Intelligent User Interfaces: An Introduction

Our lives are increasingly surrounded by data, information and knowledge captured in multiple media: text, graphics, imagery, audio, and video. These media are frequently combined or structured to form complex artifacts (e.g., hypermedia documents, interactive CD-ROMs) which exploit multiple perceptual modalities (e.g., auditory, visual, haptic/gestural). This book focuses on tools and techniques that support efficient and effective indexing, browsing, retrieval, interaction with and visualization of multimedia. Multimedia digital libraries which incorporate text, graphics, audio, and video are central to many applications areas including information access, training, and decision support. This chapter introduces the need for intelligent multimedia information retrieval, outlines its theoretical foundations, outlines the current state of the art, describes the structure of this collection, and outlines some remaining fundamental problems.