Conference review

I UI is the annual meeting of the intelligent user interface community and is the premier worldwide forum in its field. The conference series addresses the theory, design, development, and evaluation of intelligent user interfaces. Topics can range from knowledge based tools for interface design, to interface agents, to adaptive interfaces, to the evaluation of intelligent user interfaces. The 1999 edition of IUI took place January 5-8 in Redondo Beach, Calif., and counted with solid participation from outside the United States both in the technical program and among the attendees. The theme of the conference was " Bridging Science with Applications. " This theme was particularly relevant for this field because after building a steady flow of research results in recent years, intelligent interfaces are now starting to move into commercial practice appearing in many forms such as agents that assist users during interaction, planning processes that compose complex multimedia presentations, and knowledge-based modeling tools for the user-centered design of information rich interfaces. Accordingly, the technical program included two discussion panels and two invited speakers that dwelled at length on the conference theme. The papers in the program reflected the continued growth in traditional IUI topics such as information retrieval agents, intelligent multimedia user interfaces, reactive and adaptive interfaces, and model-based design of user interfaces. These topics were augmented by newer areas of interest including collaborative intelligent interfaces, visual and plan-based interfaces, and program-mable/instructable interfaces. The technical program was preceded by a full day of tutorials offered by leading practitioners in the field. Intelligence (DFKI). Dr. Wahlster has led a number of projects in the area of automatic generation of multimedia presentations and is now involved in efforts to commercialize some of the results from those research efforts. In particular, his group is examining how to produce automatically media-rich Web pages for e-commerce solutions. His talk described the fundamentals of this effort, which is based principally in projects conducted at DFKI such as WIP, PPP, and AiA that examine the use of anthropomorphic agents in guiding users during interaction with a multimedia interface. Dr. Wahlster reported on preliminary success of this technology with considerable interest from large corporations, and on being able to obtain quality interfaces with conference review conference review