On Monday October 31 I'll be chairing a workshop, supported by NSF,
to provide the Information, Robotics, and Intelligent Systems (IRIS)
Division and NSF in general with a set of recommendations for future
programs, falling in the following three categories:
1. Recommendations concerning use of WWW as an experimental platform
for collaborative efforts in the IRIS and computer science research
communities, including potential enhancements to WWW in support of
this.
2. Recommendations concerning research which NSF in general and IRIS
in particular should consider undertaking with respect to the WWW,
its accessibility, and its usability.
3. Recommendations on NSF information delivery to the public and
research communities via WWW.
THE PURPOSE OF THIS MESSAGE IS TO SOLICIT YOUR IDEAS AND SUGGESTIONS
SO WE CAN INCLUDE THEM IN THE WORKSHOP DISCUSSIONS. The workshop
itself will be a modest-sized gathering (see schedule at end of this
message with participants' names), so we want to use email as a way
to increase the set of ideas we discuss.
The results of the workshop will be available via WWW: your response
to this message will ensure that you will receive a follow-up message
with the URL for the workshop.
Ways to think about the above three questions, and hence to
categorize your comments, include:
* How might the research community supported by IRIS leverage on
methods of access, search, and navigation in the WWW to improve
communications amongst themselves, and with NSF?
* What should the IRIS research programs consider for NSF page
content that would most help grow their investigative communities and
be most useful in dissemination and retrieval of NSF-related science
and technology information?
* What issues are there regarding coordinating with information
sources from the professional societies of the investigative
communities that could be addressed via mosaic-like mechanisms, and
what role should NSF play in such an activity?
* What format, linkage, or content guidelines, if any, should be
provided PIs to whose pages NSF pages point in order to enhance the
usefulness of the pages?
* Are there any special "viewers" that might be of particular help
to the CISE and IRIS investigative communities, and how should they
be developed and supported?
* How can we deal with potential information overload in the
research communities (e.g., intelligent agents to search/filter
information for specific investigative communities) and what
experimental research, if any, should be considered on these topics?
* What research should be conducted in the area of user interfaces
(viewers) to the WWW, in order to enhance the accessibility of the
information? What is the role of information visualization
techniques? Natural language? Speech? User adaptability?
Handicapped users?
* How can we leverage on WWW (and NSF) for education and training of
future researchers and PIs?
Incidentally, topics which will NOT be the focus of the workshop
include:
* Policy, privacy and approval issues at NSF.
* Information delivery technology and method considerations within
NSF.
* Cost of WWW or Internet services.
Please direct your responses to Mr. James Pitkow here at Georgia
Tech, pitkow@cc.gatech.edu, with Subject: NSF-WS.
You may also want to at the same time look at the the GVU Center's
2nd WWW User Survey,which Jim and several colleagues are conducting,
at:
http://www.gatech.edu/pitkow/survey/survey-9-1994/Survey_Home.htm
l
WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
8:30 Coffee
8:55 Welcome - Jim Foley
9:00 Introduction and NSF Objectives for Workshop - Y.T. Chien
9:10 WWW activities within IRIS - J. Hestenes
9:15 Current Status and Near-term Plans for Mosaic - Larry Brandt
(NSF),
Joe Hardin (NCSA)
10:30 Questions and Answers regarding current and near-term
capabilities and plans
10:45 Break
11:15 Interactive Systems - Moderated by O. Garcia
John M. Carroll, Virginia Tech, carroll@vtopus.cs.vt.edu
Jim Foley, Georgia Tech, foley@cc.gatech.edu
11:45 Robotics and Machine Intelligence - Moderated by H. Moraff
Bob Berwick, MIT, berwick@ai.mit.edu
Christopher Connolly, MIT, connolly@psyche.mit.edu
Afternoon
1:30 Knowledge Models & Cognitive Systems - Moderated by L. Reeker
V. Subrahmanian, U. of Maryland, vs@cs.umd.edu
1:45 Information Technology & Organizations - Moderated by S. Chen
Tom Mitchell, CMU, tom.Mitchell@cs.cmu.edu
2:00 Database & Expert Systems - Moderated by Maria Zemankova/Ron
Ashany
Avi Silberschatz, Bell Labs, silber@research.att.com
Thomas Imielinski, Rutgers, imielinski@cs.rutgers.edu
2:30 Break
2:45 Discussion, organization of ideas, organization of short
writing
assignments for final report - Moderated by Jim Foley
5:00 Adjourn
Again, please direct your thougths to James Pitkow,
pitkow@cc.gatech.edu.
Thank you very much for taking time to reply :)
Jim
--
Jim Foley
GVU Center & College of Computing Phone 404 853 0671
Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 Fax 404 853 0673
GVU home page - http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/gvutop.htmlp