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Robert Tonkin, Deputy Secretary and Chief Information Officer for the
Department of Defence, spoke clearly about the ‘what’s in it for
us’ benefits the IT Industry must demonstrate in order to effectively
contribute to the Department’s bottom line.
“Expertise must go to management requirements rather than technical objectives,” said Mr Tonkin who believes this will assist in providing seamless, flexible communication throughout the organisation.
The IT industry may need to go back to basics in order to contribute to Defence Industry’s ‘bare essential’ needs, which could require further research in the Department’s core operations and environment.
Defence’s ‘no-benefit - no-buy” stance clearly communicates the ‘business case’ challenge for new IT products where “understanding defence is like trying to publish the Sydney Morning Herald with volunteer labor”, Mr Tonkin said.
Dr Wahlster address the Tuesday Keynote audience at IFIP96
Imagine being able to ask your car how long until you reach the
next petrol station or command it to change radio stations. According to Dr
Wolfgang Wahlster, Professor of Computer Science from the University of
Saarbrueken, Germany, this will be a strong possibility by the year 2000.
This technology is currently used in Germany by Mercedes Benz and is just one example of Speech Translation Usage.
For the past four years Dr Wahlster and over 100 colleagues have been working on the Verbmobile project, which is supported by twenty universities within Germany as well as Stanford University in the USA. The project also has support from IBM, Phillips, Seimens and Mercedes Benz.
The project aims to improve the current methods and results of Speech and Speech Translation. It looks at Machine Translation where speech in one language can be translated into another language.
Phase one of the eight year project, where the method for speech translation was formulated, has just been completed. This method involves Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation, Dialogue Processing, Knowledge Processing, and Analysis Synthesis of Speech. It also includes gender recognition, ensuring that what is a male voice in the first language remains a male voice after the translation.
Verbmobile, unlike most speech technology, is Speaker Independent, allowing the user to speak normally without having to worry about making mistakes whilst speaking. The fluency or naturalness of speech in conjunction with adaptability and dialogue capability are all requirements of an effective, user friendly Speech to Speech translation program.
The project focuses on making international appointments, where both people involved can speak their native language and the computer will interpret.
Huge amounts of data have been required to ‘teach’ the machines in relation to speech translation. Two thousand six hundred appointment dialogues were recorded and examined for the Verbmobile project. The magnitude of data has led to the Vermobile staff adopting the phrase “No data is better than more data”.
Already there are spinoffs emerging from the work done on the Verbmobile project. These include Phillips speech access lines allowing people to access train schedules for the German Railway System and also snow reports and road conditions for the Swiss German snow fields.
The second phase of the Verbmobile project will consider the future challenges of Multimedia, Teleconferences and Multiparty technologies which will allow translation of more than two languages simultaneously as well as Multifunctional, Mobile and Multilingual speech translation.
Speech translation is a quickly growing area of IT which according to Dr Wahlster, “will have major impact on computer technology by the turn of the century.”
As we move into the Information Age Australia will have more competitive communities of people who are thinkers, makers and trainers. Best practice IT is vital for success today and the South Australian government has responded by adopting its “IT 2000 Vision”. This vision will recognise SA as a centre of excellence, as a key software and professional services centre for the Asia/Pacific, and as a leading example of public sector business engineering using a whole government.
A representative from the Tasmanian government outlined three elements of the new IT approach adopted by Tasmania. These elements were: a plan of coordinated action, co-operative policy strategy, and excellence in project management. However, such strategies depend largely on the intellect and vision of individual bureaucrats.
“In the global information economy, power comes from the ability to command one or more of the intangible assets of concepts, competence and connections.” - Moss Kanter.
Dr Loeffler said they have been communicating via an Internet-based Virtual reality system from the USA to Singapore since 1994. The pair had recently discussed the possibility of Dr Loeffler attending a conference in Singapore in the near future, to allow him to share his knowledge of Virtual Reality in the arts, education, entertainment and industry.
Drs Singh and Loeffler were actually sitting next to each other in the Internet Cafe and didn’t realise who each other was, until asked to pose for a photograph for this publication. It was only when they gave their names to the photographer that they realised they knew each other!
He saw IFIP 96 as a key opportunity to improve his awareness and understanding of emerging technologies which might be considered for application in his home country of Cameroon.
Dioh is returning to Africa next week and expects to take up a position within the Cameroon government where he will have high level responsibility for developing information technology within that country.
While Cameroon currently has very little IT infrastructure and is relatively isolated from the international IT community, Itoh is keen for his country to benefit from the many possibilities that emerging technologies can offer.
“We don’t have the buying power of many other developing countries but do as much as we can with the technology we have. I am proud to be going back to serve my country in this field.”
Dr John Tiffen from the University of Wellington, proposed the question of whether new technology in education will be able to teach and allow people to learn. Today education prefers the print media and the real classroom in favour of virtual education.
He believes that Virtual Education will enable the world to be cut out and be neutralized so as to concentrate primarily thought process with the use of Virtual Reality. Virtual Reality has been integrated with the real life and has become hard to differentiate from reality.
Dr Carl Eugene Loeffler followed Dr Tiffen’s approach to Virtual Education by overviewing his work as part of the SIMLAB based in the NASA/Robotics Engineering Consortium who concentrates on art, education, entertainment and industry.
The Virtual Art Museum aimed to provide Virtual Reality as art medium in public places. Virtual Ancient Egypt displayed this by reconstructing cultural icons, including a temple, surrounding grounds, interior courts and sanctuary that can be perused and information can be virtually taken in by the user.
Recently SIMLAB has been approached by INTEL who wish to create a virtual class so that students of today and the future will be able to step into this great world and experience events time, places and people. Whilst knowledge is extracted and retained through the re-creation of important learnings by the student
The world has a lot to offer - if only we can look further than the present.
IFIP 98
The next IFIP conference will be held in Vienna and Budapest. For further
information visit the IFIP 98 exhibition and complete an information request
form so all relevant IFIP 98 information will be forwarded to you.
· One Touch Network Assistant, providing a graphical representation of the Network segment from the desktop through cabling to local servers
· Enterprise LANMeter. Used to troubleshoot complex network problems.
· DSP-100 Cable Meter instantly pinpoints faults such as bad connectors, poor workmanship or improper cabling.
... To be continued in tomorrow’s Daily Express.
