Kristian Hammond

Northwestern University | NU · Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Artificial intelligence methods and systems for triggering the generation of narratives are disclosed. Specific embodiments relate to real-time evaluation and automated generation of narrative stories based on received data. For example, data can be tested against data representative of a plurality of story angles to determine whether a narrative s...

A system and method for automatically generating a narrative story receives data and information pertaining to a domain event. The received data and information and/or one or more derived features are then used to identify a plurality of angles for the narrative story. The plurality of angles is then filtered, for example through use of parameters...

A system and method for automatically generating a narrative story receives data and information pertaining to a domain event. The received data and information and/or one or more derived features are then used to identify a plurality of angles for the narrative story. The plurality of angles is then filtered, for example through use of parameters...

The subject invention provides a method for using available data and information to automatically create narrative stories that describes domain events, circumstances and/or entities in a comprehensible and compelling and audience customized, manner. Computer executable instructions provide for generating a narrative story using standard and unifor...

A system and method for automatically generating a narrative story receives data and information pertaining to a domain event. The received data and information and/or one or more derived features are then used to identify a plurality of angles for the narrative story. The plurality of angles is then filtered, for example through use of parameters...

The United States Senate has become increasingly partisan through the years; in fact it is quite unusual for a Senator to vote against his or her party. The Congressional Close Up system automatically reports on factors that might have influenced a bipartisan vote. The system begins by assigning a topic to the legislation on which a Senate or House...

While social media have achieved significant and widespread adoption as platforms for sharing information, their use as a source of data for predicting user interests has not yet been fully explored. In this paper, we present a content-based approach to modeling user interests based on Twitter. Our recommendation system uses information retrieval t...

Journalists and editors work under tight deadlines and are forced to gather as much background and details as they can about a particular situation or event. They have to keep track of useful sources and they have to be able to record what aspects and what portions of the source provided useful information.

The central idea behind Case-Based Reasoning has always been the notion that reasoning can be supported using memories of past problem solving. One bottleneck in this work has often been the development of case libraries needed to support this reasoning rather than the transformation of the cases themselves. In much of our work, we have taken an ap...

A useful approach for enabling computers to automatically create new content is utilizing the text, media, and information already present on the World Wide Web. The newly created content is known as "machine-generated content". For example, a machine-generated content system may create a multimedia news show with two animated anchors presenting a...

Journalists and editors work under pressure to collect relevant details and background information about specific events. They spend a significant amount of time sifting through docu-ments and finding new information such as facts, opinions or stakeholders (i.e. people, places and organizations that have a stake in the news). Spotting them is a ted...

The Web makes it possible for news readers to learn more about virtually any story that interests them. Media outlets and search engines typically augment their information with links to similar stories. It is up to the user to determine what new information is added by them, if any. In this paper we present Tell Me More, a system that performs thi...

Finding out about a topic online involves visiting multiple news sites, encyclopedia entries, video repositories and other resources while discarding irrelevant information. MakeMy-Page aims to speed the search process by combining auto-matic aggregation of information with social media to build persistent web pages with images, videos and links to...

Many of our conversations are not planned. Instead, they arise opportunistically as we become aware of the common interests and goals of others. We describe a prototype system, I2I, that allows users to collaborate based on their immediate goals and interests. I2I is embedded in common document manipulation applications, where it can notice opportu...

Finding out about a topic online can be time consuming. It involves visiting multiple news sites, encyclopedia entries, video repositories and other resources while discarding irrelevant information. MakeMyPage aims to speed this process by combining automatic aggregation of information with social media to build web pages with images, videos and l...

Hearing people argue opposing sides of an issue can be a useful way to understand the topic; however, these debates or conversations often don’t exist. Unfortunately, generating interesting natural language conversations is a difficult problem and typically requires a deep model of both a domain and its language. Fortunately, there is a huge amount...

In this paper we describe an automated system, and its attendant set of techniques and tools, that is able to generate novel multimedia experiences. Using existing online sources, external textual and multimedia repositories, and user preferences, the system builds a customized audio/visual experience for the user. We discuss one application in det...

Hearing people argue opposing sides of an issue can be a useful way to understand the topic; however, these debates or conversations often don't exist. Unfortunately, generating interesting natural language conversations is a difficult problem and typically requires a deep model of both a domain and its language. Fortunately, there is a huge amount...

Finding out about a topic online can be time consuming. It involves visiting multiple news sites, encyclopedia entries, video repositories and other resources while discarding irrele- vant information. MakeMyPage aims to speed this process by combining automatic aggregation of information with social media to build web pages with images, videos and...

The Information Source Adapter Platform (or ISA Platform, for short) is a set of practical enabling technologies for developing intelligent information systems. The platform provides an infrastructure for building lightweight interfaces to existing resources that can be composed automatically using means-ends analysis. The ISA Platform enables deve...

Shoppers with an Internet-enabled computer have a wealth of product information available to them. By browsing to a variety of Websites, users can conduct searches and compare prices, read reviews, and learn more about a product. These sites are pivot points for a user; once they are at Amazon.com's landing page, for example, they can navigate outw...

We propose a machine learning system that learns to choose human gestures to accompany novel text. The system is trained on scripts comprised of speech and animations that were hand- coded by professional animators and shipped in video games. We treat this as a text-classification problem, classifying speech as corresponding with specific classes o...

In this paper, we describe a system called TagAssist that provides tag suggestions for new blog posts by utilizing existing tagged posts. The system is able to increase the quality of suggested tags by performing lossless compression over existing tag data. In addition, the system employs a set of metrics to evaluate the quality of a potential tag...

The Watson system automatically retrieves useful information in the context of a document-manipulation task. Previously-reported laboratory studies show the basic Watson system can consistently retrieve useful documents. However, a number of deployments in real-world settings suggest improvements in retrieval performance can be made. We describe a...

This paper describes a digital theater installation called Buzz. Buzz consists of virtual actors who express the collective voice gener- ated by weblogs (blogs). These actors find compelling stories from blogs and perform them. In this paper, we explore what it means for a story to be compelling and describe a set of techniques for re- trieving com...

Interest in psychological experimentation from the Artificial Intelligence community often takes the form of rigorous post-hoc evaluation of completed computer models. Through an example of our own collaborative research, we advocate a different view of how psychology and AI may be mutually relevant, and propose an integrated approach to the study...

The Internet is a living, breathing reflection of who we are, what we think, and how we feel. The pages that make up the Web form the book of our contemporary life and culture. They are the ongoing and changing buzz of our world. The latest embodiment of this cultural reflection is found in blogs. Not only are blogs widespread, but they are incredi...

As computers become more integrated into our everyday lives, they will need to be able to interact with us within the context of our world as well as theirs. While it is unlikely that we will ever want all interactions with a computer to mimic dialogs with other people, it is clear that they will need to be able to engage in coherent, compelling co...

Issues relating to agent/user interaction and usability are important in making agent research a reality. Although often discussed, interaction strategies have rarely been deployed with general users. We present the results of such deployments: a set of heuristics generated by listening to feedback from users of an autonomous information retrieval...

In this paper, we describe MusicStory, a system that automatically creates videos to accompany music with lyrics. MusicStory uses common search engines, photo-sharing websites, and simple analysis of the dynamics and tempo of the music to create personalized photo-narratives. Video pacing and content is based on the content of the song and structur...

In this article, we explore the role of emotion in digital the-ater. Unlike heavily scripted productions, we create a theatri-cal agency which uses the world wide web to determine what content to deliver and how to deliver it with emotional com-petency. We describe the use of the web as a cultural artifact and how an autonomous agency can externali...

In this article, we present the Association Engine, a multimedia installation that explores the space of language and exposes connections between words by performing a series of improvisational games. It stands out from previous efforts in the realm of computers and theater as the agency has been empowered with a cultural understanding, more specif...

In this article, we explore the structure of the web as an indicator of popular culture and its use in multi-media exhibits. In a series of art and technology installations, the software agency needs to keep 'grounded' to what people can readily understand. We administered a survey to understand how people perceived word and phrase obscurity relate...

In this article, we describe the intrinsic constraints of mobility and discuss how we can work around and often exploit these constraints using information implied by the context of the mobile user. In particular, we outline some of the work we have been doing in providing information to users on the basis of "Low-Fi" location information retrieved...

In this article, we explore the structure of the web as an indicator of popular culture. In a series of art and technology installations, the software agency needs to keep `grounded' to what people can readily understand. We administered a survey to understand how people perceived word and phrase obscurity related with frequency information gathere...

In this article, we describe the intrinsic constraints of mobility and discuss how we can work around and often exploit these constraints using information implied by the context of the mobile user. In particular, we outline some of the work we have been doing in providing information to users on the basis of "Low-Fi" location information retrieved...

An abstract is not available.

In this article, we explore a new role for the computer in art as a reflector of popular culture. Moving away from the static audiovisual installations of other artistic endeavors and from the traditional role of the machine as a computational tool, we fuse art and the Internet to expose cultural connections people draw implicitly but rarely consid...

We describe Rosetta, a digital library system for scientific literature. Rosetta makes it easy for people to find the information for which they are looking even when using short, imprecise queries. Rosetta indexes research articles based on the way they have been described when cited in other documents. The concise descriptions that occur in citat...

The work presented in this paper takes a novel approach to the task of providing information to viewers of broadcast news. Instead of considering the broadcast news as the end product, this work uses it as a starting point to dynamically build an information space for the user to explore. This information space is designed to satisfy the user's inf...

This article describes the implementation of a system that 'imagines' while a movie is being played by finding associations in the movie's content and presenting them to the viewer. This related information, in the form of images and movie clips, helps enhance the viewer's experience in a new immerse environment.

This research discusses a method for delivering just-in-time information to television viewers to provide more depth and more breadth to television broadcasts. A novel aspect of this research is that it uses broadcast news as a starting point for gathering information regarding specific stories, as opposed to considering the broadcast version to be...

Computational modeling plays a central role in cognitive science. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to computational models of human cognition. It covers major approaches and architectures, both neural network and symbolic; major theoretical issues; and specific computational models of a variety of cognitive processes, ranging from lo...

We administered a survey to students from two populations in order to better understand how to best design the Watson information access assistant we are developing. Watson works by analyzing documents its users are manipulating in order to automatically query online information repositories and deliver information relevant to a user in the context...

The ability to reason about the activity of a user is crucial to the implementation of any Intelligent User Interface. If it is able to recognize what a user is doing, a computer can act to cooperate. Most computer systems limit themselves to command-response interactions---their trivial understandings of their users cannot support a more complicat...

We describe Rosetta, a digital library system for scientific literature. Rosetta makes it easy for people to find the information for which they are looking even when using short, imprecise queries. Rosetta indexes research articles based on the way they have been described when cited in other documents. The concise descriptions that occur in citat...

We describe ongoing work on I2I, a system aimed at fostering opportunistic communication among users viewing or manipulating content on the Web and in productivity applications. Unlike previous work in which the URLs of Web resources are used to group users visiting the same resource, we present a more general framework for clustering work contexts...

Flytrap is a group music environment that knows its users' musical tastes and can automatically construct a soundtrack that tries to please everyone in the room. The system works by paying attention to what music people listen to on their computers. Users of the system have radio frequency ID badges that let the system know when they are nearby. Us...

Authors cite other work in many types of documents. Notable among these are research papers and web pages. Recently, several researchers have proposed using the text surrounding citations (references) as a means of automatically indexing documents for search engines, claiming that this technique is superior to indexing documents based on their cont...

We describe Rosetta, a digital library system for scientific literature. Rosetta makes it easy for people to find the information for which they are looking even when using short, imprecise queries. Rosetta indexes research articles based on the way they have been described when cited in other documents. The concise descriptions that occur in citat...

We present ongoing work on systems aimed at improving a user's awareness of resources available to them on the Internet and in intranets. First, we briefly describe Watson, a system that proactively retrieves documents from on-line repositories that are potentially useful in the context of a task, allowing the user to quickly become aware of docume...

Contents of documents can be characterized not just by subject matter or topic, but also in terms of more thematic or even stylistic attributes, such as level of detail, emotional vs. unemotional presentation, personal vs. impersonal voice, positive or negative attitude or "spin," theoretical vs. practical presentation, etc. As implied by these exa...

mpME! introduces users to new music and interweaves old music the listener has heard of before and enjoys. mpME! exposes listeners to new music by using existing music information on the Internet such as musical artist directories. mpME! also provides complementary information about the artist to educate the user throughout the listening experience...

Flytrap is a group music environment that knows its users' musical tastes and can automatically construct a soundtrack that tries to please everyone in the room. The system works by paying attention to what music people listen to on their computers. Users of the system have radio frequency ID badges that let the system know when they are nearby. Us...

The ability to reason about the activity of a user is crucial to the implementation of any Intelligent User Interface. If it is able to recognize what a user is doing, a computer can act to cooperate. Most computer systems limit themselves to command-response interactions-their trivial understandings of their users cannot support a more complicated...

The ability to reason about the activity of a user is crucial to the implementation of any Intelligent User Interface. If it is able to recognize what a user is doing, a computer can act to cooperate. Most computer systems limit themselves to command-response interactions-their trivial understandings of their users cannot support a more complicated...

Java Settlers is an environment for doing research in the area of multi-agent negotiation. The vehicle for this research is a Web-deployed java program for playing the popular German board game, Settlers of Catan.

Authors cite other work in many types of documents. Notable among these are research papers and web pages. Recently, several researchers have proposed using the text surrounding citations (references) as a means of automatically indexing documents for search engines, claiming that this technique is superior to indexing documents based on their cont...

In the software industry, designers are forever trying to "improve " their products by adding ever more features to them, producing bloated software systems that are capable of doing just about anything. However, these systems often make it increasingly difficult for their users to perform their tasks as they are forced to wade through a mess of un...

People are often able to act efficiently in places like grocery stores, libraries, and other man-made domains even if they haven't been to those particular places before: They are exercising useful knowledge about how these environments are organized in order to facilitate their tasks. In this paper we show that everyday environments exhibit useful...

We describe Rosetta, a digital library system for scientific literature. Rosetta makes it easy for people to find the information for which they are looking even when using short, imprecise queries. Rosetta indexes research articles based on the way they have been described when cited in other documents. The concise descriptions that occur in citat...

Our central claim is that user interactions with productivity applications (e.g. word processors, Web browsers, etc.) provide rich contextual information that can be leveraged to support just-in-time access to task-relevant information. As evidence for our claim, we present Watson, a system which gathers contextual information in the form of the te...

Many case-based reasoning systems have been developed to aid designers by providing them with libraries of prior design experiences. Traditionally, these systems are implemented as stand-alone ``external memories'' for the designer to query manually. This paper presents a contrasting approach that integrates proactive case retrieval into the design...

While recent work has focused on providing tools and infrastructure for users to access electronic information over the Internet, the relationship between the physical world and information available online has been relatively unexplored. Information about a users location, and the objects she interacts with, can be sufficient to recognize enough o...

Agents that provide just-in-time access to relevant online material by observing user behavior in everyday applications have been the focus of much research, both in our lab, and elsewhere. These systems analyze information objects the user is manipulating in order to recommend additional information. Designers of such systems typically make the as...

Our central claim is that user interactions with everyday productivity applications (e.g., word processors, Web browsers, etc.) provide rich contextual information that can be leveraged to support just-in-time access to task-relevant information. We discuss the requirements for such systems, and develop a general architecture for systems of this ty...

Although a user's navigation history contains a lot of hidden information about the relationship between web pages and between users, this information is usually not exploited. The information hidden in the history can be an invaluable source of knowledge in assisting a user to better surf the Web. We presented a system which actively monitors and...

In this paper we discuss our use of multi-modal input to improve human computer interaction. Specifically we look at the methods used in the Intelligent Classroom to combine multiple input modes, and examine in particular the visual input modes. The Classroom provides context that improves the functioning of the visual input modes. It also determin...

In designing Jabberwocky---a speech-based interface to Microsoft PowerPoint---we have tried to go beyond simple commands like "Next slide, please" and make a tool that aids speakers as they present and even learns as they rehearse their presentations. Jabberwocky looks at the contents of the slides, extracting key words and phrases and associating...

Abstract The success of case-based design aids depends both on the case-based reasoning processes they apply and on effectively integrating those processes into the larger task context: on making,the case-based reasoning component,present case information at the right time and in the right way, on exploiting additional information resources as need...

The Intelligent Classroom is an automated lecture facility where one of the primary goals is that speakers be able to control it by interacting with it as they would with a human A/V technician. In this paper we describe our research in imbedding Microsoft Powerpoint into the Intelligent Classroom. In particular we discuss howwe use two modes of se...

In this paper, we introduce a class of systems called Information Management Assistants (IMAs). IMAs automatically discover related material on behalf of the user by serving as an intermediary between the user and information retrieval systems. IMAs observe users interact with everyday applications and then anticipate their information needs using...

Current online communication systems have neglected an important property of natural conversations; that is, many conversations are opportunistic and arise from awareness of a shared context. As a result, users of current online chat systems, for example, have to explicitly log in to predefined chat rooms with a strong goal in mind. Chatting is con...

The expertise of individuals within an organization is often its most valuable resource. However, it is a timeconsuming and difficult task for an individual, a group, or an organization to systematically express, organize, and distribute expertise so it can be accessed and used by the people who need it. Moreover, novices within an organization may...

Computer software is being designed under the principle that the more features it has, the better it is. Consequently, most people find learning to use a new product overwhelming. What good is having several hundred commands in your word processor, if you can't find the ones you want, and aren't even certain what most of the others do? The difficul...

The development of successful case-based design aids depends both on the CBR processes themselves and on crucial questions of integrating the CBR system into the larger task context: how to make the CBR component provide information at the right time and in the right form, how to access relevant information from additional information sources to su...

Just-in-time" information systems monitor their users' tasks, anticipate task-based information needs, and proactively provide their users with relevant information. The effectiveness of such systems depends both on their capability to track user tasks and on their ability to retrieve information that satisfies taskbased needs. The Watson system (B...

We describe a class of systems called Information Management Assistants (IMAs). IMAs observe users as they go about completing a task in everyday software applications, and use these observations to anticipate a user's information needs. They then automatically fulfill these needs by querying traditional information sources, filtering the results a...

: When researching a topic, users often need different kinds of information which are provided by different information sources. In developing the SINGLESOURCE application, we are building a framework for accessing multiple sources, both for querying several sources simultaneously and viewing the results in a hierarchy of related documents. We firs...

It is a time consuming and difficult task for an individ- ual, a group, or an organization to classify large collec- tions of documents under a content-driven taxonomy. In this paper, we outline an approach for building a system which makes the classification process the re- sponsibility of the author of the document, thus allow- ing the author to...

We present FAQ Minder, an implemented prototype of the system that parses FAQs, files of Frequently Asked Questions associated with USENET newsgroups. The system identifies and tags, in an interactive manner, the logical components of FAQs: network headers, tables of contents, sections, glossaries, questions, answers, and bibliographies. Such parsi...

Many organizations regularly have to answer questions from their clients. While clients complain that they spend too much time navigating the organization's infrastructure to get answers, the organization's experts feel overwhelmed because they have to answer the same questions repeatedly or they receive questions that are irrelevant or marginal to...

The World Wide Web continues to challenge organi- zations to make online access to their expertise con- venient for their clients. One means of expertise ac- cess that many clients find convenient in everyday life is asking natural language questions of the organiza- tion. To support it online, we developed an approach to building organization-embe...