Cybernauts and Synthetic Documents:
A Glimpse Beyond the Web Page

ABSTRACT:
True ubiquitous information access has yet to arrive. The web provides but a hint of fingertip cyberspace access, albeit in a chaotic, organic, evolving manner. Too much useful information remains inaccessible (full newsvideo, most literatry works, near-instant fee-based human or system expertise, any form of emergency response, true distance education, etc.) Moreover, static information units, such as books and web pages will become obsolete, replaced with synthetic documents created as needed by composition of multiple information sources, varibable grain-size summarization, zoom-in detail and background expansion, and bridging media and language barriers. If the web evolves into a collective memory of the human race, and the universal communications medium, what would be the true impact on society? Which human skills will be at premium? And, which professions will wither away? For starters, cyberspace navigaton skills and problem-solving talents will dominate memorization-intensive professions.

SPEAKER BIO:
Dr. Jaime G. Carbonell is Allen Newell Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his B.S. degrees in Physics and in Mathematics from MIT in 1975, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Yale University in 1976 and 1978, respectively. Dr. Carbonell has served on various advisory committees including the NIH Human Genome Advisory Committee [1987-1991], and the National German AI Lab (DFKI) Scientific Advisory Board [1988-present]. He was the executive editor of Machine Learning [1988-1991], and serves on several editorial boards, including that of Artificial Intelligence. He was president of C-STAR-II, the international organization for speech-to-speech translation [1993-1995]. He is also a fellow of the AAAI, and has severed in the AAAI executive council [1990-1994]. Dr. Carbonell's research interests span several areas of artificial intelligence, including: machine learning, data mining, automated planning, natural language processing, machine translation, analogical reasoning, information retrieval, automated text summarization and multi-media digital libraries.

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