Howard Neely

A motion-stabilized outdoor augmented reality system

Almost all previous Augmented Reality (AR) systems work indoors. Outdoor AR systems offer the potential for new application areas. However, building an outdoor AR system is difficult due to portability constraints, the inability to modify the environment, and the greater range of operating conditions. We demonstrate a hybrid tracker that stabilizes an outdoor AR display with respect to user motion, achieving more accurate registration than previously shown in an outdoor AR system. The hybrid tracker combines rate gyros with a compass and tilt orientation sensor in a near real-time system. Sensor distortions and delays required compensation to achieve good results. The measurements from the two sensors are fused together to compensate for each others limitations. From static locations with moderate head rotation rates, peak registration errors are /spl sim/2 degrees, with typical errors under 1 degree, although errors can become larger over long time periods due to compass drift. Without our stabilization, even small motions make the display nearly unreadable.

Transonics: a speech to speech system for English-Persian interactions

In this paper, we describe the first phase of development of our speech-to-speech system between English and Modem Persian under the DARPA Babylon program. We give an overview of the various system components: the front end ASR, the machine translation system and the speech generation system. Challenges such as the sparseness of available spoken language data and solutions that have been employed to maximize the obtained benefits from using these limited resources are examined. Efforts in the creation of the user interface and the underlying dialog management system for mediated communication are described.

Performance analysis of an outdoor augmented reality tracking system that relies upon a few mobile beacons

We describe and evaluate a new tracking concept for outdoor Augmented Reality. A few mobile beacons added to the environment correct errors in head-worn inertial and GPS sensors. We evaluate the accuracy through detailed simulation of many error sources. The most important parameters are the errors in measuring the beacon and users head positions, and the geometric configuration of the beacons around the point to augment. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we identify combinations of beacon configurations and error parameters that meet a specified goal of 1 m net error at 100 m range.

Visualization tools for Free Flight air-traffic management

Free Flight lets pilots modify their routes in real time. It requires new conflict detection, resolution, and visualization decision support tools. We describe a testbed for building and evaluating such tools.

Transonics: A Practical Speech-to-Speech Translator for English-Farsi Medical Dialogs

We briefly describe a two-way speech-to-speech English-Farsi translation system prototype developed for use in doctor-patient interactions. The overarching philosophy of the developers has been to create a system that enables effective communication, rather than focusing on maximizing component-level performance. The discussion focuses on the general approach and evaluation of the system by an independent government evaluation team.

Performance analysis of a cognitive analogical reasoner

Renewed interest in cognitive information processing has identified the need for novel computing architectures that can efficiently and dynamically support reasoning and learning with emphasis on memory structures. A large number of cognitive processing methods have been implemented in software on conventional computing architectures. This paper describes detailed execution profiling of a particular cognitive method for analogical reasoning called SAGE™. SAGE™ is a symbolic-connectionist, performance oriented analogical reasoner. The primary contribution of the work is to identify the deficiencies and bottlenecks of SAGE™ to inform the development of improved architectures for cognitive information processing, and especially for analogical reasoning.

Multimodal interaction techniques for situational awareness and command of robotic combat entities

In the next generation of Army combat vehicles, the future combat system (FCS), lightly-armored robotic vehicles are commanded by human commanders operating from within moving command vehicles, and well back from the forward edge of the battle area. Two key questions to be answered for the successful realization of FCS are how can the commander maintain situational awareness and what methods best allow the commander to interact with these robotic forces to achieve the mission goals. In our research, our approach is to immerse the commander in a virtual battlespace, with capability to directly interact with visual representations of the robotic entities. We developed a multimodal (visual, speech, and gesture) interaction method and specific techniques that allow the commander to navigate the virtual battlespace and command robotic entities while seated in a vehicle and without use of a keyboard.

Modeling threat behaviors in surveillance video metadata for detection using an Analogical Reasoner

Video surveillance systems are generating much more imagery than can be cost-effectively analyzed by human analysts. One approach to the automated analysis of this imagery is to split the problem into video-to-metadata and metadata-to-interpretation tasks. We describe a system for the metadata-to-interpretation task that automatically extracts propositional graphs from the video metadata and generates graphs for use in an analogical reasoning system to detect threat behaviors that occurred in the original video scene.1 2

Implementation of an analogical reasoning system on a parallel recirculating computer architecture

Analogical reasoning systems can be used to increase the efficiency of planning, infer missing structure in test cases, and classify cases across domains. However, analogical reasoning can be computationally expensive. We describe an approach for implementing the SAGE™ analogical reasoning system on a parallel recirculating computer architecture.1 2