The demand for immediate, mobile, continuous access to distributed information is increasing. For example, a traveler, while driving to the airport, could talk to an intelligent "agent" using a cellular telephone or a personal digital assistant (PDA). The "agent" could respond to requests for information on traffic patterns, flight information, and the current weather at the traveler's destination. Similarly, a warfighter, as depicted in the illustration, should be able to carry on a complex dialogue with a computer processing military-related information, using a wearable communication device that supports voice, keypad, and mouse input, as well as voice and graphical system output. These two examples illustrate a need for future human computer interfaces (HCIs) that support mobile commercial and military applications in a robust, efficient, and user-friendly manner. The goal is to provide computer-based information for anyone at anytime from anyplace.

The goal of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Communicator program is to advance the state of the art of conversational human computer interfaces, especially for mobile environments, such as battlefields, where interface requirements, system robustness, and spoken dialogue strategies present unique and challenging demands for the interface developer. Current commercial interfaces support simple spoken commands and replies, in a limited domain, with strict human-computer interaction rules. The Communicator program goal is to support more robust and complex conversational interaction, where both the user and the system can initiate interaction, provide information, ask for clarification, signal lack of understanding, or interrupt the other participant. The interface will operate seamlessly across multiple domains -- for example, providing airline schedule information interleaved with weather forecasts for departure and arrival cities -- and will support multiple modalities, including graphics, pointing, and gesture.

Underlying the Communicator program is the Communicator architecture, designed to support rapid and cost-effective development of multi-modal human computer interfaces. This ambitious design specifies that the interface components and systems produced by the developers will be required to follow a set of standards that promote interoperability and plug-and-play of similar components. Some of these Communicator-compliant standards will be drawn from the commercial domain, while others will be established by the Communicator program itself, with an eye toward influencing future commercial standards. The initial architecture provides a plug-and-play testbed for the development of HCI components for speech recognition, speech synthesis, dialogue management, language understanding, context tracking, and language generation. As the Communicator program matures, we anticipate other components, such as those for handling graphics and gesture input and output modalities.

MITRE established a Web site (http://fofoca.mitre.org) to allow developers to quickly assemble and test new, architecture-compliant interfaces. The Web-based software repository allows Communicator participants to contribute and to access architecture-compliant modules. A Web-accessible testbed allows developers to plug and play the various components in the repository and thereby coordinate their new component with the other components to provide new interface capabilities. The testbed also provides a demonstration and data-gathering facility for the Communicator project.

The DARPA Communicator program draws upon development teams from MITRE and other organizations including Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), Carnegie Mellon University, IBM, Microsoft, MIT, and Stanford Research Institute (SRI). The MITRE Communicator team maintains the Communicator testbed and the Communicator architecture specification documentation, processes the Communicator architecture bug reports, and fixes bugs. MITRE assists DARPA in evaluating the interface components and systems developed by team members for compliance with the specified architecture. MITRE is also engaged in development of Communicator-compliant interface applications. At present the MITRE team is developing two advanced systems, the first a gesture and spoken language interface for the Army map-based Maneuver Control System and the second a phone-based interface to support airline travel information for the DARPA Communicator community.

Putting different interface components into a robust interface is a major challenge, not only for experienced researchers, but also for application developers who have no intimate familiarity with these components. Some components can be obtained commercially, such as large vocabulary speech recognizers; others, such as dialogue managers, only exist in the laboratory. These components must be adapted for the intended application and assembled into a coherent system. An additional Communicator program goal for the MITRE team is to provide training that will allow developers to assemble advanced human computer interfaces in a reasonable amount of time.

A commercial use of the Communicator program would interweave city traffic information, flight information and weather forecasts.

To support this goal, the MITRE Communicator team has developed a hands-on course to teach participants how to put together robust conversational interfaces. This course has been taken by leading researchers from commercial and academic environments funded under the Communicator program, as well as by internal MITRE personnel seeking to integrate advanced conversational interfaces into their sponsor-related projects. In this course, developers learn about the Communicator-specific architecture standards for their component so that they can interface it seamlessly with the components of other developers. The integrator of HCIs takes this course to learn how to build an advanced conversational interface for an existing application, and to learn how to specify the various functions, such as speech recognition, grammar, speech synthesis output, and state-of-the-art dialogue strategies. To date, the MITRE Communicator team has presented this course twice to two very different groups of students. The first course was targeted at HCI research-ers and component developers; the second course was targeted primarily at consumers and integrators of HCI technology. We are currently in the process of presenting the course to MITRE teams engaged in such other projects as the Command Post of the Future (see article), sponsored by DARPA, and ASTO (see article), a project in submarine-based applications sponsored by the Navy.

For more information, please contact Lynette Hirschman using the employee directory.