Natural Interfaces in the field

Adapx provides solutions for users who have substantive data collection needs, but who have yet to adopt or have rejected existing digital technologies. Our primary approach is to avoid changing users’ well-established work practices, which typically involve pen/paper and/or voice. To do so, we enable field users to collect data with natural user interfaces (NUIs), notably with digital pen and paper, and/or with multimodal interaction. Adapx’ Capturx software strategy is to develop a platform that makes it easy to integrate such NUIs with popular software that the end user already knows and uses. Examples include Adapx’ Capturx line of products for forms data entry, which have been integrated with Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Office SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics. In addition, we have built products for field note-taking (integrated with Microsoft OneNote), and for mapping/GIS (integrated with ESRI’s ArcGIS, Google Earth, and Adobe’s Acrobat using PDF/GeoPDF). These horizontal digital paper/pen Capturx products have been applied to such diverse field data collection uses as surveying, wild-fire fighting, oil/and gas exploration, Medicare enrollment, civil engineering, field-based emergency medicine, and neuropsychological testing. A significant portion of our work centers on multimodal interaction, primarily using speech, sketch, handwriting, and gesture. Typically, but not exclusively, these have been geospatial applications. Over the years, we have developed multimodal interfaces for augmented & virtual reality, and using a variety of devices, including tablets, PDAs, large-screen displays, and vision-based body-tracking. Current efforts are creating high-performance multimodal interfaces for the US Government, and automatically generated multimodal systems for geospatial applications.

In this talk, I will describe some of the above examples, discuss why natural user interfaces are often the preferred means for such data collection and interaction, and demonstrate how the Capturx technology meets the need.

Speaker Details

Dr. Phil Cohen is VP of Research at Adapx Inc. (formerly Natural Interaction Systems, LLC), which he founded in 1999. Cohen was previously professor and co-director of the Center for Human-Computer Communication in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Oregon Health and Science University. His current research is on digital pen and paper and multimodal interfaces for field-based tasks. During the past 30 years, Cohen has been engaged in research in the areas of natural user interfaces, multimodal interaction, multiagent systems, and human-computer dialogue. He has been President of the Association for Computational Linguistics, a Scientific Advisor to the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, is a member of DARPA’s ISAT technology study group, and serves as Associate editor of the journal Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent System. He was recently awarded, with Prof. Hector Levesque (U. Toronto), one of the two inaugural Influential Paper Awards by the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems for work on the theory of intention.

Date:
Speakers:
Phil Cohen
Affiliation:
Adapx Inc.
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