologies. In the emerging discussions, participants highlighted the most important technical and cooperation issues.

Examples of commercial applications of ubiquitous computing

Emerging tools will simply transform business practices---and customer expectations---in the near future.

Multiple sensor integration for indoor surveillance

Multiple Sensor Indoor Surveillance (MSIS) is a research project at Accenture Technology Labs aimed at exploring a variety of redundant sensors in a networked environment where each sensor is giving noisy information and the goal is to coherently reason about some aspect of the environment. We describe the objectives of the project, the problems it was designed to solve and some recent results. The environment includes 32 web cameras, an infrared badge ID system, a PTZ camera, and a fingerprint reader. We discuss two concrete problems that we have tackled in this project: (1) Visualizing events detected by 32 cameras during 24 hours, and (2) Localizing people using fusion of multiple streams of noisy sensory data with the contextual and domain knowledge that is provided by both the physical constraints imposed by the local environment and by the people that are involved in the surveillance tasks. We use Self-Organizing Maps to approach the first problem and suggest a Bayesian framework for the second one. The experimental data are provided and discussed.

The Community of Multimedia Agents project

Challenges in multimedia analysis are calling for the sharing of research efforts, while in practice collaboration is hindered by technical and proprietary issues. The Community of Multimedia Agents project (COMMA) attempts to solve this problem by creating an open environment for developing, testing, and prototyping multimedia content analysis and annotation methods. Each method is represented as an agent (an executable module) that can communicate with the other agents based on descriptors and description schemes in the coming MPEG-7 standard. This allows multimedia-processing agents developed by different organizations to operate and collaborate with each other, regardless of their programming languages and internal architecture. The researchers can compare the performance of agents and combine them to build more powerful and robust system prototypes. It can also serve as a learning environment for researchers and students to acquire and test cutting edge multimedia analysis algorithms. Through sharing of media agents, the Community can increase efficiency of research while protecting the intellectual property of the inventors.

The Community of Multimedia Agents

Multimedia data mining requires the ability to automatically analyze and understand the content. The Community of Multimedia Agents project is devoted to creating a community of researchers and students who are interested in developing multimedia annotation algorithms. It provides an open environment for developing, testing, learning and prototyping multimedia content analysis and annotation methods. It serves as a medium for researchers to contribute and share their achievements while protecting their proprietary techniques. Each method is represented as an agent that can communicate with the other agents registered in the environment using templates that are based on the descriptors and description schemes in the MPEG-7 standard. Using the standard allows agents that are developed by different organizations to operate and communicate with each other seamlessly regardless of their programming languages and internal architecture. A development environment is provided to facilitate the construction of media analysis methods. The tool contains a workbench, which allows the user integrating agents to build more sophisticated systems, and a blackboard browser, which visualizes the processing results. It enables researchers to compare the performance of different agents and combine them to build a rapid prototype of more powerful and robust system. The Community can also serve as a learning environment for researchers and students to acquire and exchange of cutting edge multimedia analysis algorithms.

Prairie (video program) (abstract only): a conceptual framework for a virtual organization

Prairie is a simulation prototype or vision, demonstrating how individuals may work together in a virtual work enviroment designed for a whole enterprise. Prairie addresses various organizational and social issues exacerbated by distance and time. By using the concept of communities and by extending physical interaction cues to others across distance and time, we demonstrate possible solutions to these issues. In Prairie, people and information are organized into mission-based (organizational units), goal-based (project teams) and interest-based (special interest groups) hierarchies for ease of navigation. A worker may alternately navigate to communities by using personal links from their private virtual desktops. Each community has two areas. One area contains the information germane to a community, that is pushed or pulled depending on the nature of the information. Each community also has an area with a shared view where community members can meet or congregate. Presence in these community areas range from seeing thumbnail photos to holding a video-conference. The shared view facilitates ad hoc, informal interactions which are important for maintaining and building social networks and organizational culture. We believe the framework for Prairie is flexible, integrated, and scaleable so it can be adapted to model other organizations, communities, and processes.