Communications - January 2009

ors in the display.

The wisePad system could also employ Infoscope-type services³to, say, copy an image of a menu written in Chinese, communicate it through the Internet for translation, and then display a translated menu in English on a user-display device (such as the user’s glasses). Language translation in wise- Pad also acts on audio input. Airplane-based or other mobile transport servers might thus be able to host automatic translation software^{4, 6} for train, air, and automobile travelers using wisePad. Alternatively, translation services might be delivered through the Internet for those applications that are able to tolerate several seconds of delay.

Others who might find wisePad services useful are newly arrived immigrants or visitors to North America who read and write English better

figure 2: wisePaD services blueprint.

than they speak and understand it. For people with some kind of hearing impairment, closed captioning is a proven way to enhance communications. Children and other users who need literacy aids would also benefit from wisePad’s integration of pictographic illustration within the captioning it generates in the user’s display. Moreover, document and partial-text summarization would be available through wisePad implemented (pending negotiation with other patent holders) with the help of methods like those in Fein et al., including word- and phrase-fre-

2

quency-based statistical analysis and cue-phrase analysis.

Blueprint

In 2007, we designed the wisePad ser-vice-oriented architecture (SOA)-based blueprint (see Figure 2) to express busi-

Employee

Customer

ness logic in terms of services that use XML to describe input and output, facilitating integration of IT-application components, including transcribing speech and translating text. Integration is achieved by representing the business logic of the various application components as Web services; the table here lists the composite Web services wisePad provides to its users.

These services consist of multiple layers. For example, at the portal level, users receive Web-enabled services (such as CaptionIT, generating captions from aural input) from a composite Web service process layer. Other services (such as CaptionandPictureIT, generating captioned text with symbols and pictures) consist of “horizontally” integrated component services available from the integration layer below. CaptionandPictureIT combines select-

Student

Regular user

composite service Processes layer

TELL-IT

Text-to-SpeechIT

CaptionI T; Caption-and-PictureI T

PictureIT

SimplifyIT; SummarizeIT; Simplify-and-SumIT; SimSumPicIT ChangeI T (MagnifyI T, ZoomI T, FitI T, ColorITetc); Change-and_voiceIT TranslateIT-to-other-language; Translate-and-captionIT