Hmm, needs more thought.

Wearable computing application: memory augmentation (personal
information management, elderly)

problems facing wearable computing (re information
extraction/retrieval):

– SPEECH-DRIVEN IMPLICIT QUERIES. A wearable computer can assist

human-human interaction by monitoring keywords in the conversation
and suggesting relevant information, which will be presented in the
background (visual, monophonic audio, spatially-located audio). A
limited-vocabulary speaker-dependent speech engine recognizes names
and keywords associated with personal information management while
the wearer talks to other people. For example, the user might say,
“Let me look at my schedule for Tuesday.” The system will recognize
“TUESDAY” and display a link for this Tuesday’s schedule. The user
can then key in further input or use structured voice commands to
navigate through the data. To avoid confusion with the ongoing
human-human conversation, human-computer interaction should be
structured and clearly separate. (*Note*: I think I want to work on
this for my PhD. Implicit queries for personal information
management.)

– ONLINE INTERACTION, OFFLINE DICTATION. A wearable computer can be

used to record everything you say so that you can process it later.
The speech stream from a directional microphone includes both
dialogue with the wearable computer and dialogue with other
entities. Online use involves limited-vocabulary speech recognition.
The full speech stream can be stored on the hard disk and tagged on
the fly with markers for later transcription using a
large-vocabulary speech recognition engine. The post-processing of
the text stream can be performed off-line and need not be
real-time.

– EXPLICIT QUERIES: IR, TEXT SUMMARIZATION. Explicit information

retrieval with text summarization is necessary in order to deal with
information overload. Both exact and fuzzy searches need to be
supported. Topics may need to be mapped using an ontology in order
to take advantage of communal knowledge or search through personal
information. Output needs to be summarized; browsing through a
webpage to find an answer is inefficient and requires too much
attention. However, explicit queries against personal data stores
cannot take advantage of the redundancy of the Web, and the
wearable computer will need fuzzy search capabilities. (This is hard!)