Synopses & Reviews
With contributions by leading scientists in the field, this book gives the first comprehensive overview of the results of the seminal SmartKom project - one of the most advanced multimodal dialogue systems worldwide.
Review
From the reviews: "The book is organized into six parts, each of which contains several chapters. ... This book should be useful for many types of readers. Those who want to get a sense of the state of the art of multimodal communication ... will find it invaluable. Students who have had a good grounding in artificial intelligence or natural language processing should read the book to get an overview of how the techniques from these fields can be integrated into a comprehensive system." (J. P. E. Hodgson, ACM Computing Reviews, Vol. 49 (4), April, 2008)
Synopsis
The result of four years of intensive research in a large multimodal dialogue project involving 12 partners from academia and industry, SmartKom is one of the most advanced multimodal dialogue systems worldwide and is a landmark project in the history of intelligent user interfaces. The system provides symmetric multimodality in a mixed-initiative dialogue system with an embodied conversational agent. The same software architecture and components are used in three fully operational application scenarios. The theoretical and practical foundations of SmartKom represent a new generation of multimodal dialogue systems that deal not only with simple modality integration and synchronization, but cover the full spectrum of multimodal dialogue. With contributions by leading scientists in the field, this book gives the first comprehensive overview of the results of this seminal project.
About the Author
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Wolfgang Wahlster is the Director and CEO of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) and a Professor of Computer Science at the Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken. In 2000, he was coopted as a Professor of Computational Linguistics at the same university. In addition, he is the Head of the Intelligent User Interfaces Lab at DFKI. He was the Scientific Director of the VERBMOBIL consortium on spontaneous speech translation (1993-2000) as well as the SmartKom consortium on multimodal dialog systems (1999-2003) and currently serves as the Scientific Director of the SmartWeb consortium on mobile multimodal access to semantic web services (2004-2008). He has published more than 150 technical papers and 6 books on language technology and intelligent user interfaces. His current research includes multimodal and perceptive user interfaces, user modeling, embodied conversational agents, smart navigation systems, semantic web services, and resource-adaptive cognitive technologies. He is the editor of the book "Verbmobil: Foundations of Speech-to-Speech Translation" (Springer) and the Co-Editor of the Readings in Intelligent User Interfaces.