Emerging Information Technologies

1
Emerging Information Technologies

• Dr. Charles C. Tappert
• Department of CSIS
• Pace University

2
Emerging Information Technologies

• What are Emerging Info Technologies?
• Moores Law and what might follow
• Wearable/Handheld Computers
• Virtual Reality
• Artificial Intelligence
• e-Commerce
• Speech and Handwriting Interfaces

3
Technology Life Cycle

• Precursor - dream or contemplation
• Invention
• Emergence (development)
• Acceptance (established)
• Surplus or Obsolescence

4
Moores Law

• Every 18 months we put twice as many transistors
  on an integrated circuit doubling computing power
• Been in effect about 40 years
• Projected to continue another 20 years
• This will end when the size of a transistor
  approaches the size of a few atoms and
  conventional shrinking methods wont work
• What will happen then?

5
After Moores Law New
Technologies Will Emerge

• Nanotechnology
• Quantum Computing
• Chaos Computing
• Optical Computing

6
Wearable/Handheld Computers Enabling Technologies

• Smaller Faster Processors
• Interfaces in Human Modalities
• Speech recognition (input) and synthesis (output)
  
• Pen Computing (input/output)
• Head Mounted Displays (output)
• Wireless communication

7
Photos of Wearable Computers
8
Virtual Reality

• Head Mounted Displays
• Block view of outside world
• Completely immerse user in virtual world
• Applications
• Flight simulators
• Equipment operators
• Game playing

9
Photos of VR HMDs
10
Artificial Intelligence

• Pattern recognition
• Speech handwriting recognition
• Face recognition
• Military target recognition
• Search solution spaces
• Business optimization problems
• Chess and other game playing
• Expert Systems
• Medical diagnosis
• Decision Support Systems
• E-commerce agents

11
e-Commerce Web
Metamorphosis

• from digital library
• static web pages
• focus on retrieval
• to an electronic marketplace
• dynamic web pages
• focus on transactions
• requires new perspective control mechanisms

12
e-Commerce Web Pull/Push
Technologies

• Web pull technologies
• Surfing the Net
• Using a search engine
• Personal search engines
• Using an evolutionary agent
• Web push technologies
• Broadcasting/Webcasting
• Selective channeling filtering
• Push what the user wants (cookies)
• Evolutionary push provides exact user needs

13
e-Commerce Web Agents

• Representation - marketplace goods services
• Promotion - interactive ads
• Payment settlement - secure funds transfer
• Valuation - online auctions and bargaining
• Customer info - track customer preferences and
  habits
• Quality - ratings, reviews, recommendations
• Risk Management - product guarantees, loss
  insurance
• Negotiation - automated systems for negotiation

14
Speech Recognition

• Isolated words
• Navigation and control systems
• Continuous speech recognition
• Dictation
• Speech understanding systems
• General speech input

15
Speech Recognition Problems

• Dialects
• Telephone/cell phone limitations
• Noisy environments
• Similar sounding words

16
Speech Recognition Problems

• Similar sounding words
• Recognize speech
• Wreck a nice beach
• Identically sounding words - homophones
• The suns rays meet
• The sons raise meat

17
Speech Understanding Problems Natural Language
Understanding

• The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak

18
Speech Understanding Problems Natural Language
Understanding

• The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak
• The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten

19
Handwriting Recognition

• Offline
• Scanned Images
• Static Information
• Online
• Electronic Tablet or Digitizer
• Real-Time, Dynamic Information

20
Online Handwriting Recognition

• Invention of electronic tablets -- late 1950s
• Tablet and display were separate
• Pen Computing -- 1980s
• Combined tablets and dislpay
• Brought input and output into the same surface
• Immediate feedback via electronic ink
• Created the paper-like interface

21
Dynamic Handwriting Information

• Number of strokes
• a stroke is the ink trace from pen down to pen up
• Order of strokes
• Stroke direction
• Stroke velocity, acceleration

22
Written Language and Handwriting Properties

• Alphabet
• Letters, digits, punctuation, special symbols
• Writing is a time sequence of strokes
• Complete one character before beginning next
• except for delayed strokes
• Spatial order -- for example, left to right

23
Written English Writing Styles

• Handprint
• Uppercase -- about 2 strokes per letter
• Lowercase -- about 1 stroke per letter
• Cursive Script
• Less than a stroke per letter
• Delayed crossing and dotting strokes

24
Computer Problems in English

• Constrained Handprint
• Printing on lines -- symbols can touch or overlap
• Printing one symbol per box -- form filling
• Unconstrained Handprint
• No lines and symbols can touch or overlap
• Cursive Script
• Mixed Printing and Cursive

25
Handprint Recognition Difficulties

• Digitizer problems
• Writing variation not handled by system
• Uppercase versus lowercase versus digits
• Segmentation -- character within character problem

26
Design of Graffiti for Palm Pilot

• Small Alphabet
• uppercase, digits, special symbols
• One stroke per symbol to avoid segmentation
  difficulty
• Separate writing areas to avoid letter and digit
  confusion

27
Graffiti Alphabet
28
Early Shorthand Alphabets

• Ancient Greeks -- 400 BC
• Tironian -- 63 BC
• Stenographie -- 1602
• Gabelsberger -- 1834
• Moon -- 1894
• Goldbergs Unistrokes (Xerox) -- 1993

29
Stenographie Alphabet 1602
30
Moon Alphabet 1894
31
Pen Computing Future Work

• Graffiti recognizer greatly simplified the
  recognition problem
• Handprint problem not completely solved
• Even with IBMs ThinkWrite, CICs Jot, and
  Microsoft products
• Cursive script not solved

32
Example of the Difficulty of Recognizing Cursive
Script
33
Summary

• What are Emerging Info Technologies?
• Moores Law and what might follow
• Wearable/Handheld Computers
• Virtual Reality
• Artificial Intelligence
• e-Commerce
• Speech and Handwriting Interfaces