DAGS - Electronic Publishing and the Information Superhighway
Boston 30 May - June 2 1995

Sha Xin Wei

Approx. 250 attendees, mixture of commercial/academic publishers, news folk, professors from CS, humanities, academic information czars/librarians.    Awlful title reflects leaden imagination -- but there were some bright spots, which I report below.  This is a report biased by omission  -- i skipped the tedious sessions, eg. those aimed at publishers on cost recovery and intellectual property.

I * ed the more inspiring/substantive talks.

Peter Denning, Chair ACM Publications Board

Talked about ACM's electronic publication plan and interim copyright policy.   Better than I'd expected.   The goal is to minimize barriers to exchange of knowledge.   Two tracks of "software": track 1 = reseach papers, track 2 = explain research to practitioners in industry (like ACM Communications).  Track 1 will be supported by online peer-review system.   ACM will derive revenues in 3 ways: (1) guided access to literature, (2) physical and internet conferences, (3) continuing education courses.

As to copyright: (1) Authors have "liberal rights" to modiy and distribute/mirror future versions of own published material, subject to traditional scholarly citation practice, (2) ACM expects and wants copyright fee revenues to be negligible (see above), (3) a link is a citation (not a copy) and no global compensation policy will be imposed, (4) an ACM copyrighted object may be downloaded only for personal use, may not be re-broadcast to internet, (5) ACM mirror servers must "display to browsers" an ACM copyright notice.

Also mentioned the atempted distinction between performance right and copyright.   There was faint disdain for lawyers' infinite capacity for reading"property" and property transfer into every computer operation.

Andries van Dam, Brown

Gave a nice overview of books and publishing technology starting with Bablylonian writing systems.  Some interesting remarks about need for depth, and lack of substance in most "interactive media"  -- (refered to Gelernter at Yale).

Talked about projecting/overlaying computational artifacts onto physical space.  Example, jet engine mechanic viewing physical engine through glasses which show superposed diagrams.  (See Pentland)

* Gregory Crane, Tufts

Discussed the impact of digital libraries on the humanities, and also made a case for humanities (evolved). How do writing technologies (eg Homeric formulaic epics) change how we think or communicate?   Took nuanced positions between Negroponte's boosterism and Sven Birkertss (1994) lament for the "death of literature and the fragmentation of human self."    Recommends R.A. Lanham (1993) -- The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts.    Warns humanists against evaluating new media technologies in terms of old audiences.  Multimedia may be viewed in a "realist optimistic" way as "the revenge of the book on television," but marks the gulf between mass media and scholarly media.  Contrast with traditional  scholarly publication economy -- relatively very  low production cost, distributed authorship, no hierarchical teams as in film or tv),  and at least in some fields, the possibilty for people outside the academy to engage in scholarly work.   Compared print library to monastery, appropriate in era when production/dissemination is expensive.   But role of priest class is becoming problematic in this new regime when electronic presentations can be beamed globally.   There can be a positive turn to this globalizing technology: contrasted medieval church's conservatism with 19-20th c. Catholic school systems' contribututions to democracy.   Video or print forms like books are dead prisons.   Their electronic forms are  living entities which can be refashioned by scholarly craft.

 I strongly recommend his article.

SXW

MediaWeaver.  Afterward, Hermann Maurer (HyperG) kindly said of MediaWeaver, "very impressive, there's nothing left to do! "  I said," no no , there's lots of holes -- lot's of work to do."  A. van Dam had to leave before I started, but would like a copy of the talk.  Tough choice -- the Persuasuon slides or the papers?

* Alex Pentland, MIT Media lab

Talked about Photobook and Alive.   Photobook is an umbrella (X windows/Motif) over a suite of image/video signal-based classification, search and retrieval techniques featuring work by faculty (Ken Haase, Roz Picard,Alex  Pentland) and dozen+ grad students in the Vision and Modeling group.

Alive is an even more ambitious joint project pulling together work from not only the VisMod group but also the interactive narrative and believable agents people.   Alive has  people play with artificial life forms (dog).   The computer examines live video feed of the scene, recognizes head/hand/fee, and sends their dynamics to the agent behavior subsystem, which drives a simulated critter.   The critter could be an animal in the case of children's playspaces or it could be a piece of active information like a weather simulation or a videobase.   Alive is quite robust.   The playspace version has been installed in dozens of sites/museums all over the world  for children to bang on.

I strongly recommend their articles.  Look in http://www-white.media.mit.edu/vismod/, eg. 

http://www-white.media.mit.edu/vismod/projects/projects.html
http://www-white.media.mit.edu/vismod/publications

Brewster Kahle, WAIS

Surveyed ways that ordinary business folk get online info: failure of web-crawers and spiders (LYCOS' 2 million pages are a drop in the bucket); ascii custombboard/mail systems; custom news services; personal (pull) vs publisher(pull) info flow; some info-filter services available via WWWeb(eg. WAIS); 

* T.V. Raman, DEC Cambridge Research Labs

ASTER (Automated Speech for Technical Re): Towards Modality Independent Documents.

Talked about how to "speak" structured text (examples from LaTEX which provides the most difficult cases, but any text with structure tags is fine -- eg. a play with character's labelled.)   Another example is how to read an interface (eg calender program or telnet all running emacs).   Cannot simply "rasterize" a graphical UI into voice.  

ASTER = Recognizer  + Language + Renderer.   The Recognizer parses the structured text.   The Audio Formatting Language (AFL) provides a way to map structure tokens + data into high-level operators on audio space.   Audio-space is an abstract vector space which can be mapped to a specific speech-rendering system (eg DECTalk).

Use many voice qualities such as timbre, affect (surprise, etc.), pitch...praised DECTalk for its high-dimensional speech space which allows wider palette for more subtle cueing.   Raman listens at 3X-4X normal speech which is 180 words/minute.   I could understand almost all of the slightly speeded up demo-voice at 220 wps with no habituation.  By some interesting rules, R. could map 2D structures like continued fractions or nested integrals into vocal reading.  Also implemented variables (like Maple's substitution) and links/citations which give a very intelligent top-down vocal structure desription.    Listener can intervene and selectively ask for sub-parts to be spoken, perhaps in different way.   Example:  in reading a proof straight through you would hear: "Because of A, we have B, and therefore C."   hwere A,B,C are read out as literals or by name or by recursion.   But if you do not do well with this style, you can intervene, and ASTER can read it differently, eg.  "To prove C, we appeal to B.   But B follows from C."

Mentioned example from poetry/drama uses stereo effect to set speakers in space or in motion.

Graphics like map/image may be best presented through tactile device.

Another point Raman's work illustrates is that interface layout and modality can place requrements pretty deep into the models needed to drive them.   Mathematica faces a problem: in order to allow local direct manipulation of Graphics[] and Graphics3D[] objects, its Front End would to maintain a nearly full local geometric model which would duplicate the Kernel's model.

[I "chaired" his session. Raman and Pentland presented some of the most innovative work, to my mind.  Elegant work. Liked Raman also because he's studied at Rudin's Real &Complex Analysis.  Here's my intro.]

Many information scientists and designers now adhere to the principle of factoring  information systems into data - model - presentation, but few have thought through so carefully the functional implications of this factorization as Dr. Raman has.   In order to understand the invariant structures in a data model, it helps to vary the presentation or layout, or even better , the modality.   This is the subject of Raman's work.  

See paper.

Electronic Documents Session

Sara Elo,  Augmenting Text: Good News on Disasters, MIT Media Lab

Designed a rule-based news augmentation system which reads streams of ascii from standard news feeds about disasters, parses the English, and constructs a hypertext with some words automatically linked to extra info generated from databases (geographic db's, census db, CIA Factbook, etc.)    The rulebase was hand-constructed by Elo herself, of course, and extremely special to disaster stories.   Not generalizable, given state of AI's NL techniques.

Mentioned Wittenburg and Weitzman's work on using relational grammars to generate presentations from structured media.

Kristin Summers,Towards a Taxonomy of Logical Document Structures, 

Used a graph structure to represent documents.   Good idea, but i have a problem with potential catechresis (category confusion) : in her example deconstruction of a document: she places semantics (math: lemma/theorem/corollary) and format abstraction (article/section/paragraph) on the same tree.

Asked about maps between trees of potentially very different types (structure functors), but she has not thought about that yet.

Emerging User Interfaces Session

Chair:  Robert Jacob (Tufts)  ,   very friendly and accomodating fellow, cool work with tracking user focus by eye saccades, currently working on user interaction language.   We talked about his language work.  He's studying how to capture in language things/gestures like picking up an object, sweeping it around in space and setting it down.   There are some subtleties with flipping between state-transition and dataflow representations.

Fillia Makedon ran through a list of stuff -- video parsing

Taksis Metakis on more future stuf.  Unfortunately I wasn't listening carefully because I was writing my slides, but he was talking about interesting work.

Hermann Maurer -- HyperG, on need for standard protocols in order to hook up new UI's, and need for self-censorship.

SXW -- Since I may never have time to write this up, here is the text from my slides.

MediaWeaver
	examples of unsatisfactory UI's.

Interface Metaphor <--> Data Object Model (functioanl dependencies)
Artifacts of current technology limits: 
	(1) "network": issues like network latency may disappear into properties like media object "inertia."
	(2) chunks and anchors will disappear as we come up with a general notion of  (ephemeral) "selection."
Factorization: Media - Models - Presentation

Alternative media structures?
	Continuously parametrized (eg QuickTime VR, ScriptX playspace, cosmology and fluidflow simulations)
	Content-specific structures (musical forms and transforms, Lie-algebras)

Immersion vs Submersion?   (vote for latter.)

Modeling Human...
	Gestures
	Intentionality + Desire

No to Mimesis

Human Gesture
	Expressivity
	Writing as (tele)communication ???
	Rhetorics
		cinema (zip, low angle slow zoom...)
		music (Mannheim crescendo...)
		mathematics (
				E ------- E'
				|	|	or	drawing of surface with perturbation patch
				M ------- M'
				)
		performance (from mime to incorporation of ASL into dance movements)

Human Intention & Desire
	Objectivist semantics
	Speech acts
	Derridean critique -- problem of context
Community Modelng Frameworks
	Apple E-world™ 
	Taligent People Places Things™ 
	Microsoft Bob™ 
	vs. Kaleida tabula rasa

I tangled with Hermann about authority (SOAPs -- Seals of Approval vs self-censorship by information providers  a la his WebInfo (?) consortium of self-censored providers.)

Random

Talked a bit with Alan Wylde, editor of TELOS (Springer-Verlag's Electronic Science text division).  He's doing some book on Silicon Valley which may be useful for SiliconBase.

Stephen Gabel, Director, Office of Academic Publications, University of Chicago grokked my gripes about expressivity of media writing technology.

Media Lab

Alex Pentland

Talked fairly extensively about

1.	incorporating photobook query/indexing by eigenface, random vector fields (includes textures, optical flow, temporal textures, etc.), colorspace into MediaWeaver. 

2.	live video walls -- Xerox PARC's  technology  is now >6 years old,  standard but expensive.  Pentland's group has moved on to (3):

3.	shared video streams via glasses & body-mounted videocams.   The experiment is to learn how people may live with distributed perception.

4.	embedding computer artifacts into physical world: test model -- driving assistant

 I agreed to show him some of our client media/ambitions when he or some other members of the Perceptual Computing group come out in the fall.

Glorianna Davenport

Visited her at the Media Lab.   She led me to the student who did ConText: Towards the Evolving Documentary: Mike Murtaugh http://murtaugh.www.media.mit.edu/people/murtaugh.   It's a lisp-based system which attributes blobs (videos, text) by keywords  in four general dimensions (who, what, where, when).   Strengths of currently desired attributes are continuously re-evaluated depending on user push/pull gesture (dwell time or drag or click)  and on aggregate of currently playing media's attributes.   On screen, you see videos and scrolling text appear and playout in a collage bounded byelegant,simple  multi-level scales along the four edges of the screen.   (The scales are ordered from general to specific, like a calender with years/months/days timescales arrayed over each other .)

Mitchel Resnick

Epistemology and Cognition group (includes  S.Papert) , talked about math exploration worlds, *LOGO, a-life and other aspects of  lattice computation.