SciFly

March 2005 - July 2005

SciFly is a customised flyer generation system, built on top of the Myriad platform. Myriad is the Information Engineering Lab's generic platform for creating contextualised information retrieval and delivery systems. The heart of Myriad is the Virtual Document Planner (VDP) planning engine.

SciFly is a demonstration system for CSIRO’s Myriad framework for information retrieval and delivery. SciFly’s first public outing was at CeBIT 2005 in Sydney, which was held on May 24-26.

SciFly delivers customised content based on user-selected interests. In the current system, content is assembled into a dynamically generated document and printed on-the-spot. Simultaneously a PDF document is emailed to the user along with a plain text summary in the body of an email.
This means that users receive relevant information presented in contextually relevant formats:

• Paper flyer for immediate perusal
• PDF version for retention of information and later reference
• Plain text summary for mobile device access

The current demonstration of SciFly captures user details such as name, email address and affiliation from a bar coded tag (as supplied to conference delegates).The user then navigates a touch-screen menu system to select topics of interest. The topics in this case are based on the capabilities, projects and application domains of the CSIRO ICT Centre.

Once all data is collected, SciFly assembles content tailored to the specific set of interests expressed by the user, dynamically fits the content to the space constraints of a double sided A4 page, and adds relevant contact information, web links and higher level context.

Importantly, SciFly does not just assemble pre-configured content, but dynamically adjusts the amount and detail of content based on the range of topics selected.

Technical Details

Paper flyers are produced as PDF documents. The PDF documents are generated from XHTML input. This is done in two steps. The first step is to use an XSLT transformation to convert the XHTML into an XSL:FO formatted document. Using the Apache FOP processing engine, the XSL:FO document is then transformed into a PDF document.

Email content is generated from the same discourse structure as the paper output; that is, the content itself is not replanned for the different output devices. Instead, the global presentation reasoning (the information assembly stage as we call it - see ALTA Workshop paper on Information Assembly for Adaptive Display for more information about the process) is re-run over the same content in the same discourse structure in the context of the different output device. This results in the content presentation being adapted to suit the differing needs and constraints of textual email.

Read More about SciFly

Myriad and the Virtual Document Planner

Myriad is our software platform for building applications that make use of contextualised information retrieval and delivery. The core component of Myriad is the Virtual Document Planner or VDP, which is a typical AI planning engine that performs goal-decomposition planning.

The VDP is a generic engine for delivering tailored information. It was originally designed to produce documents dynamically, integrating data from multiple sources and customising the content for a user. We are currently extending the VDP to handle both textual and graphical data planning for controlling a Graphical User Interface. The architecture of the VDP is a typical Natural Language Generation (NLG) architecture where the linguistic resources are separate from the planning engines.

The engines use discourse rules to select and organise the content, ensuring that the content remains coherent. Design rules then determine an appropriate way to realise the content and structure of the presentation on the relevant output medium (eg HTML web page, Palm Pilot, Mobile Phone screen, speech, multimedia display).

Topical Information Gathering for Easy Reuse (TIGER)

In general, the focus of the research in TIGER is on Question Answering. Generically, Question Answering systems can be described as systems that, given an arbitrary question posed in natural language, scan available data sources and retrieve answers to the question. The system then presents the available answers to the user in a useful presentation.

In TIGER, however, we don't aim to investigate general purpose question answering, nor do we attempt to address problems in all dimensions of question answering. Instead, we have framed our investigation by concentrating on how Question Answering can assist expert users performing specific tasks with defined information needs.

Additionally, within this framework, we focus our efforts on answer formulation (constructing useful and coherent answers), rather than on other aspects of question answering or information retrieval. This means that while work in information retrieval, and search is a necessary component of any question answering system, we will attempt to use existing technologies and methods for these (eg. possibly P@noptic and/or Google for the search component).

More information is available at the Tiger Project Internal Website (CSIRO access only).

Past Projects

Data Fusion, Data Management and Situation Assessment

May 2002 - July 2005

The Data Fusion, Data Management and Situation Assessment (DFDMSA) project builds upon the VDP architecture. Here the VDP is used to manage the display of relevant information for Air Combat Operators in performing surveillance and combat tasks.

An overview of the DFDMSA project's aims was published in CoResearch in April 2003:

A research relationship between CSIRO and Boeing is likely to have a significant impact on Australia's future early warning and defence capabilities. The Australian Defence Force's Project Wedgetail is providing a world-leading airborne early warning and control system (AWACS) for Australia.

Boeing has funded $1 million of CSIRO research aimed at developing better information-management systems to ensure strategic advantage in surveillance and combat situations.

Several research teams for CSIRO Mathematical and Information Sciences [now the CSIRO ICT Centre] are collaborating on the project that brings together specialists in siutation awareness, natural language generation and data integration.

Air Combat Operators (ACOs) are the key ground staff who communicate with aircraft crews and inform them of developments in a rapidly changing operational environment.

This means being aware of the location, direction and identity of potential threats and targets and knowing which are most likely to require closer monitoring or action. The air crew can be places in serious danger if the ACOs' awareness of the situation declines because of information overload. The project aims to develop technologies that handle large amounts of data and provide full situational awareness to the ACO and the flight crew.

Extract from CO:RESEARCH No. 395, April 2003

The Operators' environment is characterized by large volumes of time-critical information, and the need to integrate data from a number of different sources. This leads to both visual clutter, and a high cognitive load for operators in the current system. To overcome this overload of information, and to better support operators in performing their required tasks, we introduce an adaptive Graphical User Interface (controlled through a scripting API) and the VDP as a task-specific information planning engine.

Technology wise, the GUI is implemented in pure Java, and makes use of BBN's excellent OpenMap framework for the display and management of geo-spatial information. Our scripting API is built around the BeanShell java source interpreter, and allows the VDP to control both what is presented on the graphical the display (the content), and the way it is presented (both modality and interaction properties).

You can read more about our approach and implementation in our published papers.

This research was funded by Boeing (US) as part of the Australian Defence Force Project Wedgetail for Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW&C).

The project was successfully completed in July 2005, and Boeing and CSIRO are exploring opportunities to further develop the technology.

Adaptive Interactive Mobile Systems (AIMS)

February 2002 - June 2002

AIMS was a Chief's Special Project which developed algorithms, architectures and software for adaptive interactive mobile systems, to enable faster, smarter and more robust customised information profiling and delivery. Specifically, the FLOCK software developed deals with the email overload problem, employing intelligent agents cooperating in a Knowledge Factory to automatically, flexibly and adaptively categorise email.

The FLOCK software attracted much interest, and was the subject of a front page article in The Australian newspaper.