Linda K. Cook

Animated autonomous personal representatives

1. ABSTRACT We describe the research goals and issues in constructing autonomous personal representatives, and the desirability of using synthetic characters as the user interface for such artifacts. An application of these autonomous representatives is then described in which characters can be attached to a document to express a user’s point of view or give guided tours or presentations of the document’s contents. 1.1

The rise of personal Web pages at work

A series of 20 interviews in four organizations explores the ways in which employees take advantage of personal web pages to support their work and to reflect who they are. Both interviewee comments and web page examples suggest the importance of individual personalization of information managcmcnt and dissemination, prcscntation and pcrccption of personality, and usage from the reader’s perspective. These results can inform the development of future web technologies for use in organititions. Furthermore, this self representation on web pages is a way of making individual knowledge more available in the workplace.

Face-to-face interfaces

Recent work on the social nature of human-computer interactions [3] has prompted research on animated, anthropomorphic characters in user interfaces. Such interfaces may simplify user interactions by allowing them to use and interpret natural face-to-face communication techniques such as speech, gestures and facial expressions. We describe our initial implementation, a character that controls the A/V facilities in a state-of-the-art conference room, and outline the goals of our ongoing project.