Research Agendas
The computer is a strange machine brain
amplifier, number cruncher, image manipulator. Researchers and artists
seem fascinated by challenging its limits; they are intent on seeing
how far they can extend its capabilities. Sometimes this quest means
trying to enable computers to manifest skills that are quite unremarkable
for humans but extraordinary for a machine, for example, understanding
spoken words or extracting the meaning of a childrens story. Or it might
mean developing skills that are beyond human capabilities, for example,
being able to instantly analyze a database composed of millions of records
in thirty different ways. The research agendas to extend capabilities
and reach are critical elements of this eras cultural history. This
activity in think tanks and worldwide labs is the flow that must be
a source for current and future artistic activity. InputsSystems Recognizing
Speech, Gestures, Faces, Objects, Motion, Touch, Emotions, and Biological
Signals Speech Recognition How can a computer understand the words of
human speech? Commercial speaker- independent-recognition products are
already available. The task of understanding the meaning of speech is
much more difficult and still challenges researchers. Extensions include
the development of auditory consciousness and auditory scene analysis,
which will allow systems to track multiple human speakers in complex
sound environments and identify their relative physical locations. Other
research seeks to track speaker changes, topic changes, and changes
in emphasis. Meeting capture and speaker segmentation will enable the
scan and analysis of a record of a complex sound event, such as a meeting,
in order to systematically summarize the event and reconstruct the flow
of the conversation by speaker and the thematic thread, and allow automatic
browsing and gisting. Reportedly, the CIA has a system that can monitor
thousands of phone calls simultaneously, listening for specific key
phrases. A project called Net Sound is attempting to extract the underlying
acoustic structure of sounds in hopes of finding algorithmic representations,
like a vector or postscript representations of images, which would allow
more efficient network transmissions. Emotional computing projects seek
to enable computers to analyze the emotional content of speech via attributes
such as to create musical performance augmentation systems that can
work in both professional and casual contexts.