Project description

Financial program

The project EASY Interactions has been labeled by ITEA2

Start date: 1^st October 2007 End date: 31^th July 2010

Description

The situation before

We are facing a major revolution in the interactive approach to systems use as we move from a human-computer interaction paradigm to more pervasive human-system and human-environment interactions. Classic human-system interactivity is based on traditional devices such as the mouse, the keyboard, the joystick or the screen. Their use is already becoming difficult and time consuming in several specific domains as they are no longer able to cope with the growing complexity of today’s information and communications technology (ICT) devices.

A MULTI-MODAL SOLUTION

EASY Interactions intends to develop and introduce enhanced and personalized human-system interactivity in application domains such as: the home environment; the medical environment; mobile applications; help for the elderly and the disabled; transportation; industrial and building sectors; and public-safety applications. In this way, the project aims to contribute to the achievement of the European Union’s 2010 goal to bring information and communications technology (ICT) to everyone, everywhere.

The project will focus particularly on:

Eye/head tracking;
Gesture analysis;
Speech recognition and synthesis;
Natural language processing and understanding;
Spoken dialogue;
Three-dimensional (3D) video systems; and
3D and multi-display devices.

By integrating cutting edge natural language processing techniques and machine learning with domain ontology, EASY Interactions will make it possible to carry out content and information mining at the semantic – or meaning – level. Existing user modelling methods will be extended by specific methodologies for the semantic analysis of content. The innovation foreseen in this project consists in improving techniques to provide an intelligent and semantic access to information and services.

DEVELOPING CONTEXT AWARENESS ENGINE

As the technologies discussed above are intrinsically passive, they not aware of the context in terms of environment and user behaviour, nor are they able to adapt the interpretation of user command – proactive computing.

The EASY Interactions project will therefore develop a context-awareness engine to:

Take into account of all sources of context as soon as a sensor exists; and
Learn user behaviour and adapt services and user interfaces.

Moreover, an enhanced human-system interface cannot be addressed by the juxtaposition of different interfaces but through a combination of them. The implementation issues, the interoperability and the upgradeability will also be addressed through the definition of an open multi-modal architecture.

TAKING APPLICATION-DRIVEN APPROACH

EASY Interactions proposes an application-driven approach to introduce innovative solutions from research into market. The major results expected are:

for the definition of a user-behaviour profile, using a proactive approach, and interaction with the environment and human factors such as ergonomics, psychology, neuroscience and design;
Enhancement of the user interface with its environment – context awareness – and also with the information system through multi-modal human-system interaction by developing new algorithms and techniques;
Development of key concepts and components to take advantage of context awareness to adapt applications and human-system interactions to serve user needs better. EASY Interactions will make it possible to adapt to the user optimally and dynamically by gathering user-context information and processing it to produce higher-level context information before providing it to applications;
Definition and implementation of a multi-modal engine architecture: EASY Interactions will define and design multi-modal enablers – for example to enable the fusion of separate input streams or the splitting of application output to different devices; and
Demonstrates the approach in several real-world applications based on practical scenarios that exploit the benefits of the new user interfaces.

NEW GENERATION USER INTERFACES

An important goal is to accelerate the introduction and widespread use of new generation user interfaces. The involvement of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large industries during all the phases of the project will guarantee the penetration of knowledge into industry and the spread of the EASY Interactions technology throughout Europe.

University and research centre partners intend to exploit the project results mainly in developing new types of user psychological approaches for investigating human-technology relations such as usability, a human factor.