Situation awareness in human-machine interaction
Sven Wachsmuth
Technische Fakultät, AG Angewandte Informatik
Universität Bielefeld
Abstract
In recent years, there are two main trends in human-machine interaction. On the one side,
hand-held interactive devices are becoming smaller and smaller or completely disappear into an
ambient
intelligence environment. On the other side, artificial communication partners are becoming
em-bodied in a shared virtual or physical environment. In both cases, the interaction space is
extended from the display that is controlled by the computer system to the external environment
that has to be perceived through sensors. Intuitive and seamless communication needs to be
established in a human-human like fashion using speech, gestures, and interpreting the actions of
the user in his/her own natural environment. As a consequence, system instructions become highly
ambigu-ous and context-dependent. Situation awareness becomes a key concept in order to establish
a successful communication between the human user and the interactive machine.
In my talk I will sketch different computational models and systems that deal with visual contexts
and referential ambiguity in human-machine communication. In the first part, I will review some
work on the integration of verbal and visual information in the scenario of human-robot
interac-tion. In the second part, I will discuss several issues of maintaining the context in an
interactive augmented reality scenario.