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W3C/WAP Workshop:
the Multimodal Web

The convergence of W3C and WAP standards, and the emerging importance of speech recognition and synthesis for the Mobile Web

See also: Agenda, and Workshop Overview

Position Papers

We have received position papers from the following people/organizations. If you have sent a paper and it doesn't appear below, could you please contact Jim Larson, <jim.a.larson@intel.com>

Here are the position statements you have given us


Alastair Angwin, IBM UK Laboratories
I am very interested in enabling the Internet in all aspects for mobile devices. I hope to contribute in this meeting to a better understanding of the needs of mobile/wireless requirements and to see progress towards ubiquitous access to the Internet move a little closer through subsequent actions.

Daniel Appelquist, Digital Channel Partners
Digital Channel Partners is an E-Business consultancy that provides consulting services across the spectrum of business strategy, design and engineering. Our client base of ".coms" and ".corps" in the publishing, financial and entertainment sectors need to be exposed to the latest thinking about where the "Web" is heading. How does their ownership of a "brand" and proprietary content mesh with the new paradigms for content distribution born in an "Internet Everywhere" world? What new software development and deployment methods must be explored in order to meet these changing needs? A position paper will be forthcoming which will attempt to flesh out these and other relevant questions.

Mark Baker
I represent Sun on the WAPforum and on the HTML WG where I am a co-editor on XHTML Basic. I have a keen interest in Sun's position that interoperability with the existing Web and Internet should be the primary goal of any mobile- targetted solution, and that this rarely means that something new has to be invented.

David Bevis, IBM UK
Mobile communications, spewcifically as it relates to WAP and future mutlimedia applications within 1 or more application contexts where assyncronous events require interaction

Ruben Brave, Catchy.net
Catchy.net is a Dutch mobile internet solutions provider, which means that aour organistion provides consultancy, projectmanagement and application services. To create usable and succesfull mobile internet solutions catchy.net is convinced that voice applications will play a significant role.

Thomas Bridgman, IBM Research
I am a member of the Pervasive Computing Solutions group at IBM Research, and one of IBM's representitives to the WAP Forum's Wireless Applications working group. I am interested in the convergence work between WAP and W3C standards.

Doug Dominiak, Motorola
Motorola is interested in furthering the convergence of the WAP Application Environment with the application environment of the Web. There are many opportunities to leverage existing technologies, to preserve application developer's investment and leverage existing expertise. We also feel that voice browsing, and, generally, multimodal applications, present a great opportunity to help realize the full potential of the Web.

Steve Ehrlich, Nuance
Interest in speech in, visual out interfaces from both a technology as well as a user interface perspective.

Adam Goodfellow, Microsoft
Member of WAP Forum's Wireless Application Environment (WAP-WAG-WAE) Next Generation core team defining next generation WAE specifications. Active interest in convergence of WAP specifications with Internet (W3C/IETF/ECMA) standards.

John Graff, Parlant Technology Inc
Development of technolgoy for parental involement in k-12 education.

Tao Huang, Intel China Research Center
In Interactive Voice Response systems, how to exploit mobility and the opportunities for multimodal systems; and what's the challenges presented by the convergence of Mobile and Interactive Voice Response systems.

Naoko Ito, NEC
NEC submitted a Note to the W3C, introducing the concept of navigation which specifies a scenario to expose the data to the user and proposing XDNL, or XML Document Navigation Language which describes the navigation. XDNL can produce a document flow, or a dialog from an XML document. Together with XSLT, it can produce HTML, WML, VoiceXML. XDNL in itself may be still immature but we believe it can be a good starting point to address the issue on the device independent authoring.

Soon Kon KIM, Microsoft
I'm responsible for the solution development under WAP and other related wireless data application in Microsoft and this workshop will help me to share the info.

Kazuhiro Kitagawa, W3C/Keio
Multi-Modal interface is very important for web appliance. W3C should keep in touch with this technologies.

Kazunari Kubota, NTTDoCoMo
We are interested in the convergence of W3C Technologies and WAP technologies, such as XHTML Basic and CSS2 developing approach, and how to integrate VoiceXML and SMIL to the WML in the next stage.

Charles Hemphill, Conversa
Voice Enabling the Internet The Web has become successful due to standards, the simple point-and-click interface, the visual nature of the content, and the ability to search for content. Due to this success, we have begun to see the emergence of devices designed to access this content. Many of these new devices include reduced screens and limited support for the point-and-click paradigm. WML was created to specifically address devices with limited bandwidth and small screens. VoiceXML was created for devices with no screen at all. What is the role of voice for these devices and their impact on the corresponding markup languages? How can we best leverage existing content? How can we best share approaches across the various markup languages? We consider these questions and others as we explore how we might voice enable the Internet. (longer position paper previously submitted via E-mail)

Marianne Hickey, Hewlett Packard Laboratories
Chair of the multimodal sub-group within the W3C Voice Browsing activity. I am interested in the interplay between spoken dialogue and other input and output modalities, such as a graphical user interface (gui). How can different modalities compliment each other, as alternatives or where there is simultaneous input/output? How do we make it easy to create multimodal services? How do we build services where people can move seamlessly between using speech, a gui or a combination of the two?

David Hitchman, Microsoft
Program Manager for Microsoft Mobile Explorer, currently a dual mode (wap and html) browser as shipped on Sony Z5, working on future product roadmaps and specifications.

Chen-Ning Hsi, Philips Rsearch East Asia - Taipei
Our main interest on content adaptation is to ensure a proper content delivery according to the terminal capability/restrictions, the user characteristics/preference, and the user location/context.

Jim Larson, Intel Architecture Lab
Chairman, W3C Voice Browser Working Group; Member, ETSI Aurora project on Distributed Speech Recognition; Manager of Advanced Human I/O at the Intel Architecture Labs; Teach courses in building speech applications at Oregon Graduate Institute and at Portland State University

Andrian Lincoln, Motorola Australian Research Centre
A key focus of my activities is associated with the delivery and presentation of content to, but limited to, mobile orientated devices. My interest is helping Vodafone understand the issues that are being considered and how we can work together to form a broadly adopted standard.

Haoling Liu, NTT DoCoMo
We are interested in the convergence of W3C technologies and WAP technologies, such as XHTML Basic and CSS 2 developing approach, and how to integrate the VoiceXML and SMIL to the WML in the next stage.

Stephane Maes, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
My research interests and professional responsibilities include speech, multi-channel and multi-modal user interfaces, technologies, middleware and development environments. My core specialty is in speech technologies: conversational engines and algorithms (speech recognition, speaker recognition, natural language technologies and dialog management). I have several years of technical expertise in the domains directly addressed by the W3C/WAP workshop on the multi-modal web. I believe that I can contribute and significantly guide the directions, requirements and next steps that will be discussed.

Bennett Marks, Nokia
I am working on multi-modal presentation of combined text and audio, using WAP screens as context for audio interactions.

Larry Masinter, AT&T Labs
I am responsible for the design and implementation of device-independent services. I have been active in the development of many of the technologies for multipurpose content and content adaptation.

Shin'ichi Matsui, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
Matsushita (Panasonic) is manufacturing and selling Web-aware appliances such as mobile phones or Digital TV sets. I am interested in circumstances for those products, especially for XHTML Basic, CC/PP, SMIL, etc.

Charles McCathieNevile, W3C
I am a member of all the WAI guidelines working groups, and I aminterseted in authouring practices, device-independent interaction design, mutlimodal multimedia, and general accessibility.

Hidetaka Ohto, W3C/Panasonic
My area of interest is how to apply Web technologies for home appliances such as mobile devices, TV sets. Therefore I am interested in the convergence between WAP and W3C. Especially,I would like to make clear the similarities and differences between them, and find out the more generic solutions as much as possible.

David Pearce, Motorola (& ETSI Aurora)
I am the chairman of ETSI Aurora Working group developing standards for distributed speech recognition. DSR will enable speech driven interfaces to the mobile web. The DSR architecture enables the computationally intensive parts of a multimodal interface to be performed on a remote server. I will represent information from the Aurora working group that now as a subgroup in Applications and Protocols that is looking at similar issues to the workshop on how to build end to end services for the mobile web with speech and other interfaces. We have already had very useful liaisons with W3C voice browser working group, we share a common vision and wish to build on this.

Dave Raggett, W3C/HP
I am very interested multimodal and WAP 3G and beyond. How does multimodal interact with SMIL? How can we move forward on DialogML etc.

Andrew Scott, Telstra
I have led the WML Generic Content Authoring Guidelines (GCAG) effort within the WAP Forum's Developer Group (WDG). I'm based at the Telstra Research Labs, and have worked on WAP-related activities since 1997. In addition to WAP, I've worked on transcoding generic web content, voice browsers, and with the usability team at Telstra.

William Song, E-Business Technology Institute, Hong Kong
We are developing a sort of wireless markup language, which is based on XML and compatible to WML. Will write a position paper.

Peter Stark, Ericsson
Active in the WAP WAE working group. For position see wap-wag-wae@wapforum.org mailing list.

Jiming Sun, Intel
I am interested in supporting multi-type data stream under the WAP infrastructure. In particular, the integration of voice and ink (pen) data. Should there be inkXML? How do we collect and generate simultaneous voice and ink data that will be used extensively in the wireless industry in the near future.

Yoichiro Tomari, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
We are developing browsers for cellular phones and car navigation systems. I am interested in convergence between WML and XHTML, and multimodal user interface.

Babar Uddin, AllToSearch
See http://alltosearch.com

Markuu Vartiainen, Phone.com
I'm working on the WAP-Web convergence issues. Particularly, my aspirations are in the convergence of WMLScripting with EMMA standards. It is assumed that the next generation WMLScript will be more compliant with the ECMAScript 3rd Edition.
ECMAScript 3rd edition Mobile Profile.

William Wang, InfoTalk Corporation Ltd.
bout our company: Our company develops multi-lingual conversational speech recognition technology and natural language technology to facilitate easy commnunication of information between humans and machines over the telephone. We focus mainly on the development of telephony speech recognition systems of various Asian languages and dialects. Our systems and technologies have been successfully deployed by companies such as Cable & Wireless Hong Kong Telecom, Taiwan Paging Networks, Bank of China, and Hong Kong and China Gas Company. For more information on our company, please browse our web site at http://www.infotalkcorp.com About our participation in the Workshop: Voice Browser is a relatively new concept in Asia. However, with the rapid growth of Internet and mobile phone usage in various Asia-Pacific countries in general, and China in particular, we foresee a tremendous growth of this market segment in the near future. In fact, just recently, the first Chinese Voice Portal in Asia was successfully launched using our Chinese conversational speech recognition technology. We are also working with many partners in various Asia-Pacific regions to launch similar services in the near future. In this workshop, we seek to discuss with and to learn from other industry experts on how we can contribute to the standardization and growth of this industry.

Wieslawa Wajda, Alcatel
ETSI STQ Aurora Project would like to cooperate with W3C and WAP Forum for harmonising protocol elements and multimodal markup language for Distributed Speech Recognition applications.

Wei Wei, Microsoft
WAP's protocal development statment and evolution. W3C forum development statment and evolution. How we can match W3c and WAP, espcially cooperate with our partners(Ericsson, Sumsong, Sony,and other WAP/W3C ICP), to provide the smoothly development networks and services.

Jon C.S. Wu, Philips Research East Asia
Interested in content adaptation for multi-modal Web/WAP pages concerning terminal capabilities, user preference, and user context.

Toshihiko Yamakami, ACCESS
ACCESS is a leading solution provider for non-PC embedded internet software. From 17 years experience of embedded network software, ACCESS licences its network softare to cellular phones, game consoles, PDAs and so on. For the next generation information appliances, we are interested in the how the multimodal web will evolve with non-PC devices.

Sachiko Yoshihama, SEC
As I've working on a WAP products, I'm especially interested in convergence between VoiceXML and WML. I'm also interested in the content transforming, which I believe one of the most realistic approach to encourage migration for the new content format.