These tools support group cooperative work environments that span time and space. They will make it possible to join conferences in progress and automatically be brought up to date by agents with memory. Many of the National Challenge applications require complex interfacing between humans and intelligent control systems and sensors, and among multiple control systems and sensors. These applications must understand their environment and react to it. A broad range of integrated technologies will allow humans and computers to interact effectively, efficiently, and naturally.
Heterogeneous database interfaces.
Methods to integrate and access heterogeneously structured databases composed of multi-formatted data will be developed. In a future NII's information dissemination environment, a user could issue a query that is broadcast to appropriate databases and would receive a timely response translated into the context of the query. Image processing and computer vision. Images, graphics, and other visual information will become more useful means of human-computer communication. Research will address the theory, models, algorithms, architectures, and experimental systems for low level image processing through high level computer vision.