Developed by the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, the Tactical Language Training Program is different from interactive language programs of the past, which focus solely on spoken language. In Tactical Iraqi, players navigate a set of real-life scenarios by learning a set of Arabic phrases, culturally relevant gestures and taboos. Other titles include Tactical Levantine and Tactical Pashto.

Following each lesson, the player is asked to interact with other characters using speech and gestures, while a speech-recognition system records and evaluates the responses. Accurate responses allow the soldier to build a rapport with other characters and advance to the next level.

The Army and Marine Corps have trained about 300 soldiers using the system, says Lewis Johnson of USC’s Information Sciences Institute. Some of them traveled to Iraq with the game to continue their own training and share the knowledge with other troops. Johnson expects several thousand soldiers will have used the game by the end of the year.

Misunderstanding nonverbal cues such as proximity while speaking, handshakes and subtle gestures like bowing the head or placing one’s hand over the heart can create or destroy trust, says Hannes Vilhjalmsson, the project’s technical director. “There is a whole sequence of things that has to happen in connection with what you are saying, and it’s that kind of rich context of interaction that we are trying to re-create in the virtual environment,” he says.

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An open-standards group has created a framework that could facilitate the global exchange of information among organizations. The naming system could benefit a wide range of disciplines, from disaster response to medical research.

The Open Group’s Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF) has the potential to hasten information exchange by indexing the world’s datasets — from e-commerce services to government registries and medical research databases — in one universally shared semantic repository.

And evidence shows that UDEF works. In October 2005, Open Group officials demonstrated the framework for members of the information technology community.

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When it comes to watching television, it seems bigger is always better.

So why settle for a pipsqueak 50-inch plasma television or one of those modestly sized 65-inch rear-projection TVs when you can get something truly gigantic?

A growing number of consumers are taking a look at front-projection video systems, units that transmit an image onto a screen much like a slide projector. Front projectors can create images 110 inches and greater in size. Couple this with a surround-sound system and, unless you like commercials and chattering seatmates, you may never want to go to the movie theater again.

Front video projectors have long been used in offices to show PowerPoint presentations, and are found in the screening rooms of the rich and famous. But with prices now starting at less than $1,000, they are becoming affordable for more people.

The market for this home entertainment technology, though still modest, is growing fast. Just 18,000 front video projectors were sold for home use in 2001, but sales jumped to 306,000 in 2005, and are expected to grow to 452,000 this year, according to Quixel Research, a video research firm in Portland, Ore. That remains a tiny fraction of the 34 million televisions sold each year in the United States.

Front projectors range in price from $900 to $250,000. Major manufacturers include Epson, InFocus, Panasonic, Runco, Sharp, SIM2 and Sony.

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Bigger. Wider. Flatter. That’s the vision of tomorrow’s entertainment. And if you’ve already got a new high-definition flat-panel TV, you know exactly what we’re talking about.

But HD flat-panels aren’t just a bleeding-edge luxury anymore. They’re about to become the household standard. While today’s entertainment networks offer only a handful of high-def programs, the number of HD shows is rapidly growing. And if natural market forces weren’t moving rapidly enough for your liking, the United States Congress has just given the technology a firm push forward. There’s never been a better time to jump on the HD bandwagon.

Television as you’ve always known it is about to be history. Just weeks ago, President Bush signed into law a piece of legislation that will require all television broadcasts in the United States to use digital signals, rather than the old analog VHF/UHF signals we’ve received on our tubes for the last few decades — and make the change by Feb. 17, 2009.

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Abstract
Personal Communication with mixed voice and data can be offered as a very rich set of applications, which can be rapidly introduced at low cost. Wireless and positioning technologies in combination with Internet’s demonstrated capability to integrate voice and data are further leveraged by the use of software agents. Our work clearly demonstrates the benefits of providing context-aware personal communication in terms of its potential to bringing about the rapid introduction, at low cost, of a rich communication space where artifacts, people, and non-physical entities are integral parts.

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The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help. One of the major obstacles to this has been the fact that most information on the Web is designed for human consumption, and even if it was derived from a database with well defined meanings (in at least some terms) for its columns, that the structure of the data is not evident to a robot browsing the web. Leaving aside the artificial intelligence problem of training machines to behave like people, the Semantic Web approach instead develops languages for expressing information in a machine processable form.

This document gives a road map – a sequence for the incremental introduction of technology to take us, step by step, from the Web of today to a Web in which machine reasoning will be ubiquitous and devastatingly powerful.

It follows the note on the architecture of the Web, which defines existing design decisions and principles for what has been accomplished to date.

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Many think the Internet is mainstream now, but that’s only true for nonpaying use, such as surfing for free information. As of 2003, commercial operations involving monetary exchange were limited to about 23% for broadband, 10% for e-tailing, 12% for B2B, 10% for distance learning, and 5% for music. And these are the most popular Internet applications. Others hardly register in adoption levels at all.

TechCast, a virtual think tank tracking the technology revolution, suggest that more-complex applications – online voting, e-health, the virtual university, virtual reality, and the global grid – are likely to follow later. These forms of e-commerce lag because they involve more exotic and costly technology, difficult institutional changes, and new forms of consumer behavior. Making the virtual university a reality, for instance, requires professors to switch from traditional lectures to communication technologies that are poorly developed, college administrators to justify the economic feasibility of more expensive systems, and students to feel comfortable and trusting in a virtual setting. E-health demands a similar transformation among physicians, hospitals, and patients.

Remaining developments – taxation, privacy and security, computerized research, telesurgery, and equal access – should appear at varying times throughout the next two decades. These applications differ because they do not serve major new social needs but involve modifications of existing systems.

Interwoven through these advances in e-commerce are other trends leading to a new generation of intelligent systems expected to emerge during the same time period. The TechCast project calls it TeleLiving – a conversational human-machine interface that allows a more comfortable and convenient way to shop, work, educate, entertain, and conduct most other social relationships [see THE FUTURIST, January-February 2003]. Advances in speech recognition, artificial intelligence, powerful chips, virtual environments, and flat-screen wall monitors are likely to produce this intelligent interface.

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Wireless Internet service providers would be allowed to operate freely on new chunks of unused TV spectrum, according to two new bills in the U.S. Senate.

A pair of similar measures introduced Friday would give wireless device manufacturers the green light to develop products for unlicensed use on the broadband airwaves’ “white spaces”–that is, empty, unused channels in the broadcast TV bands.

Companies interested in deploying Wi-Fi networks covet the bands of spectrum on which broadcast television currently resides because of its inherent scientific properties. Signals at that frequency travel straighter and farther. Consumer advocates say using the spectrum would enable cheaper and easier set-up–and thus more widespread access for rural and low-income areas.

That’s one of the major reasons high-tech companies also have been clamoring for bumping broadcasters off the analog spectrum entirely. Congress has already mandated that movement–and the nation’s transition to all-digital TV broadcasts–must happen by February 2009.

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A decade after browsers came into popular use, the Internet has reached into–and, in some cases, reshaped–just about every important realm of modern life. It has changed the way we inform ourselves, amuse ourselves, care for ourselves, educate ourselves, work, shop, bank, pray and stay in touch.

This entry is the Pew Internet Project’s contribution to “Trends 2005,” a publication of the newly-created Pew Research Center, a research orgnization that combines several analytical projects funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Taking a look back at adoption of the internet in the past decade, the Pew Internet Projects finds:

On a typical day at the end of 2004, some 70 million American adults logged onto the Internet to use email, get news, access government information, check out health and medical information, participate in auctions, book travel reservations, research their genealogy, gamble, seek out romantic partners, and engage in countless other activities. That represents a 37 percent increase from the 51 million Americans who were online on an average day in 2000 when the Pew Internet & American Life Project began its study of online life.

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