Masahiro Hori Visit Report
Wednesday, July 5th, 2000

Masahiro Hori, Ph.D.
Software and Pervasive Computing,
IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory
Tel: +81-46-215-4667 / Fax: +81-46-274-4282
Email: horim@jp.ibm.com

Masahiro Hori came to visit us for a morning during a three-day trip
to Holland.  He works with IBM research in Tokyo.  He is interested in
media that adapts for devices of varying degrees of mobility.  He is
primarily interested in authoring systems for XML.

He showed a demo of a WYSIWYG HTML editor that stores editing commands
given by the user in XSLT.  The resulting XSLT code can later be
applied to the HTML document the user started with to generate the
HTML document the user ended with.  The longer term goal is to
generate XSLT code that is more general.  That is, to generate XSLT
code that applies to a set of HTML documents, not just one.  This way,
the XSLT code becomes a style sheet for that set of HTML documents,
and the editor becomes a WYSIWYG style editor.

His interest in adaptive media applies primarily to enabling documents
to be presented on mobile devices as well as on desktop computers.  He
perspective on this is primarily in terms of modality selection --
that is, do the audio or video equivalent of one communicative object.
He is also interested in understanding what the XML code would be like
of a document that would go through XSLT processing and would apply
equally to all devices of varying mobility.

His involvement with mobile devices has lead to his involvement with
Voice XML.  Voice XML is an XML format for synthesized speech.  It
also has the interest of the Web accessibility community.  The markup
defines all sorts of voice variation and accentuation as well as,
apparently, some abstracter concepts such as grammatical structure.
(Perhaps voice style sheets can state how such abstracter concepts
should be conveyed by voice?)

I though we could work with Voice XML.  Is was just submitted by the
committee that made it to the W3C for consideration.  We could
generate it as part of generated multimedia presentations.  The spoken
voice would then be synchronized with the rest of the SMIL code.  This
would depend on what constructs Voice XML provides for enabling
synchronization, and how these are implemented in the devices
available.  One device that is available, apparently for free, is IBM
Direct Talk.

Here are some Voice XML links:

  http://www.voicexml.org/
  http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-voicexml-20000505/
  http://www.w3.org/Voice/
  http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/voicexml4dt

I also showed Masahiro GRiNS.  He was interested in it as an XML
editor for XML code with atypical, and GUI rich, presentation semantic
domain.

-Lloyd