Quo vadimus? The 21st Century and multimedia

The concept is related of computer driven multimedia to the NASA Scientific and Technical Information Program (STIP). Multimedia is defined here as computer integration and output of text, animation, audio, video, and graphics. Multimedia is the stage of computer based information that allows access to experience. The concepts are also drawn in of hypermedia, intermedia, interactive multimedia, hypertext, imaging, cyberspace, and virtual reality. Examples of these technology developments are given for NASA, private industry, and academia. Examples of concurrent technology developments and implementations are given to show how these technologies, along with multimedia, have put us at the threshold of the 21st century. The STI Program sees multimedia as an opportunity for revolutionizing the way STI is managed

Generating multimedia presentations: from plain text to screenplay

In many Natural Language Generation (NLG) applications, the output is limited to plain text – i.e., a string of words with punctuation and paragraph breaks, but no indications for layout, or pictures, or dialogue. In several projects, we have begun to explore NLG applications in which these extra media are brought into play. This paper gives an informal account of what we have learned. For coherence, we focus on the domain of patient information leaflets, and follow an example in which the same content is expressed first in plain text, then in formatted text, then in text with pictures, and finally in a dialogue script that can be performed by two animated agents. We show how the same meaning can be mapped to realisation patterns in different media, and how the expanded options for expressing meaning are related to the perceived style and tone of the presentation. Throughout, we stress that the extra media are not simple added to plain text, but integrated with it: thus the use of formatting, or pictures, or dialogue, may require radical rewording of the text itself

SCOF: A Standardised, Customisable Online Feedback Tool

Increasing pressures on staff, combined with increased requests for feedback from students mean that there is less time to do more things. Investigation into potential methods to assist the staff of the School of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences at City University London in their feedback activities identified that a combination of bespoke feedback combined with a standardised scheme (or rubric) may give the best results. The stand-alone SCOF tool was developed to address this observation and allows staff to create formatted feedback sheets quickly in different environments, using tools ranging from desktop computers to mobile telephones and tablets. It is currently about to undergo an institution-wide evaluation and will subsequently be made freely available to other institutions. This paper outlines the requirements of the tool, its usage, evaluation progress and future work to be undertaken, and includes a link to a public demonstration version of the tool