Title: A visual language for web-based interpersonal communication.

Steve Tanimoto, Washington University

Abstract: One potential benefit of the Internet is the provision of
new forms of communication that overcome various existing barriers,
such as those that stand between speakers of English and speakers of
other languages like Italian.  Visual representations of language have
been used or proposed in many forms in the past with varying degrees
of success.  However, until now they have not been able to benefit
from computation.  In this talk I will review some of the past work on
visual languages for human communication, including Bliss Symbols and
Elephant Memory.  Then I will present a system called Vedo-Vedi that
combines static and dynamic visual representation, a computer-based
ontology, a simple natural language translation facility, and a
web-based "post-office" service.  This language is limited to simple
messages about vacation travel -- messages of the sort a ten-year-old
might write on the back of a picture postcard.


Steven L. Tanimoto is Professor of Computer Science and
Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering
at the University of Washington in Seattle.
His research interests include visual languages,
educational technology,  parallel image processing,
and artificial intelligence.

He has held visiting positions at the University of Paris,
Linkoping University (Sweden), Kobe University (Japan),
the National Institutes of Standards and Technology,
and Thinking Machines Corporation.

Dr. Tanimoto served an an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions
on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence from 1983 to 1986, and
as Editor-in-Chief from 1986-1990.  His text,  The Elements of
Artificial Intelligence Using Common Lisp, Second Edition, was published by
W.H.Freeman in 1995.  He served as the program chair for the
1992 International Workshop on Visual Languages, the 1994
International Conference on Pattern Recognition subconference on
parallel computation, and as co-program chair of the 1994 IEEE
Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern
Recognition.

He received the Ph.D. from Princeton in 1975, and he was named
a Fellow of the IEEE in 1996.