Research

• Microsoft Research
  Application: Player Animations express a sense of process and continuity that is difficult to convey through other techniques. Although interfaces can often benefit from animation, User Interface Management Systems (UIMSs) rarely provide the tools necessary to easily support complex, state-dependent application output, such as animations. Here we describe Player, an interface component that facilitates sequencing these animations. One difficulty of integrating animations into interactive systems is that animation scripts typically only work in very specific contexts. Care must be taken to establish the required context prior to executing animation. Player employs a precondition and postcondition-based specification language, and automatically computes which animation scripts should be invoked to establish the necessary state. Player's specification language has been designed to make it easy to express the desired behavior of animation controllers. Since planning can be a time-consuming process inappropriate for interactive systems, Player precompiles the plan-based specification into a state machine that executes far more quickly. Serving as an animation controller, Player hides animation script dependencies from the application. Player has been incorporated into the Persona UIMS, and is currently used in the Peedy application.

• Sony CSL
  Application: Language Analysis Project
  Sony C.S.L, an Independent Research Laboratory in Paris, France, researches the meaning of language, its origin and its evolution.

• University of Southern California
  Application: LOOM
  Loom is a language and environment for constructing intelligent applications. The heart of Loom is a knowledge representation system that is used to provide deductive support for the declarative portion of the Loom language. Declarative knowledge in Loom consists of definitions, rules, facts, and default rules. A deductive engine called a classifier utilizes forward-chaining, semantic unification and object-oriented truth maintenance technologies in order to compile the declarative knowledge into a network designed to efficiently support on-line deductive query processing.

• Stanford University
  Application: Common Music
  Common Music produces sound by transforming a high-level representation of musical structure into a variety of control protocols for sound synthesis and display: MIDI, Csound, Common Lisp Music, Music Kit, C Mix, C Music, M4C, RT, Mix and Common Music Notation. Common Music defines an extensive library of compositional tools and provides a public interface through which the composer may easily modify and extend the system.

• University of Wyoming Applied AI Lab
  Application: CARMA
  Wyoming ranchers have a new source of expert advice in responding to grasshopper infestations thanks to the Case-based Range Management Advisor (CARMA).