Rick_McCormack@mindlink.bc.ca (Rick McCormack) (06/18/91)
I believe that the system was out of Chicago, but could not find my reference to the original article. I think I deleted it for two reasons: (a) here on MindLink BBS in Vancouver, BC, Canada, we have access to the UPI and Newsbytes postings, and may select among approximately 115 newsgroups. Thus I have a set of groups that I read everyday, mostly skimming the headers and reading/copying those I feel of most interest. Very handy, and much appreciated by many of the MindLink users. (b) The electronic newspaper has two major drawbacks to gaining popularity. Suprisingly, the market for an ad-free paper is small; many rely on local ads in their paper to key them into their community. Also, reader surveys show that many skim a newspaper, and read things they never would have thought would be of interest to them. Trying to keep this "spontaneous selection" process intact in a "dedicated" newspaper is impossible. The best compromise seems to be (at present) to create an "electronic clipping service" to search out references to items/companies/topics that you want, and to have the option of adding to and modifying these lists frequently, while still reading a "general newspaper." I would be very interested in a system that would pick these items off my computer screen, and, using a dedicated servo-controlled audio cassette recorder hooked to my Mac, with something simple like MacinTalk, transfer the written article to audio, for use in my car or portable player. Thus, I would run my scanner program while getting breakfast, grab the cassette, and listen to it on the way to where-ever. (Hey, I am the guy who can't figure out why no-one markets an audio cassete recorder with a built-in recording timer a la VCRs -- I miss a lot of radio shows I want to listen to because they are half-over when i remember them. :-) ) If I can find that original reference to Knight-Ridders service (Holy cow! Right out of the subconscious -- I think it WAS Knight-Ridder!) I will post it here. Luck -- _________________________________________________________ | IMAGISTICS Business Theatre Technology | Rick McCormack | | Interactive Effective Compelling | Vancouver, BC | |________________________________________|________________| | UseNet: Rick_McCormack@mindlink.uucp | A O-L: Rique | |_________________________________________________________| .
mickey@a.nl.cs.cmu.edu (Raman Chandrasekar) (06/19/91)
I have read about a system (?prototype) developed at the
MIT Media Lab, which extracts news of relevance to a
*particular* reader, and customizes it to the reader's
preference, and presents it to her in a multimedia
electronic form. For example, this system would highlight
sports stories (perhaps, specifically, tennis stories) for
a sports (tennis) fanatic. It would prominently display
Chicago weather if you planned to take a trip there.
I have a few questions about this and related systems:
1. If you have a contact (name + email address) for
the person(s) who developed the system above, could
you please mail it to me?
2. If you know of any similar systems (multimedia, or just
plain text), could you please send whatever you have:
contact names, addresses, email addresses, bibliographic
references -- anything relevant?
I would appreciate any help in this. Many thanks.
-- Chandrasekar
mickey@cs.cmu.edu
______________________________________________________________________
R Chandrasekar Email: mickey@a.nl.cs.cmu.edu
Center for Machine Translation Fax : +1 (412) 268-6298
Smith Hall 109, Carnegie Mellon Univ Phone: +1 (412) 268-5113
Pittsburgh PA 15213-3890 Home: +1 (412) 361-5150
______________________________________________________________________
eric@mcrware.UUCP (Eric Miller) (06/20/91)
In article <6356@mindlink.bc.ca> Rick_McCormack@mindlink.bc.ca (Rick McCormack) writes: >(b) The electronic newspaper has two major drawbacks to gaining popularity. >Suprisingly, the market for an ad-free paper is small; many rely on local ads >in their paper to key them into their community. Also, reader surveys show that >many skim a newspaper, and read things they never would have thought would be >of interest to them. Trying to keep this "spontaneous selection" process >intact in a "dedicated" newspaper is impossible. > >The best compromise seems to be (at present) to create an "electronic clipping >service" to search out references to items/companies/topics that you want, and >to have the option of adding to and modifying these lists frequently, while >still reading a "general newspaper." I recently heard a speech by Robert Maxwell in which he described this very service. He was actually speaking in the context of print media staying competitive with CNN and others. Of course, everyone's question is "Would a significant number of people use such a service?" and "Could you make it cheap enough that people will subscribe to all of those articles that they would normally only skim through?" I am afraid that "us techies" represent the minority opinion in the big picture... >I would be very interested in a system that would pick these items off my >computer screen, and, [...convert the...] >written article to audio, for use in my car or portable player. Thus, I would >run my scanner program while getting breakfast, grab the cassette, and listen >to it on the way to where-ever. Actually, the best thing would be to download the data in audio format directly, instead of converting from text to speech. Use a low sample rate since the fidelity doesn't have to be fantastic, and you could squeeze quite a bit a data into a fairly narrow bandwidth carrier. Of course this defeats the Maxwell proposal of maintaining a print media. For that, you either need low cost personal fax machines or a printer connected to your home information terminal. Either way, it's exciting to me. (((enough rambling, they must be making the coffee stronger here lately...))) Eric Miller Microware Systems Corp Des Moines, IA
dmmg1176@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (David M Marcovitz) (06/21/91)
Here at University of Illinois we subscribe to the Clari News system. We have a bunch of newsgroups from the UPI wire services. The newsgroups are divided up by topic. For example, I read clari.news.urgent (important front-page kinds of stories), clari.feature.mike_royko (Mike Royko's column), clari.sports.basketball (basketball stories), and clari.sports.football (football stories). Also, I use the nn newsreader so I can autoselect certain stories based on topic. For example, I follow the Boston Celtics so I automatically select any story with "Boston," "Celtics," "Celts," or "Bird" in the title. -- David M. Marcovitz | internet: marcovitz@uiuc.edu Computer-based Education Research Lab | dmmg1176@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu University of Illinois | novanet: marco / cca / cerl
verber@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu (Mark Verber) (06/24/91)
In article <13510@pt.cs.cmu.edu> mickey@a.nl.cs.cmu.edu (Raman Chandrasekar) writes:
I have read about a system (?prototype) developed at the
MIT Media Lab, which extracts news of relevance to a
*particular* reader, and customizes it to the reader's
preference, and presents it to her in a multimedia
electronic form.
A paper about this system can be found in the most recent proceedings of
Usenix:
Multimedia - For Now and the Future
USENIX Summer '91 Conference Proceedings -- June 10-14
Newspace: Mass Media and Personal Computing, Page 329-347
--markosborn@socs.uts.edu.au (Tom Osborn) (06/25/91)
verber@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu (Mark Verber) writes: >In article <13510@pt.cs.cmu.edu> mickey@a.nl.cs.cmu.edu (Raman Chandrasekar) writes: > ... a system (?prototype)... MIT Media Lab, ... extracts news ... > ... relevance to a *particular* reader, and customizes it to > the reader's preference, and presents it to her in a multimedia > electronic form. >A paper about this system can be found in the most recent proceedings of >Usenix: >Multimedia - For Now and the Future >USENIX Summer '91 Conference Proceedings -- June 10-14 >Newspace: Mass Media and Personal Computing, Page 329-347 Well, the Media Lab isn't the only group working on this. GMD in Darmstadt has been working on the (huge number of) problems for a while and expect to release a prototype systems soon. The non- prototype version is expected for September (but I don't know which September). I must admit some doubts about this. I had a postgrad student working on something a bit like this a few years ago (automatic indexing and content addressable retrieval). Some that retrieval from headlines and intro paragraphs is fraught with problems - the key words are there, but so is a lot of attention attracting hype. Manual key-wording is a possible fix, but it seems that non-experts are poor at this (they devise keys from their own perspective well, but for readers badly). Educating writers or demanding a higher editorial standard may be the only way. Ie, for whatever reason, news contains a lot of noise. Also, the *personalised* customising is very problematic. Eh? Tomasso. -- Tom Osborn, School of Computing Sciences, " Beware of the small carrots " University of Technology, Sydney, PO Box 123 Broadway 2007, AUSTRALIA. R H-M.
asb@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Amy Bruckman) (06/26/91)
In article <osborn.677813746@dragon> osborn@socs.uts.edu.au (Tom Osborn) writes: > >I must admit some doubts about this. I had a postgrad student working >on something a bit like this a few years ago (automatic indexing and >content addressable retrieval). Some that retrieval from headlines and >intro paragraphs is fraught with problems - the key words are there, >but so is a lot of attention attracting hype. Manual key-wording is a >possible fix, but it seems that non-experts are poor at this (they >devise keys from their own perspective well, but for readers badly). At AAAI-90 in one of the applications seminars, a company presented a rule-based system developed for Reuters to do automatic indexing of news stories coming off of the wire. They have had tremendous success with the system. It is more accurate at indexing stories than humans, because humans get bored and careless. (Evidently, indexing is tedious.) And it's much quicker: stories are indexed within an hour, if I remember correctly, instead of two days. (There is no paper about this in the proceedings. There might have been a separate set of proceedings for the applications conference; I'm not sure.) The system is very simple in its design. For example, it distinguishes the meaning of the word "lead" ("I lead them to the conference room" versus "our widgit is made of lead") by looking for the presence or absence of certain other words in the surrounding text. What is interesting about the system is not its design but its tremendous practical success. -- Amy