More Than Screen Deep Toward Every-Citizen Interfaces to the Nation's Information Infrastructure (1997) / Chapter Skim
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On Functions
On Functions
Pages 307-374
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Three interfaces provide practical examples: the popcorn button on microwave ovens, the VCR (video cassette recorder) + system, and the ATM (automated teller machine)
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Computational techniques for mining such information and turning it into a reusable asset raise the potential for a form of "virtual collaboration," with some of the benefits of collaboration without the costs of communication or personal involvement. To summarize, there are three fundamental motivations for collaborative systems and a research approach built on each one: · Tasks require specialized skills and knowledge ~ Intelligent collaborative agents · Work is inherently social ~ Computer-supported cooperative work · People can reuse the experience of others ~ Virtual collaboration Next I discuss the prospects for collaboration in common tasks supported by the national information infrastructure (NII)
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Information seekers need assistance in finding high-quality, relevant information in the vast, ever-changing sea of Web sites. Information publishers need assistance in designing functional and attractive interactive applications.
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As applied to collaborative agents, it highlights the involvement of the people who create the agents, both domain experts whose knowledge is modeled in the agents and knowledge engineers (or artificial intelligence researchers) who work with the experts to articulate the knowledge and develop representations and algorithms for using it.
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Collecting and Evaluating Data Necessary for Virtual Collaboration Two major approaches to virtual collaboration have been explored. Systems like the Bellcore Recommender (Hill et al., 1995)
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If the agent has the capability to learn, and the community will offer necessary input the agent can improve over time. For example, PHOAKS maintains a ranked set of Web pages for each newsgroup based on its categorization of URL mentions in messages.
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People ask questions about the topic of a newsgroup, like where to find a bagpiper. People complain about the way PHOAKS has categorized Web pages; for example, in rare cases a condemnation of a Web page (e.g., from a hate group)
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(1986) Direct Manipulation Interfaces.
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Principles of human discourse communication and of humanto-human collaboration are two critically overlooked sources for simplifying interfaces. They offer a means of integrating various modalities and of extending the range of computer users.
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Current interfaces do not have such a model. The user's goals and tasks lie completely outside of interface, and there is no means to say anything about them.
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There is a great deal more known about human discourse communication that could be used in interfaces today. Recent work in linguistics, natural language processing, and psychology offers principles of communication that can be embodied in interfaces, even when they do not speak full human language.
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Most linguistics and natural language processing work is directed at progress in natural language/speech understanding and generation, in machine translation, or at more applied concerns such as language-based information retrieval. Uncovering the principles of human communication requires considerably more effort than has been undertaken so far.
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Finally, user populations never considered before, such as the multiple millions of semiliterate and illiterate Americans, will require careful study in speech interfaces; this research is also not likely to occur in industry and will require joint research between industry and universities under government funding. Speech as a modality naturally suggests speaking to someone.
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While current interfaces are hard to use and give few choices of modality, we are on the brink of having available many new technologies that can change the nature of interfaces. We must bring to bear our knowledge of human collaboration and discourse communication on these interfaces so that they serve a wider range of users.
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1995. "The Use of Knowledge Preconditions in Language Processing," Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MorganKaufmann, San Mateo, CA, pp.
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One goal of others in the national information infrastructure (NII) research and development community ought to be to examine the ways in which digital spatial data (geodata)
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All of the following support the wider use of geodata and geoprocessing by every citizen: powerful spatial database technologies introduced by major database vendors; smaller and cheaper geographic positioning systems (GPSs) ; sophisticated, inexpensive, and abundant commercial earth imaging data prod
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Citizens will use the NII to help them get from A to B GPSs in car and cell phones will provide the coordinates of A, and a car's map display and the cell phone's multimedia yellow pages will show the way to B
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and parking place · Traffic/weather information · Route guidance and planning, multimodal trip planning, traveler · Locale-specific resources and recommendations for small farms and gardens · City information services · Finding jobs and clients available locally. follows: Some geographic applications used by citizens in various jobs are as · Emergency road services and 911 emergency response systems · Virtual reality landscapes from earth images for military, disaster relief, and rescue preparedness; civil engineering and landscape architecture · Agriculture and forestry · Climate research, agronomy, biology, ecology, geology, other sci ences
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User interfaces are collections of symbols and metaphors, and the map metaphor is inherently important in cyberspace. Basic research in spatial reasoning, spatial memory, and spatial communication would support development of better user interfaces that employ spatial display and manipulation.
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Digital maps and three-dimensional virtual fly-overs and fly-throughs will be an important part of many graphical user interfaces because everyone intuitively understands maps and aerial views and many kinds of infor
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Virtual reality applications will employ spatial representations of real spatial phenomena, but they will also employ spatial representations of nonspatial phenomena simply because our brains are hardwired for solving problems in three-dimensional space. Important parts of the software and data for configuring and populating cyberspace will be borrowed from geoprocessing applications and geodata archives and data feeds.
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address the cognitive and broader social effects of developments in the spatial subdomain of the multimedia world and (2) look in very basic ways at how user interface design can layer most elegantly on our legacy wetware and cultural firmware and leverage most powerfully a positive vision for the future.
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I believe an important goal for the national information infrastructure (NII) is to develop the infrastructure, technology, and tools to provide automated gathering and integration of data.
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Ideally, instead of going through this tedious process, a user could simply issue the query to a software agent for the financial domain and that agent would know where to retrieve the relevant information and how to process it to produce the data requested by the user. The goal then is to develop the infrastructure and tools required to easily construct and maintain software agents for querying and integrating information in any domain of interest.
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The hope is that this would eventually lead to standards for marking up pages with semantic information and to the development of domain-specific ontologies that can be used for information integration. Planning Information Gathering and Integration Given a description of the available sources, the problem still remains as to how to select and integrate the most relevant information.
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Data mining can be used to find relationships in individual sources and between sources, which can then be used to optimize the query processing. Natural Language Processing and User Interfaces Natural language querying and/or graphical interfaces are needed to provide user-friendly access to information.
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In this paper I consider some issues that we should try to anticipate in the construction of a voice, video, and data infrastructure that provides the opportunity for just-in-time learning throughout life.
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CABLE MODEMS VS. CABLE BOXES Prior to coming to Turner, I lived in Newton, Massachusetts, and had cable television installed.
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336 MORE THAN SCREEN DEEP and was routed up to my bedroom, into a cable box, through my VCR and into my television my "entertainment center." In March of 1996, I became part of an early trial of cable modems by Continental Cablevision and BBN. The cable into the basement was split and part of it routed into my home office, into a cable modem, and then into my computer, providing ethernet-speed access to the Internet my "work center." The two setups were separated by a thin wall, two different boxes, and two different monitors.
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ON FUNCTIONS 337 audience is seen as being freer to construct meaning through participating in these choices. Television itself is evolving as the surrounding technologies change: The VCR disrupted the modern entanglement between centralized transmission and privatized reception because it displaced the locus of control over the circulation of cultural texts to more local contexts.
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338 MORE THAN SCREEN DEEP cursors. It is essentially a social structure.
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ON FUNCTIONS 339 submitted to an 800 number or over the Web by students. The student's act of asking a question changes the presumption of the broadcast.
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This design emphasizes the collection of data (attendance and grade information, or inventories, or bank accounts) in one central location, and the distribution of centralized resources or information (paychecks, reports, decisions)
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Current interface technology, dominated by the Web browser paradigm, besides being slow, lets users do the access, filtering, interpretation of raw data through point and click, and text/graphic cognitive processing. Current NII technology has a number of limitations, including the following: · It does not flexibly support information, access, and filtering.
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The paradigm of intelligent agents has shown initial promise for handling some of the above problems, especially information location, filtering, and integration. Although a precise definition of an intelligent agent is still forthcoming, the current working notion is that intelligent software agents are programs that act on behalf of their human users in order to perform laborious information-gathering tasks, such as locating and accessing information from various on-line information sources, resolving inconsistencies in the retrieved information, filtering away irrelevant or unwanted information, integrating information from heterogeneous information sources, and adapting over time to their human users' information needs and the shape of the infosphere.
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Identification of characteristics of agent design and presentation that facilitate helpful adaptation and flexibility in use. · Because of the vastness of the infosphere, investigation of protocols for collaboration of distributed intelligent agents also is necessary.
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· Searching and skimming video and audio large-scale information: lust viewing digital video, while useful, is not enough. Once users identify video objects of interest, they will need to be able to manipulate, organize, analyze, and reuse the video.
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Unfortunately, development of interfaces that help users identify the information that is relevant to their current needs and present this information in ways that are most appropriate given the information content and the needs of particular users lags far behind development of the infrastructure for storing, transferring, and displaying information. As Grosz and Davis (1994)
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In contrast, keyword-based search engines for the World Wide Web allow users to search many information resources at once by specifying their queries using combinations of keywords (and indications of whether or not the keywords are required to occur in the document, whether they must occur in sequence, etc.~. Such search engines do not require users to form a detailed plan, but they often turn up many irrelevant documents and users typically do not know what data resources have been examined.
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IIAs must be equipped with strategies that tell them how to form such plans and must also be able to trade off the urgency of the request against the cost of accessing different information sources and the likelihood that a particular plan will be successful. In the journal editor example I gave earlier, the agent may need to be capable of determining which information sources would be most likely to help find an appropriate reviewer before the end of the day.
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INTELLIGENT MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATION OF INFORMATION IIAs will be able to acquire information from many different information sources in a variety of media. These systems will need to be able to plan multimedia presentations that most effectively communicate this information in ways that support users in achieving their goals and performing their tasks.
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It uses its knowledge of techniques available to the various media generators to apportion content to media and generate a sequence of directives for individual media generators. Media generators (e.g., for natural language text, speech, and graphics)
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Users cannot be expected to fully specify presentation design choices; it is more natural for them to learn a language for expressing their tasks and goals than to learn a language for describing presentation techniques. In some cases, users will have preferences about presentation design in advance of display generation.
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With the introduction of graphical user interfaces and the desktop metaphor, files became concrete visual objects, directly manipulated by the user, stored on the desktop or in folders, and, to a limited extent, arranged by users and software in semantically meaningful ways. But the contents of those files is still out of direct reach of the user.
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Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Menlo Park, Calif.: AAAI Press.
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Pp. 9-16 in Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Menlo Park, Calif.: AAAI Press.
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the resource delivery problem, which has many dimensions, including complications brought about by differing bandwidth capacities, differing user interactive devices, and differing user cognitive (dis~abilities. The goals that I see in these two areas can be stated simply: · With respect to resource discovery, every literate citizen should have access to directory and finding services that are within that user's capacity to use.
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Further, there is the problem of combining and manipulating results from different search services and other relevant information broker sources. Efforts to achieve some standardized distributed object-like protocols so that different search services can be integrated is a step in the right direction (http: / /www-db.stanford.edu/~gravano/standards)
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In that light I would suggest that at least one major project coming out of a government funding effort concentrate on proposing standards and economic models for information brokering services so that integrated resource discovery tools become possible. We also need to experiment with building public registries so that nonprofit and governmental bodies can be easily found and their services utilized by the appropriate populations.
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The ultimate test will be success at allowing nonsophisticated users to find what they need, but it is not obvious at this point how to compare and evaluate competing systems and methods. RESEARCH ISSUES: RESOURCE DELIVERY As mentioned, the multidimensional resource delivery problem is characterized by constraints such as differing bandwidth capacities, differing user interactive devices, and differing user cognitive (dis~abilities.
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An example of a proposed mapping architecture can be found at http://community.bellcore.com/kentw/rgfor-ap5-abstract.html. Others can be found in Artificial Intelligence-oriented work on automatic presentation coming out of Columbia, Carnegie Mellon, ISI, and MITRE.
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The problem is not with the infrastructure the databases, protocols, and physical transport media. The problem is that we do not have a national information superstructure a set of access and publishing tools that are widely distributed, easy to use, cheap, powerful, and accessible through a variety of terminals that include computers, personal digital assistants, telephones, screen phones, cellular phones, pagers, and television sets.
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We also need to understand and discuss new publishing models that include broadcasting but that also allow for "narrowcasting" of information. I see the current barriers to widespread content production and publishing as the high capital costs of computer ownership; the high level of technical savvy demanded by today's production, editing, and publishing tools; the literacy level required by what is predominantly a textual medium; and a lack of understanding on the part of the general population of the power of publishing content.
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The design of search engines would benefit greatly from knowing what people expect to happen given a variety of scenarios. Free search engines such as AltaVista seem to demand different kinds of knowledge from the user than a visit to, say, Yahoo!
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362 MORE THAN SCREEN DEEP are willing to let anyone see. As Web-based security improves, we will move to a narrowcasting model where the publisher can be assured of limiting access to a select group.
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Emerging wireless computer communications systems promise to make mobile computing connectivity as easy and common as cellular phone service.
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Requests for generic data from a vast array of government databases can be made and instantaneously satisfied via Web browsers interacting with servers coupled to massive databases. Interactions for a variety of personal transactions with government agencies also will be enabled (e.g., filing tax forms, making tax payments, or checking one's Social Security account status)
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Cellular phone calls are not only easy to intercept, but the account information used for billing is even easier to acquire via automated means. It has been estimated that the lack of attention to security, if only for this billing authorization information, has cost the cellular phone industry hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.
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Given the many security problems that have been discovered in Web browsers such as the Netscape Navigator and the rash of lava-based security problems that have been described in the literature, this is hardly an encouraging alternative paradigm. In either case, networked computers of some sort will provide an every-citizen interface to many NII elements.
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A Trojan horse is malicious imported software that performs some apparently useful function but also executes some sort of attack on the target system (e.g., destroying data or acquiring data for the attacker)
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Today, many corporate security administrators urge users to disable Java support in their Web browsers to minimize the potential for this sort of security problem. While use of lava is still rather minimal on the Internet, in time many Web pages may become lava applets, and disabling lava may prevent access to so many sites that users are forced to permit lava execution.
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RELATED PROBLEMS AND RESEARCH DIRECTIONS As noted above, confinement is a hard computer security problem that has been studied for almost 20 years. To protect users against malicious imported software (e.g., applets)
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If the only data displayed are from the final certificate in a path, suitable constraints must be imposed on the certification path validation algorithm to prevent "surprises." However, configuring and managing certification path validation parameters appears to be a fairly complex task in the general case. Noting that the average citizen cannot program a video cassette recorder successfully, it is hard to imagine how this individual could manage a more complex certification validation system.
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. A final research problem area is how to provide a user interfacefor personal cryptographic tokens so that users will be protectedfrom malicious software that will attempt to misapply a user's digital signature capability.
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A prompt and moderate level of research effort can shape the evolution of user interfaces to match the skills, needs, and orientation of the broadest users. Topics might include the following: · Cognitive design strategies for information-abundant Web sites, including metaphor choice (library, shopping mall, television channels, etc.)
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; · U.S. government efforts such as GILS (Government Information Locator Service)
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374 MORE THAN SCREEN DEEP · Joint effort on digital libraries by the National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; and · International efforts (e.g., Canada, Singapore, Italy)
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