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Representing InformationWant a weather forecast? Call 1-888-573-8255 and ask Jupiter, the Spoken Language Systems application that recognizes natural language weather questions and responds to them. This Lab for Computer Science (LCS) team develops core technologies and architectures to enable people worldwide to communicate with computers using their own words. Advances include the underlying Galaxy architecture and Genesis, a language generation system that can transform English, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese requests into HTML or SQL. Visualizing Information John Maeda, Associate Professor of Design and Computation, directs the Media Lab's aesthetics + computation group (acg), which designs system architectures and thought processes to create new visual forms and digital spaces. Maeda's own work includes reactive graphics, java applets, and videos of exhibits. Visit MaedaStudio to create a Japanese summer greeting card; play with Mori, unreleased applets including FontPark Paint that reproduces Kanji; and to experience exhibitions such as F00D, a recent New York show. Concepts, a series of 11 video statements documenting acg's work, includes retrospectives and exhibits such as the post digital Tokyo show. Maeda's Computational Media Design students exhibited eleven, a visual representation of peace themes in an unpeaceful time. Graduate student Ben Fry's Anemone uses organic information design, the process of creating software visualizations depicting large, dynamic data sources, to map web site traffic. The layers in Artifacts of the Presence Era, a 2003 Sociable Media exhibit at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, made a visual record of the images and sounds produced in the gallery. The Present display reflected real time data, then a shaped layer of color was added to the History display every five minutes. Try out another project, ChatCircles2, a chat room that uses color and geometric form to convey social presence and activity. Encoding Meaning The Cognitive Machines Group creates machines that are learning to communicate on human terms. The group develops meaningful, physical representations that help systems to model, reason, and communicate. Ripley, a gripper robot, is learning about gestures using a Hidden Markov Model representation. The Bishop project is teaching a system to describe spatial scenes. The Artificial Intelligence Lab's Design Rationale group is creating tools that will capture the evolution of designs so others may learn from the process as well as the product. These intelligent design environments, developed in projects like Multi-Domain Sketch Recognition, may look like conventional white boards, for example, but can ask intelligent questions about a sketch-in-progress. The Media Lab's tangible media group gives physical form to digital information by transforming painted bits of GUIs into tangible bits. Super Cilia Skin is an interactive interface that couples tactile-kinesthetic input with tactile and visual output. IP Network Design Workbench is a performance simulation tool that can show how design changes impact cost and performance. Representing information in new ways is a core interest of the Research Laboratory of Electronics' (RLE) Sensory Communication group project that adds touch to virtual reality. Last November a RLE Touch Lab team and a UK team demonstrated the first transatlantic touch, a pioneering step translating the biomechanics of touch via computer. Information can travel at light speed. Just check the Microphotonics Center Communications Technology Roadmap for development targets for the long-term evolution of photonic component integration in the optical communications industry. go on to Part 2: Moving Information
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Copyright ©2003 Massachusetts
Institute of Technology