Date: 16 Aug 85 10:16 PDT Sender: sheehan.pa From: Moran.pa Subject: New section for SASI proposal To: Marshall.pasa cc: Liles.pasa, Halasz, Trigg, Moran.pa CATHY, HERE IS THE NEW SECTION. IT SHOULD BE PLACED RIGHT AFTER THE "ENHANCEMENTS TO NOTECARDS" SECTION. THE POINT OF THIS SECTION IS TO CONVINCE THE AGENCY THAT XEROX IS SHARING THE LOAD IN SUPPORTING THIS PROJECT. FEEL FREE TO ADD ITEMS ABOUT ANY XSIS WORK THAT WAS NOT AGENCY-SPONSORED (I DON'T HAVE A CLEAR PICTURE OF WHAT WORK DOWN THERE WAS DONE WITH XSIS OVERHEAD FUNDS). --TOM 6. Non-SASI-Supported Work Related to NoteCards The work surrounding the NoteCards system is much broader than the specific work funded by the PSA and SASI contracts and will continue to be broader than the work outlined (in the previous sections) for funding under SASI-II. The purpose of this section is to outline some of this non-SASI work, both past and future, that is supported directly by Xerox. 6.1 Project Direction and Management by PARC NoteCards research and development was directed by Tom Moran for the last couple of years, and much of this responsibility is being shifted to Frank Halasz. The main project direction is set at PARC, although by now autonomous activities on NoteCards are springing up in several Xerox divisions. Much of the top level design of NoteCards has been and will continue to be done by Frank Halasz and Tom Moran. 6.2 Product Support Early on, PARC supported Terri Wanke to document and assist the first NoteCards users. Then XSIS took on much of the user support and distribution of NoteCards and licenced it to external customers. Xerox is now committed to marketing NoteCards as a fully supported product. This activity will center in the Artificial Intelligence Systems (AIS) division, where NoteCards will be an application package on top of Interlisp-D. AIS has hired a full-time programmer, Kirk Kelley, to support the NoteCards product. He is being housed at PARC to work closely with PARC researchers as he takes over the support functions. His work in making the system more robust will improve the prospects for practical research on real-world applications. 6.3 Related Research at PARC NoteCards was conceived and created at PARC in response to the particular issues posed by the PSA project, but arose in the general research context of PARC which was primed to address the general issues of getting computer systems to help people articulate and "play" with ideas. There a variety of PARC projects that overlap with NoteCards and contribute to its development. Often, PARC researchers do initial investigations and then request funding (such as SASI) to provide resources to carry promising projects on. Idea sketching: Richard Burton is developing his Sketch program to allow for easy sketching of ideas on a 2-D surface. Since Sketch comes with NoteCards, our goal is to provide a way to convert 2-D idea sketches into notecard structures, and visa versa. (Note also that Richard Burton's early work on Annoland was a strong base on which we launched the first implementation of NoteCards.) User interfaces: Stu Card and Tom Moran are senior researchers in the area of user psychology and user interfaces. Stu Card is currently working on a project dealing with the management of multi-window displays and with new ways to display large network structures. He is coordinating his research with Tom Moran by using NoteCards as a domain for his investigations, so that it can be directly incorporated into NoteCards. Tailorability: Tom Moran and Frank Halasz are working on the tailorability issues (explained in a previous section). This summer PARC is supporting a visiting scientist, Steve Payne, to help us do some theoretical and empirical work in characterizing the tailoribility problem from the user's point of view. Argumentation: PARC supported research assistants, Ceci Blase and (currently) Susan Newman, to carry out initial analyses of public policy argumentation. The NoteCards group is working closely with Johan DeKleer, who invented the ATMS reasoning mechanisms managing argument structures. Research on legal argumentation was begun by Art Farley, a visiting scientist in AI, and continues under George Cole, a lawyer and now a Stanford student working at PARC. (We are requesting that continuation of this work be supported by SASI-II.) Collaboration tools: The NoteCards group is cooperating closely with the CoLab project, headed by Mark Stefik. Not only are we investigating the use of NoteCards in the CoLab (a kind of electronic meeting room), but also we are prepared to make use of the argumentation tools the CoLab group develops. (Note also that the CoLab people and others at PARC are providing the NoteCards group with support in moving the NoteCards system into the Loops world.) Distributed NoteCards and object-based databases: Frank Halasz is actively interested in providing a distributed NoteCards in a global database (rather than in a user's local files). He is working with the inter-laboratory effort in PARC to develop an appropriate object-oriented database server. 6.4 New Applications by Advanced PARC Users NoteCards is a popular facility within the PARC Lisp community. Much of the use of NoteCards is routine from a research perspective, but there are also many "advanced" NoteCards users. These computer-sophisticated users are building systems on top of NoteCards (either simply using the NoteCards programmer's interface or more serious systems building). These users contribute to the development by influencing its development and even our vision of the nature of NoteCards. Scientific argumentation: Kurt VanLehn has relied on NoteCards to complete his argumentation on the merits of various information-processing models of cognition (which will appear as a book). He has developed the most sopisticated argumentation structures in NoteCards, and he was influential in making us realize the potential of a TMS in helping with complex argument analysis. Documentation: Austin Henderson has recently begun analyze the documentation of large systems and how users obtain help information from such documentation. He is making the documentation's structure explicit in NoteCards and then extracting a linear document appropriate to the particular user's working context. His work is forcing us to rethink our linking mechanisms in NoteCards. Statistical data management: Jan Peterson (a Stanford thesis student) is investigating building statistical data structures (of Interlisp's statistical package, IDL) into NoteCards to provide an environment for a data analyst to be able to explore and manage complex data analyses. Mail filtering and classification: Steve Levy (an MIT thesis student) is working at PARC to build an interface between the Lisp mail system, Lafite, and NoteCards, as part of a larger cooperative project with Tom Malone at the MIT Sloan School. The system will allow a user to specify rules for filtering and classifying incoming mail and then storing and managing it within NoteCards. Engineering design and technology: Frank Halasz, Tom Moran, and Dan Russell have investigated the use of NoteCards in a team engineering design setting. (This effort is currently on hold until resourses can be found to pursue it.) Dan Russell is embarking on an engineering technology database, which will guide a user in exploring various technology configurations and which will automatically provide a variety of analyses. Intelligent training environments: A sister project (largely supported by the Army Research Institute) to the NoteCards project is investigating computer-based intelligent training environments for teaching Xerox tech reps. This project is heavily using NoteCards in a variety of ways. Frank Halasz and Dan Russell are integrating videodisk input into NoteCards (a video card!). NoteCards was used to analyze and rationalize diagnostic procedures, so that they could be taught with more meaning. Dan Jordan is exploring using NoteCards as a teaching environment for new course material being developed on the project. As part of that effort, Dan Russell is integrating on-line animated simulation models developed in that project into NoteCards (a simulator card!). Recently, we have developed a plan to use NoteCards to explore the notion of an instructional design environment, in which a course developer can represent domain knowledge and instructional principles and use these to design course materials. 6.5 PARC Cooperative Research with Universities PARC researchers are in contact with cognitive researchers in universities. Many university researchers are interested in using NoteCards as a research vehicle. With the help of XSIS, the NoteCards system has been given to many universities (including Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, CMU, MIT, U Pittsburgh, U Michigan). Finally, PARC is jointly bidding with Stanford and UC Berkeley to be the site for the NIE Center for the Study of Writing. If this bid is successful, this will give us resources to further empirically study the usefulness of NoteCards as an authoring tool.