"Multimodal Spoken Natural Language Dialog for a Battlefield Information System"

RONNIE W. SMITH

Department of Computer Science, East Carolina University

With the proliferation of sensor technology for military applications, commanders now have access to more information but also have greater difficulty in gaining access to the proper information to provide them with appropriate situational awareness about what is actually happening.  The DARPA-sponsored Command Post of the Future (CPOF) project is an attempt to develop technology to enable commanders to more quickly obtain accurate awareness of the actual military situation so that commanders can be more proactive rather than reactive.

This talk will focus on our research team's efforts at constructing a multimodal spoken natural language dialog system that allows military commanders to specify expectations for a military action.  Key issues in multimodal language understanding and context representation will be discussed and an overview of solution techniques described.  This talk is intended for a general computer science audience.

(This work was conducted jointly by researchers at General Dynamics: Advanced Information Systems, Hwachi, Inc. Duke University, and East Carolina
University via financial support from DARPA contract F30602-99-C-0060)

"Inexplicable? The status of complex numbers in Britain, 1750-1850"

ADRIAN RICE

Department of Mathematics, Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, VA 23005-5505, U.S.A.

The period from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century is generally regarded as the time when complex numbers were finally accepted as legitimate algebraic objects by the mathematical community. It is also widely considered to have been the work of Gauss that was primarily responsible for bringing these numbers into the mathematical mainstream. However, the story of the acceptance of complex numbers was a little different in the British Isles.

This paper surveys the peculiarly British position towards complex and imaginary numbers in the period up to around 1850, a subject which still awaits a definitive history. Following a brief summary of the early history of complex numbers, it highlights the largely forgotten but influential research of two British mathematicians, John Warren and John Thomas Graves. It then traces the influence of their work on the changing British mathematical attitudes during this time, concluding with a look at how the notion of "inexplicable quantities" subsequently came to be extended.

DOUGLAS REEVES

Department of Computer Science, NC State University

Peer-to-peer systems such as Napster, Gnutella, and KaaZaa have proven to be
wildly popular.  They have many advantages and can be useful for more than just
sharing of MP3 files.  :-)

On the other hand, there are risks associated with P2P.  Do you really know what
that P2P software is doing with/to your computer, and with your data?  Do you know the
content of the files you are sharing?  Can your computer be used to attack other
computers without your knowledge?  Can someone track your usage of P2P
applications and what files you access?  Who can you trust in a peer-based community?

In this talk I'll sketch some of the security challenges for peer-to-peer computing,
and I'll describe some approaches to deal with them.