Tele-immersion is a new medium that enables a user to share a virtual space with remote participants. The user is immersed in a rendered 3D-world that is transmitted from a remote site. To acquire this 3D description we apply biand trinocular stereo techniques. The challenge is to compute dense stereo range data at high frame rates, since participants cannot easily communicate if the processing cycle or network latencies are long. Moreover, new views of the received 3D-world must be as accurate as possible. We address both issues of speed and accuracy and we propose a method for combining motion and stereo in order to increase speed and robustness.

George Santayana's statement, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, " is only half true. The past also includes successful histories. If you haven't been made aware of them, you're often condemned not to repeat their successes. In a rapidly expanding field such as software engineering, this happens a lot. Extensive studies of many software projects such as the Standish Reports offer convincing evidence that many projects fail to repeat past successes. This paper tries to identify at least some of the major past software experiences that were well worth repeating, and some that were not. It also tries to identify underlying phenomena influencing the evolution of software engineering practices that have at least helped the author appreciate how our field has gotten to where it has been and where it is. A counterpart Santayana-like statement about the past and future might say, "In an era of rapid change, those who repeat the past are condemned to a bleak future. " (Think about the dinosaurs, and think carefully about software engineering maturity models that emphasize repeatability.) This paper also tries to identify some of the major sources of change that will affect software engineering practices in the next couple of decades, and identifies some strategies for assessing and adapting to these sources of change. It also makes some first steps towards distinguishing relatively timeless software engineering principles that are risky not to repeat, and conditions of change under which aging practices will become increasingly risky to repeat.

Abstract—E-communication in businesses has been the target of intense research. The media richness hypothesis has been influential in some e-communication research circles and has also been strongly attacked by social theorists. It is argued in this paper that this theoretical polarization involving advocates of the media richness hypothesis and social theorists is due to two problems. The first is that there is a wealth of empirical evidence that provides direct support for the notion that human beings prefer the face-to-face medium for a variety of business tasks that involve communication, which seems to provide support for the media richness hypothesis. The second problem is that the media richness hypothesis is built on a vacuum, as no underlying explanation was ever presented by media richness theorists for our predisposition toward rich (or face-to-face) media. The main goal of this paper is to offer a solution to these problems by providing an alternative to the media richness hypothesis, referred to here as media naturalness hypothesis, developed based on Darwin’s theory of evolution. The media naturalness hypothesis argues that, other things being equal, a decrease in the degree of naturalness of a communication medium (or its degree of similarity to the face-to-face medium) leads to the following effects in connection with a communication interaction: (1) increased cognitive effort, (2) increased communication ambiguity, and (3) decreased physiological arousal. Like the media richness hypothesis, the media naturalness hypothesis has important implications for the selection, use,

This article describes experiments conducted with the system and 3- to 5-year-old children. We highlight several dimensions of the study pertaining to music education, including attention span, spontaneous development of playing modes, and capacity to listen analytically. We describe very encouraging preliminary results and stress the importance of using reflective interactive systems for triggering musical interest in children and creating stimulating, nonsupervised music learning environments. We conclude by setting up our research in the context of the theory of flow as an optimal experience.

No topic raises more contentious debate among educators than the role of interaction as a crucial component of the education process. This debate is fueled by surface problems of definition and vested interests of professional educators, but is more deeply marked by epistemological assumptions relative to the role of humans and human interaction in education and learning. The seminal article by Daniel and Marquis (1979) challenged distance educators to get the mixture right between independent study and interactive learning strategies and activities. They quite rightly pointed out that these two primary forms of education have differing economic, pedagogical, and social characteristics, and that we are unlikely to find a “perfect ” mix that meets all learner and institutional needs across all curricula and content. Nonetheless, hard decisions have to be made. Even more than in 1979, the development of newer, cost effective technologies and the nearly ubiquitous (in developed countries) Net-based telecommunications system is transforming, at least, the cost and access implications of getting the mix right. Further, developments in social cognitive based learning theories are providing increased evidence of the importance of collaborative activity as a component of all forms of education – including those delivered at a distance. Finally, the context in which distance education is developed and delivered is changing in response to the capacity of the semantic Web (Berners-Lee, 1999) to support interaction, not only amongst humans, but also between and among autonomous agents and human beings. Thus, the landscape and challenges of “getting the mix right ” have not lessened in the past 25 years, and, in fact, have become even more complicated. This paper attempts to provide a theoretical rationale and guide for instructional designers and teachers interested in developing distance education systems that are both effective and efficient in meeting diverse student learning needs.

Significant progress has taken place in ‘Spoken Language Output ’ (SLO) R&D, yet there is still some way to go before it becomes a ubiquitous and widely deployed technology. This paper reviews the challenges facing SLO, using ‘Technology Roadmapping ’ (TRM) to identify market drivers and future product concepts. It concludes with a summary of the behaviours that will be required in future SLO systems. 1.

We posit that, given the current state of development of cognitive science, the greatest synergies between this field and artificial intelligence arise when one adopts a high level of abstraction. On the one hand, we suggest, cognitive science embodies some interesting, potentially general principles regarding cognition under limited resources, and AI systems that violate these principles should be treated with skepticism. But on the other hand, attempts to precisely emulate human cognition in silicon are hampered by both their ineffectiveness at exploiting the power of digital computers, and the current paucity of algorithm-level knowledge as to how human cognition takes place. We advocate a focus on artificial general intelligence design. This

The purpose of this work is to improve understanding of existing and proposed decision systems, ideally to improve the design of future systems. A "decision system " is defined as a collection of information-processing components-- often involving humans and automation (e.g., computers)-- that interact towards a common set of objectives. Since a key issue in the design of decision systems is the division of work between humans and machines (a task known as "function allocation"), this report is primarily intended to help designers incorporate automation more appropriately within these systems. This report does not provide a design methodology, but introduces a way to qualitatively analyze potential designs early in the system design process. A novel analytical framework is presented, based on the concept of "semi-Structured " decision processes. It is believed that many decisions involve both well-defined "Structured " parts (e.g., formal procedures, traditional algorithms) and ill-defined "Unstructured " parts (e.g., intuition, judgement, neural networks) that interact in a known manner. While Structured processes are often desired because they fully prescribe how a future decision (during "operation") will be made, they are limited by what is explicitly understood prior to operation. A system designer who incorporates Unstructured processes into

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