Emerging Information Technologies Dr. Charles C. Tappert Department of CSIS Pace University

Emerging Information Technologies  What are Emerging Info Technologies?  Moore’s Law and what might follow  Wearable/Handheld Computers  Virtual Reality  Artificial Intelligence  e-Commerce  Speech and Handwriting Interfaces

Technology Life Cycle  Precursor - dream or contemplation  Invention  Emergence (development)  Acceptance (established)  Surplus or Obsolescence

Moore’s 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 won’t work  What will happen then?

After Moore’s Law New Technologies Will Emerge  Nanotechnology  Quantum Computing  Chaos Computing  Optical Computing

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

Photos of Wearable Computers

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

Photos of VR HMDs

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

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

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

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

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

Speech Recognition Problems  Dialects  Telephone/cell phone limitations  Noisy environments  Similar sounding words

Speech Recognition Problems  Similar sounding words Recognize speech Wreck a nice beach  Identically sounding words - homophones The sun’s rays meet The sons raise meat

Speech Understanding Problems Natural Language Understanding  The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak

Speech Understanding Problems Natural Language Understanding  The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak  The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten

Handwriting Recognition  Offline Scanned Images Static Information  Online Electronic Tablet or Digitizer Real-Time, Dynamic Information

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

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

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

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

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

Handprint Recognition Difficulties  Digitizer problems  Writing variation not handled by system  Uppercase versus lowercase versus digits  Segmentation -- character within character problem

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

Graffiti Alphabet

Early Shorthand Alphabets  Ancient Greeks BC  Tironian BC  Stenographie  Gabelsberger  Moon  Goldberg’s Unistrokes (Xerox)

Stenographie Alphabet 1602

Moon Alphabet 1894

Pen Computing Future Work  Graffiti recognizer greatly simplified the recognition problem  Handprint problem not completely solved Even with IBM’s ThinkWrite, CIC’s Jot, and Microsoft products  Cursive script not solved

Example of the Difficulty of Recognizing Cursive Script

Summary  What are Emerging Info Technologies?  Moore’s Law and what might follow  Wearable/Handheld Computers  Virtual Reality  Artificial Intelligence  e-Commerce  Speech and Handwriting Interfaces