The Intelligent Room project

At the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, we have been working on technologies for an Intelligent Room. Rather than pull people into the virtual world of the computer, we are trying to pull the computer out into the real world of people. To do this, we are combining robotics and vision technology with speech understanding systems and agent-based architectures to provide ready-at-hand computation and information services for people engaged in day-to-day activities, both on their own and in conjunction with others. We have built a layered architecture where, at the bottom level, vision systems track people and identify their activities and gestures, and, through word spotting, decide whether people in the room are talking to each other or to the room itself. At the next level, an agent architecture provides a uniform interface to such specially-built systems, and to other off-the-shelf software, such as Web browsers, etc. At the highest level, we are able to build application systems that provide occupants of the room with specialized services; examples we have built include systems for command-and-control situations rooms and as a room for giving presentations.