VASC Seminar Announcement ========================= Speaker: Alex Waibel Affiliation: Carnegie Mellon University E-mail: ahw@cs.cmu.edu Date: Monday, November 11th Time: 3:30pm Place: NSH 1507 Title: CHIL Computing to Overcome Techno-Clutter Abstract: After building computers that paid no intention to communicating with humans, we have in recent years developed ever more sophisticated interfaces that put the "human in the loop" of computers. These interfaces have improved usability by providing more appealing output (graphics, animations), more easy to use input methods (mouse, pointing, clicking, dragging) and more natural interaction modes (speech, vision, gesture, etc.). Yet the productivity gains that have been promised have largely not been seen and human-machine interaction still remains a partially frustrating and tedious experience, full of techno-clutter and excessive attention required by the technical artifact. In this talk, I will argue, that we must transition to a third paradigm of computer use, in which we let people interact with people, and move the machine into the background to observe the humans' activities and to provide services implicitly, that is, -to the extent possible- without explicit request. Putting the "Computer in the Human Interaction Loop" (CHIL), instead of the other way round, however, brings formidable technical challenges. The machine must now always observe and understand humans, model their activities, their interaction with other humans, the human state as well as the state of the space they are in, and finally, infer intentions and needs. From a perceptual user interface point of view, we must process signals from sensors that are always on, frequently inappropriately positioned, and subject to much greater variablity. We must also not only recognize WHAT was seen or said in a given space, but also a broad range of additional information, such as the WHO, WHERE, HOW, TO WHOM, WHY, WHEN of human interaction and engagement. In this talk, I will describe a variety of multimodal interface technologies that we have developed to answer these questions and some preliminary CHIL type services that take advantage of such perceptual interfaces. Biography: Alex Waibel is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh and at the University of Karlsruhe (Germany). He directs the Interactive Systems Laboratories (www.is.cs.cmu.edu) at both Universities with research emphasis in speech recognition, handwriting recognition, language processing, speech translation, machine learning and multimodal and multimedia interfaces. At Carnegie Mellon, he also serves as Associate Director of the Language Technology Institute and as Director of the Language Technology PhD program. He was one of the founding member of the CMU's Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) and continues on its core faculty. Dr. Waibel was one of the founders of C-STAR, the international consortium for speech translation research and served as its chairman from 1998-2000. His team has developed the JANUS speech translation system, the JANUS speech recognition toolkit, and a number of multimodal systems including the meeting room, the Genoa Meeting recognizer and meeting browser. Dr. Waibel received the B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1980 and 1986. His work on the Time Delay Neural Networks was awarded the IEEE best paper award in 1990; his work on multilingual and speech translation systems the "Alcatel SEL Research Prize for Technical Communication" in 1994, the "Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence" from CMU in 2002 and the Speech Communication Best Paper Award in 1992.