EMBASSI multimodal assistance for infotainment and service infrastructures

EMBASSI is a joint research project with 19 partners from industry and acad emia. Its focus is the development of new paradigms and architectures for t he intuitive interaction with technical infrastructures of everyday life, s uch as home entertainment and control, public terminals, and car infotainme nt systems. As a so-called focus project, EMBASSI is funded by the German M inistry of Education and Research (BMBF) and addresses innovative methods o f man-machine interaction, where "machine" explicitly refers to technical s ystems consisting of a variety of distributed, networked devices. EMBASSI aims at enhancing the interaction with these infrastructures by pro viding intelligent assistance, multimodal interaction, and anthropomorphic user interfaces within a unified framework. Technical development in EMBASS I is based on a user centered approach, with accompanying psychological and ergonomics research. A primary objective of the project is to establish an "EMBASSI layer" that extends recently developed networking standards like HAVi, UPaP, or Konnex towards user-centered, goal-based interaction by merging experiences from k nowledge based Al systems with those coming from device oriented command an d control architectures. This layer will enable the unification of interact ion paradigms and will assist the user by enabling "natural" or "intuitive" commands instead of forcing the user to think in terms of device functions . (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.