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Peter E. Hart: "Building future multimedia office systems: A research portfolio"
The decrease in cost of multimedia hardware (digital still and video
cameras, audio recording, storage, ...), the desire for enriched, persuasive
and memorable messages, and the pressing need to combat information
overload, together present a significant opportunity for changing the
fundamental nature of office communication. Research challenges exist at
every level, from bottom to top: the need for more flexible image
compression methods; the design of information appliances and user
interfaces; and the creation of new architectures for multimedia messaging
systems, to name a few. I'll survey recent research from the Ricoh
California Research Center on these topics, aimed at simplifying the
capture, communication and comprehension of multimedia messages. I'll also
show how our resulting technologies have become office products and have
influenced commercial services. I'll conclude with some insights on the
changing social contract between corporations and their funded research
groups, and the skills researchers need to thrive in this new environment.
Speaker bio: Peter E. Hart, a Fellow of the AAAI and IEEE, is Chairman and
President of Ricoh Innovations, Inc. and Director of its California Research
Center. His research contributions include an analysis of the
nearest-neighbor rule (for which he received the IEEE Information Theory
Society's Golden Anniversary Award), the development of the A* algorithm for
optimal graph searching, the invention of the modern form of the Hough
transform, and the development of PROSPECTOR, one of the first expert
systems. He is also a Senior Vice President of Ricoh Company, Ltd. (Japan),
one of the few Westerners to be an executive officer of a major Japanese
corporation.
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