Thom is currently involved in two projects at Carnegie Mellon. One is currently his job. The other could ultimately change his job forever.
The Icie Project--the "Information Collaboration Interactive Environment"--is the brainchild of Dr. Dan Olsen, the current head of the Human Computer Interaction Institute. It envisions a future where computers and computing devices have operating-system-level support for collaboration, including identity, the propagation of data deltas, and constraints.
The first version of Icie is being built as a UI toolkit in Java (using Dr. Scott Hudson's subArctic toolkit.) Thom's a full-time working stiff, along with two other full-time HCII masters students (Genevieve Conaty and Chung-Man Tam) and two part-timers (Edson Lo and Matt Phelps), banging out these Icie widgets left, right, and center. Sort of like an Icie machine.
Synthetic Interviews are the current research focus of Dr. Scott Stevens and Don Marinelli and the soon-to-be-offical Entertainment Technology Center, an offshoot of the HCII. Though several synthetic interviews have been created, the one causing all the hubbub nowadays is the Conversation with Einstein, an interview with an on-screen actor who performs several hours of Albert Einstein's actual speeches and writings. Using the Sphinx speech recognition technology, also developed at CMU, the user can ask Al anything she wants to using a microphone and a normal speaking voice, and Einstein will obligingly answer using the most relevant words he can find.
Tons of stuff is happening here. The ETC will be offering a new masters degree--much like the masters of HCI currently offered--by fall of 1998. There is considerable interest in both Einstein and other projects using the synthetic interview technology. For my part, I'm teamed up with some other interested students (the aforementioned Genevieve and Chung, Bill Slease, and Jonathon Rest) to work on our own project based on SI technology extended to handle what we're calling Synthetic Conversation. Can you feel the palpable tingle of excitement?