Information Retrieval List Digest 107 (April 7, 1992) URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/irld/irld-107 ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 19:20:12 PST Reply-To: "Information Retrieval List" Sender: "Information Retrieval List" From: IRLIST Subject: IR-L Digest, Vol.IX, No.11, Issue 107 IRLIST Digest April 7, 1992 Volume IX, Number 11 Issue 107 ********************************************************** I. NOTICES A. Meeting Announcements/Calls for Papers 1. Learning to Team, Training to Win Graphic Communications Association Collaboration '92, June 1-3, 1992, San Francisco, California B. Publications Announcements 1. NSF HPCC Workshop on Vision, Natural Language,/Speec Processing, and Artivical Intelligence: Preliminary Report ********************************************************** I. NOTICES I.A.1. Fr: Bruce Brown Re: COLLABERATION '92 The Graphic Communications Association Presents COLLABORATION '92: Learning to Team, Teaming to Learn June 1-3, 1992 San Francisco Ritz Carlton Hotel Conference Chair: Christopher Locke, CIMLINC, Inc. "Business is finally recognizing that division of labor is increasingly ineffective as the basis for an organization in an environment of constant rather than occasional change.... Management control is replaced by management coordination of the work of others who may know more than the manager, and decision making occurs in the team rather than in the hierarchy." --Peter G.W. Keen, Shaping the Future: Business Design Through Information Technology, Harvard Business School Press, 1991. "The growing emphasis on high-technology production means greater demands on the competence of each individual employee. And so the element of comprehensive, life long learning for all members of the enterprise will probably turn out to be the most characteristic feature of work in the 21st century." --Robert B. McKersie and Richard E. Walton, "Organizational Change," in The Corporation of the 1990s, Oxford University Press, 1991. "Genuine knowledge resides and proliferates where people live and work, not in some abstract formal realm. Good tools should support and augment that knowledge as it is rather than attempting to 'engineer' it to fit some model-theoretic framework entirely divorced from the work itself. We desperately need more and better software tools whose design reflects this fundamental insight, and that will therefore aid our best people in articulating, modifying and improving their understanding of the work environments they inhabit. Most crucially, we need tools that will substantially assist knowledge workers -- and today this category should include nearly all workers -- in sharing their understanding across the currently rigid boundaries of functional specialization." --Christopher Locke and John West, "Concurrent Engineering in Context," Concurrent Engineering, November-December, 1991. OVERVIEW: Battered by the new realities of global competition and the demonstrated failure of many high technologies that were heralded as saviors in the 1980s, American business is in the throes of a critical sea change. Symptoms and partial solutions are reported from every quarter -- the mass media, academic think tanks and Fortune 500 companies. However, the business community has not yet reached any meaningful consensus on the full implications of this genuine paradigm shift. COLLABORATION '92 will bring together a broad and eclectic spectrum of business leaders, management consultants, academic researchers, editorial observers, technology analysts and commercial developers to address the scope and significance of the radical changes taking place in organizations today. The fundamental premise of COLLABORATION '92 is that these sweeping challenges and changes are being driven neither by technological developments alone, nor by strictly economic considerations. Instead, the pivotal factor determining the competitive viability of today's businesses is their ability or inability to effectively develop and deploy their human capital. A considerable constellation of buzzwords and hot buttons has recently evolved, each of which points to this shift to this new focus on human understanding in contemporary business organizations: concurrent engineering, organizational redesign, total quality, lean production, flexible specialization, the learning organization, the "boundaryless" organization, the "informated" organization, employee involvement, participatory management, self-directed work teams, collaboration technologies, workgroup computing. While none captures the essence of the transformation currently underway, each suggests the emergence of a coherent and powerful new vision of human work and a more humanized workplace. Taken as a whole, these terms also converge toward an implicit agreement that the real barriers to this vision are primarily cultural rather than technological. The necessary but difficult cultural changes taking place in business organizations can be either nurtured or obstructed depending on the computer and communications systems adopted today. This intersection of corporate culture and information technology constitutes the primary theme of COLLABORATION '92. KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Keynote talks will be delivered by Michael Schrage, columnist for the Los Angeles Times and author of Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration, and Charles Garfield, author of Second to None: How Our Smartest Companies Put People First. A complimentary copy of both these author's widely acclaimed books will be sent to all registered participants in advance of the conference to provide an initial reference point for further discussion. CONFERENCE OUTLINE: Each of the three days of COLLABORATION '92 will focus on a single broad aspect of the overall theme: Principles, Practices and Programs. DAY 1: PRINCIPLES. Speakers will focus on the external factors influencing this global shift in perspective and priorities, and the fundamental principles which must be grasped and adopted to realize such a vision. Speakers will put current organizational change into historical perspective by examining why previous corporate structures and styles of management are inadequate to present demands. They will also describe the advantages of newly emergent organizations based on human initiative, local autonomy and group learning, and the resulting potential for continuous improvement. Confirmed speakers include: Jill Janov Founder, Jill Janov Associates Jack Orsburn Co-author of Self-Directed Work Teams: The New American Challenge Thomas Stewart Associate Editor, Fortune Jon Van Technology Writer, Chicago Tribune, author of "Recrafting America" series RESEARCH PANEL: John Seely Brown Director, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Etienne Wenger Institute for Research on Learning, co-author of Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation Terry Winograd Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University, co-author Understanding Computers and Cognition DAY 2: PRACTICES. Speakers will focus on initiatives and methods which can be adopted to support necessary cultural change and operational practices within new high-performance business organizations. Confirmed speakers include: John Hillkirk USA Today, co-author (with Donald E. Petersen, ex-Chairman & CEO, Ford) of A Better Idea: Redefining the Way Americans Work Gerald Michalski New Science Associates (Intelligent Document Management and Continuous Information Environments services) Kenneth Paterson Publisher, Motorola University Press George Robson GE Aircraft Engines, author of Continuous Process Improvement: Simplifying Work Flow and Systems Richard F. Hilbert Manager, Business Process Improvement, GE Corporate Business Development Charles Savage Digital Equipment Corporation, author of Fifth Generation Management: Integrating Enterprises through Human Networking MEDIA PANEL: John Markoff New York Times (moderator) John Hillkirk USA Today Michael Schrage Los Angeles Times Thomas Stewart Fortune Jon Van Chicago Tribune These noted media analysts will voice their own concerns relating to the conference theme, and will provide "instant-replay" commentary on the presentations made up to this point. DAY 3: PROGRAMS. Speakers will focus on software technologies capable of supporting and propagating human understanding, workgroup coordination, apprenticeship training and continuous learning within redesigned workplaces. Confirmed speakers include: David Auer VP, North American Operations, CIMLINC, Inc. (Linkage) Mark Penrose Director, Information Systems, GTE Research and Development (in-house multimedia information systems) Michael Pliner President, Verity, Inc. (Topic) Lou Reynolds President, Electronic Book Technologies (DynaText) Howard Rheingold Editor, Whole Earth Review (The WELL) Haviland Wright President, Avalanche Development Corporation (FastTag) WHO SHOULD ATTEND?: COLLABORATION '92 represents an opportunity to network across the industry, organizational and disciplinary boundaries that tend to divide us all. We hope the audience will represent as many differing perspectives and areas of professional involvement as the speakers we are bringing together here. Because old ideas of functional specialization are counterproductive today, we hope that conference participants will reflect a highly heterogeneous set of professional experience and concerns. Cross-disciplinary discourse and recombinant collaboration are not just passive themes, but active goals of this conference. In the spirit of learning to speak each other's languages, we invite: business managers and team facilitators total quality managers and "concurrent engineers" information vendors and "lean producers" human resource managers and research analysts software developers and customer service representatives management consultants and computer scientists government administrators and corporate change managers environmentalists and marketing directors financial analysts and labor leaders information systems managers and unmanageable "end users" In short, we invite anyone and everyone who plans to play a substantive role in shaping the new human-centered corporations of the 1990s. COLLABORATION IN ACTION: GCA has established an electronic forum on the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) so that participants can get to know each other before the conference, and keep in touch until COLLABORATION '93 (microcomputer and modem required). We hope that this ongoing electronic discourse will spawn a powerful virtual community whose boundaries will extend far beyond the geographic and temporal limitations typical of traditional conferences. For details contact conference Chair: Christopher Locke CIMLINC, Inc. 1222 Hamilton Parkway Itasca, IL 60143 Voice: (708) 250-0090 ext. 1661 Fax: (708) 250-8513 The Well: clocke Internet: clocke@well.sf.ca.us or well!clocke@apple.com REGISTRATION INFORMATION Contact: Mr. Marion Elledge Vice President, Information Systems Graphic Communications Association 100 Daingerfield Road Alexandria, VA 22314-2804 Voice: (703) 519-8160 Fax: (703) 548-2867 The Well: mern Internet: mern@well.sf.ca.us or well!mern@apple.com ********** I.B.2. Fr: Benjamin W. Wah Re: Prelim. Report -- NSF HPCC Workshop on Vision, Nat. Lang./Speech Proc., AI Preliminary Report Workshop on High Performance Computing and Communications for Grand Challenge Applications: Computer Vision, Natural Language and Speech Processing, and Artificial Intelligence ____________________ This workshop was supported by National Science Foundation under grant IRI-9212592. Ideas reported here do not reflect the official position of the sponsoring agency. ____________________ 1. INTRODUCTION: This article reports preliminary findings of the Workshop on High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) for Grand Challenge Applications: Computer Vision, Natural Language and Speech Processing, and Artificial Intelligence. Attendees focused on answering the following questions. a) What grand challenge applications in computer vision, natural language and speech processing, and AI can benefit by the availability of HPCC systems? b) How should HPCC systems be designed so that they can support grand challenge applications in these areas? This report contains a collection of ideas expressed by individuals at the workshop; it does not necessarily represent a consensus among all the participants. Further, ideas expressed in this report do not reflect the official position of the sponsoring agency. 2. SUMMARY OF IDEAS 2.1. Computer Vision Area: Computer vision has two goals. From the engineering viewpoint, the goal is to build autonomous systems that can perform some tasks that the human visual system can do, and even go beyond the capabilities of the human visual system in multimodality, speed, and reliability. From the scientific viewpoint, the goal is to develop computational theories of vision, and by so doing, gain insights into human visual perception. Grand challenge applications in computer vision fall in two classes. a) Autonomous vision systems have many important applications. Examples include i) flexible manufacturing, ii) intelligent vehicle highway systems, iii) environment monitoring, and iv) visual man-machine interface and model-based compression for telecommunication, multimedia, and education. Note that most of the applications involve interaction of the vision system with the environment and humans. b) Computer vision techniques can also be invaluable tools for studying many basic scientific problems in other areas. A prominent example is the visual understanding of turbulence in fluid flow. The basic scientific issues underlying the applications are i) machine learning, ii) surface reconstruction, inverse optics, and integration, iii) model acquisition, and iv) perception and action. HPCC support for computer vision can be divided into three classes. 1) Vision Systems. There are two cases: i) designing vision systems, and ii) running vision systems. Both require huge amounts of computation power and memory. In addition, vision systems often require real-time operation, low-cost, low power, small volume, and low weight. For instance, a vision system may receive as its input 1-100 gigabits/second of image data that need to be processed in real time. 2) Vision Tasks. Tasks in a vision system fall into roughly three categories: low-level (e.g., noise reduc tion, data interpolation, feature extraction, and matching), intermediate level (e.g., grouping), and high-level (e.g., object recognition). To per form these tasks efficiently, each level may require different types of computer architectures. Therefore, for many vision systems, a heterogene ous parallel architecture may be the best answer. Of particular interest is the scalability of such architectures, especially the question of how the different components can be easily "glued'' together, and the communi cation and control pathways between the different homogeneous parallel pro cessors. Another challenge is to develop easy-to-use software for such architectures. 3) Distributed Processing. In many vision systems, compu tations need to be carried out at several different locations. Thus, dis tributed computing is of great importance. One aspect of this problem is the transmission and management of huge amounts of image data. Computer vision is related to other grand challenge areas because a) many applications, such as video compression and man-machine interface, involve both vision and speech; and b) AI techniques, such as knowledge based reasoning, are needed in vision systems. Infrastructure supports for computer vision include a) sharing image databases, software over high-bandwidth networks, and b) providing facili ties and incentives for architects and computer-vision researchers to work together. 2.2. Natural Language and Speech Processing Area: Grand Challenge applications in this area include a) electronic libraries and librarians, which include the use of spoken language interfaces, machine translation, and full text retrieval, and b) spoken language translation. The fundamental scientific and enabling technologies include a) corpus based natural language processing (NLP) that involves the acquisition of linguistic structure, b) statistical approaches to NLP, c) language analysis and search strategies, d) auditory and vocal-tract modeling, e) integration of multiple levels of speech and language analyses, f) connec tionist speech and language processing, g) full text retrieval techniques, and h) special-purpose architectures. Bridges to other grand challenge areas include a) optical character reader (OCR), b) handwriting analysis, c) document image analysis, d) multi-media interfaces, and e) integration of multiple knowledge sources. Architectural needs for supporting natural language and speech pro cessing include a) faster processors with larger memory, b) general purpose supercomputing, c) heterogeneous architectures, such as systems including signal processing and symbolic processing capabilities, d) homogeneous architectures not requiring wide floating point arithmetic, such as those for modeling connectionist architectures, and e) high-bandwidth real-time inputs and outputs. Infrastructure supports include a) shareable text and speech data bases, b) smart compilers and open parallel systems, c) technical staff for developing sharable tools, and d) access to high-performance computing through high-performance wide-area networks. 2.3. Artificial Intelligence/Computer Architecture: This area covers the broad field of AI and the computer architectural support for HPCC AI systems. Some of the grand challenge applications are a) nation-wide job banks, b) electronic library, c) electronic market places, d) large-scale real time planning and scheduling, e) automation in constructing very large knowledge bases, and f) automation of decision making. For example, an electronic library may involve a diverse collection of text, images, data bases, and other information scattered around the net in an assortment of formats. Users will need an intelligent librarian program to help guide them through all this information. The librarian will need to communicate with users in natural language and understand something about text stored in the network. The basic research issues and enabling technologies underlying the applications include a) study and design of scalable and verifiable "trad itional'' symbolic AI/expert systems, b) construction and utilization of very large knowledge bases, c) development of highly parallel machine learning techniques, d) research on active memories as a means of increas ing the contribution of knowledge sources in reasoning, e) development and evaluation of marker/value passing techniques, f) application of neural networks to AI, and g) further studies of heuristic search techniques applied to problem solving. Some computer architecture implications are a) increased use of mas sively parallel processing techniques with a goal of achieving real-time AI processing, b) understanding of the computational requirements of various AI paradigms and how they translate into system requirements in order to either build specialized systems or improve the mapping of AI problems into existing high performance computers, c) understanding of the architecture of systems supporting both numeric and symbolic AI problems, d) development of knowledge base management techniques for implementing efficient multi level knowledge based systems, e) deciding when it is best to use general purpose versus specialized accelerators, and f) development of compilers for AI languages on today's supercomputers. Required infrastructure supports include a) access to large fast com puters by the AI community, b) access to on-line large knowledge bases and corpora, c) sharing systems and research results achieved in large projects by the community, and d) development of computational benchmarks for impor tant AI paradigms. ********************************************************** IRLIST Digest is distributed from the University of California, Division of Library Automation, 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, CA. 94612-3550. Send subscription requests to: LISTSERV@UCCVMA.BITNET Send submissions to IRLIST to: IR-L@UCCVMA.BITNET Editorial Staff: Clifford Lynch lynch@postgres.berkeley.edu or calur@uccmvsa.bitnet Nancy Gusack ncgur@uccmvsa.bitnet Mary Engle engle@cmsa.berkeley.edu or meeur@uccmvsa.bitnet The IRLIST Archives will be set up for anonymous FTP, and the address will be announced in future issues. To access back issues presently, send the message INDEX IR-L to LISTSERV@UCCVMA.BITNET. 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