StartMobile/2006-04-10

Boris and Alex discussed preparations for the Grand Opening on April 21st. We need to prepare a poster and demos. We agreed that Boris will prepare material on the handling of natural language request and possibly on the process of developing the domain. Also material on START for mobile users would be a good fit. Larry will prepare material on service description structure and discovery. Alex will prepare material on overall architecture as well as using the backward chaining and unification engine for matching structured requests to service descriptions and other databases on the phone. We shall integrate everything on April 19th.

-AR

StartMobile/2006-03-29

Boris and Alex discussed the need to re-emphasize the work on START for mobile users. The key research issues to be addressed are:

• mobile-appropriate domains and presentation
• using profile and context information to disambiguate requests and to compact the answers (don't tell me what I know)

Alex described the idea of text message processor that attempts to answer questions about the user's context or execute requests found in text messages. Many interesting use cases like "notify me when you finish the phone call" or "what is the phone number of X" or "can you send me the pictures you took at the meeting yesterday" etc. Boris liked the idea and promised to discuss it with the students and report on results during the next project meeting.

-AR

March 23, 2006

Present Boris, Daniel, Federico, Raimondas, Alex

11-12 AM

We discussed the process of developing Start domain. One of the conclusions I have drawn from the meeting is that there is a need to define the domain. I have creared a draft document RequestLexicon that describes the request StartMobile needs to handle.

4-5 PM

We discussed project Wiki and the expectation that we use to share information. We went through the draft of RequestLexicon. At first sight it appears to describe well what we need to do.

AP Daniel and Federico will work on implementing a subdomain based on the above.

AP Raimondas will use the description to document syntax and terms of the RequestLanguage - the language for formal representation of natural language user requests

The formal representation of the request might have variables referencing objects by description rather than by identity. For example "the pictures I took yesterday" [picture: picture.time in (t1, t2)]. A reference to Joe will be represented as [contact: contact.name == Joe] etc. The second stage is binding the variables to specific objects or sets of objects. The third stage may require disambiguation or completion of the information in the request.

Right now we want to progres on the first stage.

Federico suggested creating a natural language interface to SMIL tutorials. Sounds like a good idea.

AP Alex find out how to make SMIL player play a specific SMIL file.

-Alex

Larry and I discussed text message answering agent when we realized it is an interesting usecase for StartMobile. Often text messages contain requests and querries that can be handled in the same way as other requests

Thursday, March 09, 2006 Present Larry Boris Sue Emily Federico Gabriel Daniel Alex Raimondas

1. WHAT DO WE WANT TO DEMONSTRATE?
   • This question consumed the entire hour of our meeting.

   • InfoLab people have compiled a list of use cases that seem interesting, but are not possible to implement in Python right now.

   • Boris suggested we need a way to support these usecases because they are impressive and will improve the chances of the project being appreciated by Nokia decision makers.
   • Alex pointed out that we need to impress Nokia people by providing new functionality that is not currently available on the phone rather than by demonstrating that we know how to access currently available functionality.
2. We agreed:

Demonstration usecases only serve as a probe of interest and therefore we should use services that are easy to access from Python.

• AP: Alex promised to compile 5 concrete examples
• If we believe that the conditional invocation of services is interesting we have to plan implementing it as a part of the project. That is to have a component that can deal with complex conditions over multiple streams of events. We need to design it from the beginning to support effective interaction in natural language.
• Notes: I compiled the minutes from memory. Please add anything relevant. -Alex