Ira Smith

QuickSet: multimodal interaction for distributed applications

QuickSet: Multimodal Interaction for Distributed Applications Philip R. Cohen, Michael Johnston, David McGee, Sharon Oviatt, Jay Pittman, Ira Smith, Liang Chen and Josh Glow Center for Human Computer Communication Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology

A software engineering experiment in software component generation

The paper presents results of a software engineering experiment in which a new technology for constructing program generators from domain-specific specification languages has been compared with a reuse technology that employs sets of reusable Ada program templates. Both technologies were applied to a common problem domain, constructing message translation and validation modules for military command, control, communications and information systems (C/sup 3/I). The experiment employed four subjects to conduct trials of use of the two technologies on a common set of test examples. The experiment was conducted with personnel supplied and supervised by an independent contractor. Test cases consisted of message specifications taken from Air Force C/sup 3/I systems. The main results are that greater productivity was achieved and fewer error were introduced when subjects used the program generator than when they used Ada templates to implement software modules from sets of specifications. The differences in the average performance of the subjects are statistically significant at confidence levels exceeding 99 percent.

Designing conversation policies using joint intention theory

In this paper we apply the semantics sketched by Smith and Cohen (1996) to the system of conversational policies developed for KAoS. We show that the compositional nature of the speech-acts and their semantics allows us to provide a comprehensive semantics for the conversational policies; and that we can use the generated semantics to analyze policies, to alter policies, and to show how the policies can be combined to form complete dialogues and protocol control strategies. We also show that the semantics provides us with a valuable tool to analyze and to suggest corrections for the conversational policies.

QuickSet: Multimodal Interaction for Simulation Set-up and Control

This paper presents a novel multimodal system applied to the setup and control of distributed interactive simulations. We have developed the QuickSet prototype, a pen/voice system running on a hand-held PC, communicating through a distributed agent architecture to NRaDs1 LeatherNet system, a distributed interactive training simulator built for the US Marine Corps (USMC). The paper briefly describes the system and illustrates its use in multimodal simulation setup.