14 August 2002

MIT Tech Review: Rodney Brooks' Oxygen - pervasive human-centred computing For Rodney Brooks, Oxygen is about making computers enter the human world rather than the other way round. For Victor Zue, it's about semantics and intent rather than syntax and form (eg: understanding meaning rather than merely transcribing from a speech interface). TR: When an intelligent room gets crowded, how does the computer know who to pay attention to? ZUE: We are trying to combine speech and vision in ways that they can complement each other. In a very noisy environment you invariably begin to pay attention to people in terms of their facial expressions. Lip reading can improve speech recognition performance. We might also be able to steer the microphone array toward the person whose mouth is moving. It's a hugely ambitious project, and there's a long way to go: "sometimes people laugh, and the curtains open". 11:37:46 AM     comments