he MIT
(Massachussets Institute of Technology) Media Lab, Microsoft and many others are
working on computer recognition of facial expressions, biometric access
identification via the face, etc. It won't be any good for a US business person
to be making a great point in a Web-based multi-lingual video conference to an
Argentinian, having his words translated into perfect Argentinian Spanish if he
makes the "O" gesture at the same time. Computers can intercept this kind of
thing and edit them on the fly.

There are thousands of ways in which cultures and countries differ, and most of
these are computerizable to change as one goes from one culture to the other.
They include laws, customs, business practices, ethics, currency conversions,
clothing size differences, metric versus English system differences, etc.
Enterprising companies will be capturing and programming these differences and
selling products and services to help the peoples of the world communicate
better. Once this kind of thing is widespread, it will truly contribute to
international understanding.

*Interview of September 10, 2000

= What do you think about e-books?

E-books continue to grow as the display technology improves, and as the hardware
becomes more physically flexible and lighter. Plus, among the early adapters
will be colleges because of the many advantages for students (ability to
download all their reading for the entire semester, inexpensiveness, linking
into exams, assignments, need for portability, eliminating need to lug books all
over).

EDUARD HOVY (Marina del Rey, California)

#Head of the Natural Language Group at USC/ISI (University of Southern
California / Information Sciences Institute)

The Natural Language Group (NLG) at the Information Sciences Institute of the
University of Southern California (USC/ISI) is currently involved in various
aspects of computational/natural language processing. The group's projects are:
machine translation; automated text summarization; multilingual verb access and
text management; development of large concept taxonomies (ontologies); discourse
and text generation; construction of large lexicons for various languages; and
multimedia communication.

Eduard Hovy, his director, is a member of the Computer Science Departments of
USC and of the University of Waterloo. He completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science
(Artificial Intelligence) at Yale University in 1987. His research focuses on
machine t