Human Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland
With Dr. Ben Shneiderman, Dr. Ben Bederson and Allison Druin, HCIL Faculty
Thursday, May 9, 2002; 3 p.m. EDT How can children help design software? How do you evaluate computer rage? Imagine a virtual library for children's literature and storybooks that you can zoom through. The Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland is one of the leading research organizations that analyze the development and implementation of technology and advanced user interfaces. The team of interdisciplinary researchers study how technology designs affect content display. The research follows a "life-cycle" from the initial technology design, implementation issues, to the evaluation of user performance. The results have provided new approaches to information visualization, interfaces for digital libraries, multimedia resources for learning communities, zooming user interfaces (ZUIs), technology design methods with and for children, and instruments for evaluating user interface technologies. Read Post columnist Leslie Walker's Tech Thursday column, A Visual Rather Than Verbal Future (Post, May 9). Join the founding director and director of HCIL, Dr. Ben Shneiderman, Dr. Ben Bederson, and Dr. Allison Druin, professor at HCIL, to discuss the impact of technology and education. Recently Bederson and Druin received funding from the National Science Foundation to build the International Children's Digital Library, a comprehensive virtual library of international children's literature. On Friday, May 31, 2002, HCIL will be hosting its 19th annual symposium and open house featuring topics and projects on web-based surveys, message boards for family communication, interactive exploration of foreign-language collections and a storytelling robot. For more information visit the HCIL Symposium and Open House Web site. A transcript follows. Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.
Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: On behalf of the HCIL, Allison Druin, Ben Shneiderman and I (Ben Bederson) are all here, and are happy to discuss your questions about today's article, and any other thoughts you have about improving computer user's experiences.
Hayward, Calif.: Does a speech interaction between humans exclude thinking at the same time? What is a true nature of a discussion? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: Speaking makes it harder (but not impossible) to think, that's why we stop speaking and ask for quiet when trying to solve a tough problem.
The sooner that speech recognition researchers move to doing empirical studies of users, the sooner they will find the best ways to build effective interfaces.
-- Ben S
Washington, D.C.: What will it take for the well established industry to shift its attention to more visual interfaces? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: Like most industries, it will probably take time. There are a few risk takers out there already, and doing a good job of promoting highly visual interfaces. For example, Spotfire commercialized some ides that came out of our lab, and is doing a good job. There is also InXight, a Xerox PARC spinoff that has a number of exciting products. So, what will it take? The realization that these companies are making money, and that there is more to be made. I think this is happening now - just one step at a time.
- Ben B.
Providence, R.I.: First, as a programmer, let me thank you for releasing your Jazz package as open source; I, and hopefully many other programmers, plan to try it out to solve a variety of problems. Other than your work at Maryland, what would you say are the most exciting new results and tools in HCI that you'd like to see lots of people using? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: Thank you - I have been very excited about releasing Jazz as open source software, and the community response to it that we have gotten. A number of people and companies are building projects using Jazz, and they are doing things that have not even thought of. You'll be happy to know that we are also hard at work on Piccolo Jazz, its successor. Piccolo Jazz is a lean and mean engine for zooming technology that will also be publicly available. We're starting in Java, but will also port it to Microsoft's .NET.
There are a lot of other exciting projects going on around the world in this area. For example, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs is working on a "DiamondTouch" table that acts is a touch-sensitive surface, but allows multiple people to touch it at the same time. This will be a great technology to support collaboration between children, programmers, or anyone working on visual things together.
I'm also very excited about better display technology. IBM and Toshiba both have beautiful 20" 9 megapixel displays with very high resolution (200 DPI). It is so good, that I think it will change how people read on computers, and will end up subtly shifting how people interact with computers.
- Ben B.
Washington, D.C.: A lot of people think voice will become the primary way we control computers simply because it's so EASY to talk. Never mind whether it's terribly efficient, as the article suggests it isn't. It's still EASY to talk to a computer, and people need more ease-of-use for computers. What's your reaction? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: The historical evidence of failed speech products shows that there are serious problems, which were confirmed by several studies. The technology works up to a point, but the products are not effective because they don't really serve the needs of most users. Speech products have a role to play for some disabled users, over the telephone, and in some specialized situations. I won't predict that there will never be widespread speech, but I will bet that there will always be more airline tickets sold by visual interfaces than by voice.
The $11Billion failure of Learnhout & Hauspie shows that the inflated expectations were a problem.
Bethesda, Md.: Do children today learn differently than children in the past, including today's adults? If so, and if that difference is an orientation toward visual learning, as in TV and video games, do you think kids will learn and retain different types of information than people who grew up learning from printed text? How will that change education? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: Allison- This is an excellent question that many of today's educational researchers are trying to understand. I can say from my own experiences that as the tools change that children use to learn with, many of their same concerns remain: to be creative, to be social, and to be in control of their lives. In regards to the new tools-- we do see that children are able to accomplish more complex tasks than we originally thought possible at that age. What we find is that many times the tools of learning can hamper children and when something new can support them in new ways, it's exciting to see the outcomes. An example of this is when children search for information on the web. Currently, most tools require children to read, or type keywords to find what they are looking for. So when young children don't find what they are looking for because of horrible spelling, that doesn't mean they can't search for items they want. It merely means they have the wrong tool to support them. Today our team at Maryland is trying to overcome these limitations for young children in creating new technologies. How will this change education? We are still trying to figure that out with our own research.
Rockville, Md.: When do you expect we will start seeing improvements like these in mainstream commercial applications (like Windows)? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: Of course, we already are seeing improvements in commercial applications and operating systems - they just tend to be more incremental than we'd sometimes like. As start-ups and companies like SmartMoney show how visual interfaces give demonstrable added value to their customers, I believe the market will respond with more and more options.
And if they don't the research labs will offer solutions and we'll end up selling them ourselves.
- Ben B.
Minneapolis, Minn.: I am engaged in developing a web application making available the complete aggregate US census records from 1790 to the present (http://www.nhgis.org). One of the problems facing this development is the sheer volume of variables available and their documentation. In order to manage the tension between facilitating expert interaction without alienating newcomers, we've chosen to mediate our documentation system with discrete, constrained views into a complete description encoded in XML. This seems a somewhat ham-handed approach to what must be a generalized problem for HCI; one that contemporary GUI OS managers (Windows, MacOS, Gnome, KDE, et. al.) have only partially solved. I am curious whether your group has addressed the problem and what insights you can offer.
Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: This is a great problem that we are working on as well for the US Census Bureau. We think new visualization tools with dynamic queries can be very effective - these allow users to rapidly select what they want to see, or make an animated tour on the data from 1790 to the present. Our lab web page has some examples in the project titled "Dynamaps and Census Data" and newer versions in Java with all 3000+ counties are being developed by our group.
-- Ben S
Rockville, Md.: Your example application of PhotoMesa is great for organizing pictures since pictures are visual. Could you extend this visual paradigm to non-visual data (sound files)? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: PhotoMesa is an example of what I call a "Zoomable User Interface" or ZUI. It works by putting lots of information on the screen at once, and letting users simply zoom into areas they are interested in.
However, for this approach to work, there must be a clear and recognizable small representation of the information. Photos work particularly well because people are remarkably good at recognizing photos. Sounds, on the other hand, are notorious for not having good small visual representations - so a direct photomesa-style interface probably wouldn't work. However, photomesa also includes integrated search, highlights, and clustering which can are useful in many domains.
- Ben B.
Rockville, Md.: What area's do you see this shift in visual interface really making an impact? Your example application of PhotoMesa is great for organizing pictures since pictures are visual, but what about audio files? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: Visual interfaces are terrific in helping users find patterns, outliers, gaps, and clusters in large data sets. The dramatic success of visual tool such as Spotfire (derived from our work) for pharmaceutical drug discovery demonstrates its strong advantages.
As for audio files, if you had a catalog of 2000 songs, I think a visual interface could be very helpful in finding what you wanted.
-- Ben S
Reston, Va.: Do you have any "open source" projects that you are working on? Can you provide some URLs where we can get more information about what you are doing?
Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: Our biggest open source project is Jazz - a Java toolkit that supports the development of Zoomable User Interfaces, but can also be used for any 2D object-oriented graphics. You can find it at www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz
- Ben B.
Washington, D.C.: What are your ideas about designs for human interface devices that cater to the early childhood, when growth and learning is exponential and moving faster than speech?
Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: Allison- Last year we began a research project to focus on user interfaces that support early childhood development in the preschool classroom. What we have already found is that it is critical for young children to have technology experiences that challenge them physically (not just ask them to sit in one place), that enable them to be social learners, and that enable multiple forms of input. Young children are each so very different that it is also difficult to say that any one approach to technology is right or wrong. But the most important thing is that interfaces for children can support diversity of skills.
Rockville, Md.: Just because speech recognition isn't perfect now doesn't mean that it won't get better. Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: That is true! But don't go down that route because soon you'll be saying the alchemy and time travel research should also be pursued.
Speech recognition will get better, but I believe that visual interface tools will get better even faster. Our capacity for visual information acceptance and output is much greater than for speech.
-- Ben S
Sudley Springs, Va.: What advances do you see in the area of Virtual Input Devices? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: By Virtual Input Devices, I assume you mean devices that somehow sense your body movement and translate that into input for a computer. One reasonable system that does this is a "virtual" keyboard by FingerWorks, a company in Delaware. It is a flat (well, slightly curved) surface that you can tap with your fingers and it interprets your finger presses as if you were typing on a computer. By doing it this way, you can modify the keyboard to any layout you want - which is great for small and disabled fingers. Also, they support integrated gestures, so you can drag your fingers across the surface in special ways for common commands, like cut/copy/paste or mouse movement.
But all this comes at a price. There is no feedback, and this makes typing much more difficult. Even if you aren't aware of it, the noise, pressure, and shape of the keys on a regular keyboard making typing very efficient because you can continually modify your typing - this makes it unlikely for your hands to shift off the keyboard - a bad thing that can and does happen with virtual keyboards.
I'm more skeptical about more vague gesture recognition systems - for instance, a vision system that watched how you moved your hands in the air would never work well, I think. Among other problems, users wouldn't be good at producing just the right gesture every time. And, how would you distinguish an explicit gesture vs. a sneeze?
- Ben B.
Toronto, Canada: Can you expand upon the comments made about speech and short term memory using the same cognitive resources? The suggestion seems to be that speech and audition use working memory resources, but visual processing doesn't. Is that right? Can you point us to more information about this? Thanks. Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: You've go it! It is difficult (not impossible) to speak and think at the same time. Visual processing and hand-ey coordination are handled in a different part of your brain, so you get more parallel processing.
I discuss this and point to several studies in my "The limits of speech recognition", Communications of the ACM,
September 2000 (pages 63-65).
-- Ben S
Los Alamos, N.M.: I've followed Allison's work with young learners over the past several years and have always marveled at the kinds of thinking and product young kids are capable of - when place in such a rich learning environment. In working with classroom teachers, however, I don't yet see the same kinds of rich learning environments readily available to the average teacher (without HCI backgrounds). Is such research done at HCI lab destined, like some many other excellent projects, to never get out of the lab or used only by the most "gifted" of teachers? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: Allison- Thanks so much for the kind words! In regards to classrooms and getting research into the hands of the people doing the hard word, I do agree-- it is a challenge to make our work "more than a research project" for a few. In response to that, my team at Maryland has been working hard to get the technologies we create on the web and freely downloadable. We do have a zoomable storytelling technology we have been creating in collaboration with children and teachers in Sweden, England and the US. It is called KidPad and it is freely downloadable at www.kidpad.org. In the Fall, you will also see our digital libraries work accessible via the Internet. However, I have to say that this is only a small portion of the research we do. We also make storytelling robots, room-sized environments, and more which can not just be downloaded. We need to work with industry to get these new physical technologies to the public-- and alas that is no small challenge.
Washington, D.C.: Could you talk a little about the digital divide? As computers become more important in education, especially for younger children, how can schools and libraries in poorer communities keep up with new technologies? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: Thanks for raising this important issue. It is true that in poorly educated and low income segments of the US only 25% have internet access, while the number rises to over 80% access for well-educated wealthy Americans. This is a serious concern for me, and we must address this nationally with economic incentives, improved design of technology, better training for teachers, neighborhood computing centers, and other ideas. I am very disturbed that the current administration's budget proposals cuts out projects designed to reduce the digital divide. Citizens who are concerned should contact their representatives... to learn more see
www.digitaldividenetwork.org
-- Ben S
Silver Spring, Md.: I am a Senior and have hard time learning how to type. Yet, I still scientific articles
some of them lengthy.Would a program "Dragon Naturally Speaking 6" be appropriate for me?
Sincerely
Leon Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: Allison- I am not familiar with the technology you suggest, but my suggestion is that you keep trying what you can to make a difference. Many people try just one thing, get frustrated, and give up on technology. Don't give up!
Norfolk, Va.: The MacOS has long been graphical oriented. How are your developments fundamentally different from the MacOS? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: While Mac OS (and Microsoft Windows) are visual in nature, they are a different kind of visual interface than we usually make. The OS's use visual "widgets" to control the interface, and use graphics for icons or design, but almost uniformly use text to render the actual information.
We, on the other hand, use visual depictions of the underlying data. These kind of "information visualization" systems scale up better than text - supporting tens of thousands of pieces of information on a single screen - while text usually maxes out after ~100 items or so per screen.
So for us, the holy grail is to find ways to represent large amounts of information on a single screen with simple interfaces that let users see details while still maintaining context. That is what PhotoMesa does.
Another example is FishCal - a calendar interface I've been working on for PDAs. It uses dense information displays along with a "fisheye" distortion technique that lets users see details without getting lost. We ran an experiment with folks from Microsoft Research comparing it against the shipping calendar program on Pocket PC 2002. We explicitly looked at planning and analysis tasks, and FishCal beat the commercial system in time and accuracy on almost every question. You can read more about FishCal, and see some screenshots and a video at www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/fishcal
In general, Ben S. has an information visualization "mantra":
Overview first,
zoom and filter,
then, details on demand
- Ben B.
Rockville, Md.: How would you choose a target audience (age group) of kids for a possible kids' Web site about the science-based information on the human brain? Would it make sense to have 5th graders to high schoolers "share" the same site?
Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: Allison- The way I understand if a technology is appropriate for kids-- is to ask them and their teachers. In our lab we partner with kids and teachers to understand learns' needs, abilities, and interests. I could go on forever about this topic, but let me refer you to our web site that can give you some ideas of how we work together http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/kiddesign/ The short answer though, is always ask the user!!
Catharpin, Va: Dvorak tried to change the keyboard back in the 30's because he realized the current system was inadequate. When will the masses be able to embrace a new technology? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: The Dvorak keyboard question comes up over and over because it is a purportedly better keyboard design that never replaced the QWERTY layout because of the installed base of the keyboard we all know.
There is a lesson here. You have to consider learning time for new technologies, not just how good it is once you're an expert. The Dvorak keyboard offers a very modest improvement over QWERTY, and so the time it would take to learn the new one (several weeks for a good typist - I know, I tried) would have to be worth it. In this case, it wasn't.
So, when will the masses be able and willing to embrace a new technology? As soon as the new technology offers a significant improvement. 20% improvement is not enough.
- Ben B.
Washington, D.C.: What's the most surprising thing you've found about the impact of computers on children? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: Allison- Wonderful question! I guess the most surprising impact that technology can have on children in how it can effect them socially. It never ceases to amaze me how technology can bring children together, whether it's for a game, for learning about a new animal, or for communicating with someone else that can answer their questions. Whether at a distance, or in the same room, computers can be a catalyst for not being alone. And that's incredibly important-- certainly at any age, but especially as young children's minds and emotions are developing.
Savannah, Ga.: From what I have seen, your interfaces still require the window's based display mechanism. What limitations do you think it holds, and how will interfaces develop beyond them? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: I think visual interfaces will have a growing appeal, especially as screen sizes and resolutions increase. The easiest way to improve your productivity, is often just to move from a 640 x 480 pixel display to a 768 x 1024 pixel display, or even larger. For many tasks the larger display means less disruptive scrolling and window manipulation.... you can concentrate on your work, and not on operating the computer. Air traffic controllers use large displays so they can see the entire airspace without worrying about scrolling.
Of course, we need to address the needs of blind users with alternate designs that provide information in a form that they can use.
Exciting new possibilities are emerging with small portable devices, and interfaces that are embedded in our environment.... but for many tasks screens and pointing devices are an excellent way to get your work (and play) done.
-- Ben S
Washington, D.C.: What's your opinion on how good an interface Windows XP is? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: This is, of course, a loaded question. What should I compare it to? Windows 2000? Mac OS X, Linux and XWindows?
I have used every version of windows back to DOS 3.0 extensively, and now use Windows XP as I type this. As an overall interface for managing my my windows and files, I find it to do the job, and to be the best that I've seen. I like it more than Mac OS X in general because XP offers keyboard shortcuts to almost every feature. This is crucial for expert users. Moving your hands from the keyboard to the mouse and back typically takes over 2 seconds. Do this a few thousand times a day, and you waste a lot of time.
XP also has some new interface features that I really appreciate. One is their ClearType display technology which effectively doubles the horizontal resolution of the display for text (for LCD displays, anyway), making it much easier to read text. There is also much better support for wireless networks, so if you move your laptop around between several wireless networks as I do, it works flawlessly with no intervention on my part. And if I do want to customize the networking details, I can.
Some other things I like about XP: grouped taskbar buttons - so you don't end up with 6 Internet Explorer buttons when one would do. And the "tray" icons on the bottom right that get automatically hidden when they aren't used often also work well.
What doesn't work well? I *hate* that Microsoft limits users ability to customize the desktop. There is a great new feature called "themes", but you can only use Microsoft-supplied themes. Someone wrote some software in Germany that overrides this feature and lets you customize your desktop - which I think ought to be a user's right. Search on Google for "hack XP themes" to find it.
There are more, but that's enough for now.
- Ben B.
Durham, N.H.: Are you working on any assistive technology that involves children? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: Allison- As it happens we have been partnering with a small Maryland company, AnthroTronix, to develop a storytelling robot for children with disabilities. It is a robot that encourages children to actively use their bodies to tell stories. You can see more about it at:
A Storytelling Robot for Pediatric Rehabilitation
Reston, Va.: In addition to improving the software interface for computer programs, have you been doing any research into the hardware interface? In particular, I'm hoping that touch screens will make a come back. Mice tend to slow me down (although they're probably more appropriate for some interactions); I tend to prefer keyboards, and get more work done faster with them. Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: I have been working on one small hardware device - a kind of linear physical scrollbar designed to attach to the side of the keyboard to control linear things like scrolling and zooming. The problem with the mouse is that it controls two degrees of freedom which doesn't map well to 1D tasks.
Mostly, though, our lab uses existing hardware and concentrates on software.
- Ben B.
Annapolis, Md.: You talk about displaying thousands of pieces of information on a screen. What is the limit of the brain for processing and understanding information? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: I can't give you an explicit number about the limit of the human brain, but it is clearly bigger than 100. And probably smaller than a billion. Current high resolution computer displays are actually pretty well matched to the capabilities of the human visual system - since most of the eye's resolution is in the center of the visual field.
The human visual system is good at recognizing patterns and outliers in large visual fields. You don't have to understand each of 50,000 dots to recognize that there are bunch of red ones in the lower right corner, and that is where information visualization can help.
- Ben B.
Washington, D.C.: What can you tell us about the digital children's library you're working on? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: Allison- We're very excited about this work, and we've been quite encouraged with our newest grant from the National Science Foundation. Over the last 3 years we've been exploring how children search and what visual interfaces can support them in these explorations. You can see some of this work at: www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/kiddesign/searchkids.shtml
We are now expanding this research to understand how children search and browse digital books. We are looking forward to this Fall making this work more publicly available. So stay tuned!
Camp Springs, Md.: So, which is easier for people: to process and act upon information received visually or to process and act upon information received orally/aurally? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: I think you've made the distinction too sharp. Human-human exchanges by voice convey emotional intensity, fear, happiness, authority, etc. So people like to get this rich form of spoken information. But speech is difficult to use because it is ephemeral, hard to scan, and slow to absorb.
Visual information presentation can be extremely efficient such as in a map, diagram or even tabular list. Users can review visual presentations to extract specific information, scan it to get an overview, and get lots of information quickly. Of course visual is not perfect - there are lots of poorly done visualizations, and sometimes training is needed. Depending on the task, some users prefer textual or spoken information, even if visual forms would be faster.
-- Ben S
Florham Park, NJ: To Ben Scheniderman Your claim that speech input interferes with thinking is based in part
on a paper you wrote with Karl and Pettey. In your experiment,
subjects would use speech commands after a cursory training period.
So, when they had to say "up" or "down" instead of pressing the usual
buttons, they tended to forget information that was presented to them.
I don't believe that shows in -any- way that it is the use speech
commands that are at fault; you have demonstrated only that the output
modality that is the most familiar is the one that carries the least
cognitive load. Is that right? That brings me to another point: much of research in human-computer
interfaces is based on experiments like yours that are much too short
to account for the effect of training and experience. Given the
controversy surrounding epidemiologic studies, I would like your
opinion on how much faith we should have in short-term studies in the
field of human-computer interaction?
Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: Every good experiment raises further questions. Our experiment did show advantages for speech in simple tasks but when the memory load was greater the speech users had more trouble -- that was the surprise!! That is what led us to understand the greater demands on short term memory from spoken language interfaces.
My main message over the years has been to encourage promoters of speech recognition to conduct empirical studies. I think a long-term study to see how users of speech systems accommodate to it would be very useful.... but I'd rather spend my time studying users of visual interfaces, because I think the payoff will be larger.
-- Ben S
Arlington, Va.: RE: International Children's Digital Library project -- Why did National Science Foundation choose your lab to implement it? Can you talk about how are you going to implement this project? Will there be fairy tales in languages other than English?
Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: Allison- It's always hard to say why some research is funded, but we'd like to think that our previous experience in this area coupled with our unique partnerships with children and teachers helps. As for what this new digital library will be or contain, we are just now mapping out its future for the next five years of funding. Again, check back in the Fall, and we expect to have some exciting new research directions!
Washington, D.C.: Hi. I'm wondering what you think of Microsoft's vision that we will all soon have personal Web software agents who will fetch the news we want, negotiate our travel arrangements, make calendar entries automatically and notify us when anything changes. Is this a realistic vision, and if so, how soon? Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: I view Microsoft's vision as having two components. The first is a technical thing called "Web Services" where web servers can host databases and provide web-based programs for fetching and interacting with that data. This is a fantastic idea, and is being picked up across the computer industry. On a simple level, community organizations such as soccer leagues and babysitting clubs can put their calendars online as a web service rather than a static web page. Then, you'll be able to use your calendar program to download those activities into your own calendar program. This will be much better than having to good look at their web page and integrate it manually with your own calendar.
In terms of more AI-like "agents" that know your wishes and do things for you, I'm much more skeptical. I'd much have the editors of the Washington Post and NewsScan fetch information for me then a robot. For travel arrangements, I don't even work with human travel agents - my requirements are just too complex. What are the chances that a computer agent will be able to do my bidding? More to the point, what is the chance that there will be an interface where I will be able to clearly specify my requirements? That is the problem. My requirements are dynamic, and dependent on the options available - they are not preset and cast in stone. So, I just don't see it happening for complex cases.
- Ben B.
Ben Shneiderman, Ben Bederson and Allison Druin: We appreciate the strong interest in these issues, and the excellent and thoughtful questions. We wish we had more time as there are many more questions we didn't get a chance to respond to.
However, there is a great opportunity to learn more about what we do, and to meet us in person. Our lab has an annual symposium and open house, which conveniently is in a few weeks - May 30th, 31st. Learn more and register at HCIL Symposium & Open House.
washingtonpost.com: That wraps up today's show. Thanks to everyone who joined the discussion.
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