Prof. Wolfgang Wahlster gave a keynote talk at ACM MM 2007 on his project on Mobile SmartWeb. In this project he is developing exciting technology for vehicles to access Web in multimodal format. This system used multimodal input and multimodal output on mobile devices. It combine most existing approaches in Ontology, Web search, document analysis and related areas. Definitely one of the most interesting project that takes existing and emerging technology from many different areas and combines them intelligently to solve some common problems in efficient and interesting way.
You can ask a question on — say — who was the football champion in 1956 and the system will answer in text (name), photo (picture of the team), video (winning goal), or audio (commentary about the final goal) format. Use may request the form as in most search engines. The beauty of the project is in integrating different techniques intelligently and providing a compelling mobile environment. It also takes the car’s information from different sensors to provide all information to the driver. It can warn using multimodal methods about potential warnings related to weather and road conditions. It uses different modes to sense these conditions and informs the driver using ‘contextual intelligence’ to minimize cognitive load on the driver.
This is a major project — with budget of about 200 Million Euros.
He also brought in a motorcycle and a car to show his working system.
(By the way, I discovered in discussions with him after his talk, that we used be colleagues in 1977 at Universtaet Hamburg and used to share our ideas related to traffic videos.)
Wonderful! I was there, this brings back memories!