COMPASS2008: The Smart Dining Service

2005

COMPASS2008 is a general service platform developed to be utilized as the tourist and city explorers assistant within the information services for the Beijing Olympic Games 2008. The main goals of COMPASS2008 are to help foreigners to overcome language barriers in Beijing and assist them in finding information anywhere and anytime they need it. Novel strategies have been developed to exploit the interaction of multimodality, multilinguality and cross-linguality for intelligent information service access and information presentation via mobile devices.

We will demonstrate a novel information service system, which is designed and realized for meeting the demanding challenges posed by international mega-events. The system COMPASS 2008 is planned to be the mobile digital companion for participants and visitors of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Mobile personalized, multilingual and multimodal services will assist foreign visitors in typical situations such as navigation, communication with waiters or taxi drivers and in cases of emergency. Based on semantic web technology, ontologies are utilized on our platform for the description, the structuring and presentation of services and service content. The well-considered combination strategy of open-domain machine translation and service-specific translation ensures the robust and precise translation quality. Intelligent multimodal user interface technologies ensure comfortable access via the small screens of PDAs and smart phones and the limited input options for handheld computers.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004

Through recent developments in the segment of mobile devices like personal digital assistants (PDA) the usage of mobile applications in different areas of our normal life increases. New applications support mobile users with location-aware information. But today's systems are not usable for all: there still exist various barriers for blind and visually impaired people. This user group does not receives the same information as normally sighted users. AccesSights overcomes these barriers by supporting both user groups with the same information. Meeting the different user requirements we designed a multimodal user interface to support different user groups -each in their suitable fashion. The introduced AccesSights system is based on our highly flexible and modular Niccimon platform.

… Interaction with Mobile …, 2003

2007

We will describe a field test and its evaluation of a truly novel type of mobile computer programs that will assist foreign tourists in their communication with Chinese people. The software is an electronic phrase book and a translation aid but at the same time a powerful multilingual information system connected to numerous services via the Internet. It effectively helps visitors to navigate through the streets, temples and shopping centres of the Beijing megalopolis. It was developed in the German-Chinese project COMPASS 2008, a research action within the Digital Olympics framework. The subjects of the field test were fifteen tourists from seven countries. The test concentrated on usability and acceptance. The applied methodology adapts recognized standards and widely accepted best practice to the specific application type.

2005

Context in mobile tourist information systems is typically captured as the current location of the user. Few systems consider the user's interests or wider context of the sights. This paper explores ideas of how to model, observe, evaluate, and exploit a richer notion of context in this application area. We discuss the influence of such a richer context model on the user interaction for both the capturing of context and the context-aware user/device interactions.

Methods for Adaptable Usability

In this chapter the role of multimodality in intelligent, mobile guides for cultural heritage environments is discussed. Multimodal access to information contents enables the creation of systems with a higher degree of accessibility and usability. A multimodal interaction may involve several human interaction modes, such as sight, touch and voice to navigate contents, or gestures to activate controls. We first start our discussion by presenting a timeline of cultural heritage system evolution, spanning from 2001 to 2008, which highlights design issues such as intelligence and context-awareness in providing information. Then, multimodal access to contents is discussed, along with problems and corresponding solutions; an evaluation of several reviewed systems is also presented. Lastly, a case study multimodal framework termed MAGA is described, which combines intelligent conversational agents with speech recognition/ synthesis technology in a framework employing RFID based location and Wi-Fi based data exchange.

This paper presents the EURESCOM1 project MUST, (MUltimodal, multilingual information Services for small mobile Terminals). The project started in Febru- ary 2001 and will last till the end of 2002. Based on existing technologies and plat- forms a multimodal demonstrator (the MUST tourist guide to Paris) has been implemented. This demonstrator uses speech and pen (pointing) for input, and speech, text, and graphics for output. In addition a multilingual Question/ Answer- ing system has been integrated to handle out of domain requests. The paper focuses on the implementation of the demonstra- tor. The real-time demonstrator was used for evaluations performed by usability ex- perts. The results of this evaluation are also discussed.

Journal of The Acoustical Society of America, 2002

This paper presents the EURESCOM 1 project MUST, (MUltimodal, multilingual information Services for small mobile Terminals). The project started in February 2001 and will last till the end of 2002. Based on existing technologies and platforms a multimodal demonstrator (the MUST tourist guide to Paris) has been implemented. This demonstrator uses speech and pen (pointing) for input, and speech, text, and graphics for output. In addition a multilingual Question/ Answering system has been integrated to handle out of domain requests. The paper focuses on the implementation of the demonstrator. The real-time demonstrator was used for evaluations performed by usability experts. The results of this evaluation are also discussed.

Although examples of tourist guides abound, the role of context aware feedback in such systems is an issue that has been insufficiently explored. Given the potential importance of such feedback, this paper investigates, from a usability perspective, two tour guide systems developed for Brunel University; one with context-aware user feedback and the other without. An empirical study was undertaken in which each of the applications was assessed through the prism of three usability measurements: efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction. Incorporating the participant feedback gathered as a result, the paper compares the use of the two applications in order to determine the impact of real-time feedback with respect to user location. Efficiency, understood as the time taken by a participant to successfully complete a task, was found to be significantly affected by the use of context-aware functionality. Effectiveness, understood as the amount of information a participant assimilated from the application, was shown not to be impacted by the provision of context-aware feedback, even though average experiment duration was found to be significantly shorter in this case. Lastly, participants' subjective satisfaction when using context-aware functionality was shown to be significantly higher than when using the non-context aware application.