[Sigia-l] TMI - and expert-level knowledge

[Listera]

Livia Labate:

> Full presentation video here (1:13, worth the whole thing)
> http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/cs547/050114-cs547-100.asx

Good video. Needless to say, we can always use more of this stuff. Two
comments:

1.  Most such systems (Bob anyone? :-) have failed in the market place,
especially in the broad consumer market.

2.  I'm always suspicious when such research comes out of organizations with
little exposure to the consumer market like IBM, Sun, Oracle, etc. Having no
OS of its own, no consumer PC business, little/no presence on the desktop
app market, etc, I'm curious as to what IBM will do with this?

Anyhow, many of the examples she shows early in the presentation regarding
computer help systems have been done by Apple more than a *decade* ago.
AppleScript-driven Apple Help system would highlight actual screen objects
and take the user through an interactive tour, providing explanations and
performing actions. It wasn't real-time adaptive and, for a variety of
reasons, Apple abandoned it. The upcoming Automator is another take on the
same notion, on a broader scale:

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/automator.html>

(Disclosure: I'm currently designing an "embedded guiding system" for the
finance industry. And I may have used the words "the," "a" and "is" in my
posts here several times in the past few months.)

Ziya
Nullius in Verba