BayCHI 13-Jan-1998

Part 1: "Novel Uses of Task Models"

Sandrine Balbo, Australian Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Org. (CSIRO)

I didn't get a lot out of this talk; perhaps it was more meaningful to folks with a different background.

The part that sounded interesting was "ISOLDE" = Integrated Software and Online Documentation Environment.

The idea is to support development of online documentation within the software development cycle.

• From an underlying model of the software's functionality, can documentation be generated automatically?
• Can a task model be obtained automatically from a CASE tool?
• Can end users manipulate task models?
• Can task analysis help us understand the process of technical writing?
• The goal is to generate online help consistently, and in multiple human languages.

Sandrine's web page is:

http://www.syd.dit.csiro.au/staff/sandrine/

Part 2: "From HAL to Office Appliances: Human-machine interaction in SciFi+Reality"

David G. Stork, Ricoh Silicon Valley and Stanford University

Although I've only read part of it, I recommend Stork's book from last year, HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer As Dream and Reality ($17.50 from www.amazon.com; paperback coming soon for an entire three bucks less).

The book explores areas where we do/don't live up to the HAL vision in today's technology. We do well in power and reliability (and chess?), but fall short everywhere else: speech recognition, discourse analysis, artificial intelligence, planning, vision, lip-reading.

Regarding Marvin Minsky consulting with the filmmakers, Stork said, "The filmmakers went to the best people of the time. No, wait, they went to the leading people of the time."

[ Page last revised 7-Jul-2001. ]

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