The Interaction research
theme supports and complements other DSTC research themes and
project activities by focusing on the integration of advanced
human information interfacing technologies and enterprise computing
infrastructure to provide the basis for future work environments.
Much of the current research in the human information interfacing
area has focused on specific technologies or the development
of frameworks to support the interaction between these technologies.
For example, there has been excellent work at Stanford, MIT
and elsewhere in developing frameworks to support the management
of display devices and multi-modal interaction approaches (speech,
gestures, etc.) in workspace environments. However, relatively
little has been done to look at underpinning this work with
the types of enterprise architectures and technologies that
have been developed by DSTC (e.g., use of workflow to orchestrate
and coordinate many common work activities such as meetings,
collaborative analysis activities, briefings, or planning sessions).
Furthermore, there is a need for adaptive environments that
can be rapidly reconfigured to support changing organisational
aspects, work processes and technologies.
Key Research Challenges: Integration of enterprise computing
and human interfacing technologies/frameworks/tools into workspace
solutions.
Research areas include:
- Enterprise architecture, agent frameworks.
- Rapid adaptation and configuration of workspaces to
support a range of activities (i.e., using generic infrastructure
adapted through context awareness and enterprise knowledge).
- Orchestration and synchronisation of work activities.
- Display and view management to provide the right information
in the right form at the right time in relation to orchestrated
work activities.
- Range of display approaches to be considered including
the use of large screen displays, light tables, augmented reality.
- Universal interaction and control in multidisplay environments
through the use of multimodal interfacing techniques.
- Context management and awareness in future workspaces
(both physical meeting rooms and for distributed work).
- Knowledge and information management in future workspaces
(includes use of ontologies and the Semantic Web).
