In this special two-part video edition of House Calls for Healthcare Professionals, Bill Crounse, MD, visits with researchers at Microsoft Research. Each program reviews three promising areas of research that may one day lead to solutions with a direct or indirect application to health and healthcare. Viewers will gain insight to advanced ideas and technologies now in the labs at Microsoft Research long before they find their way into future products, solutions, or applications.
A special thanks to Dr. Eric Horvitz, MSR Area Manager, for his assistance in the production of this program.
Part 1
Situated Interaction
The Situated Interaction project at Microsoft Research aims to enable a new generation of interactive systems that can reason about their surroundings and embed interaction deeply into the natural flow of everyday tasks, activities, and collaborations. As an initial sample challenge in this space, researchers are currently developing a situated conversational agent that can act as a Microsoft front-desk receptionist (for example, make shuttle reservations, register visitors, and provide campus information). The system integrates a large number of artificial intelligence technologies—such as speech recognition and language understanding, face detection and tracking, intention recognition, engagement, and behavioral modeling—in a conversational framework that allows it to engage in mixed-initiative, natural language interaction with one participant or multiple participants.
http://msrweb/adapt/SituatedInteraction
•Dan Bohus, Ph.D.
Researcher
Gaze Tracking
Eye-tracking technology can be used to understand how people interact with information—for instance, search results and Web pages and perform other information processing tasks. This information can then be used to design new ways of interacting with computers in which the machine recognizes what people look at and better understands what they pay attention to in order to respond accordingly.
http://research.microsoft.com/~cutrell/
Cutrell, E., and Z. Guan. 2007. “What are you looking for? An eye-tracking study of information usage in Web search.” In Proceedings of CHI'07, Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, CA), ACM Press, 407-416.
Guan, Z., and E. Cutrell. 2007. “An eye-tracking study of the effect of target rank on Web search.” In Proceedings of CHI'07, Human Factors in Computing Systems (San Jose, CA), ACM Press, 417-420.
•Ed Cutrell, Ph.D.
Researcher
Big Top
“FourBySix” is a large, 4-foot by 6-foot (standing height) surface computer that Microsoft researchers recently prototyped to explore productivity scenarios and applications involving small groups of users meeting face to face. For example, one use would be to support groups of designers who are combining and reviewing images, allowing them to sketch new designs in a collaborative setting.
•Andy Wilson, Ph.D.
Researcher
