text:
Spoken Language Processing and Multimodal
Communication : A View from Europe.
Joseph J. Mariani
LIMSI-CNRS
Orsay, France
Human-Machine Communication if a very active research field and is one of the main areas in which computer manufacturers, telecommunications companies and the general public electronic equipment industry invest a large amount of R&D efforts. Human-Machine Communication includes perception, production and cognition aspects. Several means can be used to communicate, such as spoken or written language, image, vision or gesture. Those topics represent a large, long-term, interdisciplinary research area.
Spoken language communication with machines is a research topic per se, and includes speech recognition and synthesis as well as speaker or language recognition. Large efforts have been devoted in that field, and big progress can be reported in the recent past, based on the use of stochastic modeling approaches, requiring large quantities of training data.
However, it appears that communication between humans usually involves different modalities, even for a single media, such as audio processing and face/lip "reading" in spoken language communication. When speech is used together with gesture and vision, it may result in a more robust, more natural and more efficient communication. Bringing this multimodal communication ability in the field of human-machine communication is now a big challenge, and raises difficult problems, such as the integration over time of speech and gesture stimuli, or the use of a common visual reference shared in a human-machine dialog. It also appears that similar methodologies can be used for addressing the different communication modalities
Another interesting aspect of the works in this area is the possibility to transfer the information from one media to another, such as vision to speech, or speech to gesture in order to help the handicapped people to better communicate with the machine. Finally, it may be thought that, in the long term, the study of multimodal training is necessary in order to develop a single communication mode system.
In order to investigate research in those areas, know-how in various related areas such as Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing, Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, Gestural interaction, Human Factors, Cognitive Psychology and Sociology of innovation has been gathered at Limsi. The integration of modalities has been studied with different approaches. Multimodal communication has been applied for providing information to customers (« Multimodal-Multimedia Automated Service Kiosk » (MASK) project), to graphic design interface (LimsiDraw and Mix3D projects) and to car navigation. Transmodal communication has been studied for developing aids to the blinds (Meditor), and to the deaf (French Sign Language recognition).
Those research areas are similarly very active at the European level. Several Spoken Language Processing projects have been conducted in the framework of major programs of the European Union, such as Esprit, Esprit « Long Term Research » or Telematics « Language Research and Engineering ». They address both basic research and technology development from the very beginning in 1984. New programs have been started recently, which focus more on the applications of such technologies and on the response to the needs of society, such as the « Language Engineering » program, the Info2000 program for the publishing industry, the « Multilingual Information Society » (MLIS) program, for providing support allowing for multilingual communication all over Europe, TIDE for the aids to the handicapped. Also, the multimedia and multimodal aspects are specifically addressed in subprograms such as Intelligent Information Interfaces, Multimedia Systems or Educational Multimedia.
1.0	Human Communication: Perception, Production and Cognition
Human-Machine Communication (HMC) is a very active research field, and is one of the main areas in which computer manufacturer, telecommunication companies or the general electric equipment industry invest a large amount of R&D efforts. Communication includes the perception or production of a message or of an action, as an explicit or implicit cognitive process. This communication establishes a link between the human being and his environment which is made up partly by other human beings. Several communication modes coexist. For perception, the "5 senses": hearing, vision, touch, taste and odor, with reading as a specific visual operation, and speech perception as a specific hearing operation related to spoken language sounds. For production, it also includes sound (speech, or general sound production), vision (generation of drawings, of graphics or, more typically, of written messages). Those means are specifically involved in the communication between human beings. Other actions can be produced, such as grasping, throwing, holding..., which generalize communication to the whole physical world. Cognition is the central entity, which should be able to understand, or to generate a message or an action, from a knowledge source. This activity relies on conscious processes (that allow, for example, to conduct a reasoning), or unconscious ones. It takes into account the task to be fulfilled and the goal which is aimed at. It plans the scheduling of actions in order to reach that goal, and takes decisions. A specific aspect of HMC is the teleogical component (the fact that we prepare well in advance the actual generation of a linguistic event, of a sound or of a move).
2.0	Human-Machine Communication
The idea is thus to offer this ability, which is typical to human beings, to machines in order to allow for a dialog with the machine which then becomes an interface between the human being and the physical world with whom he communicates. This world can be reduced to objects, but it can also be constituted by other human beings. In the first case, which is much simpler, and for the three communication links of this human-machine-world triplet, both perception and production aspects appear. The communication between the human and the real world can involve a direct communication, or may entirely be conducted through the machine. The communication between the machine and the real world corresponds to Robotics, and includes effectors (robot, machine tool...), and sensors (normal or infra-red camera, sonar sensor, laser telemeter..., recognition of sounds (engine noises for example), or of odors (exhaust gas)...).
In the domain of HMC, the computer already has artificial perception abilities: speech, character, graphics, gesture or movement recognition. This recognition function can be accompanied by the recognition of the identity of the person through the same modes. Recognition and understanding are closely related in the framework of a dynamic process, as the understanding of the beginning of a message will interfere with the recognition of the rest of the message. The abilities of those communication modes are still limited, and imply the need of strong constraints on the use of the systems. Gesture or movement recognition is made through the use of a special equipment, such as the VPL DataGlove, or even DataSuit, or the Cyberglove, which includes position sensors. Other sensors allow for recognizing the direction of viewing (through an oculometer, or through a camera). Reciprocally, the computer can produce messages. The most trivial is of course the display on a screen of a pre-determined textual or graphical (including icons) message. We could add Concept-to-Text generation, summary generation, speech synthesis, static or animated image synthesis. They can be produced in stereovision, or as a complete environment in which the user is immersed ("virtual" reality), or be superimposed on the real environment ("augmented" reality), thus requiring to wear a special equipment. The provided information is multimedia, including text, real or synthetic images and sound. It is also possible, in the gestural communication mode, to produce a kinesthetic feedback, allowing for the generation of simulated solid objects.
Finally, the machine must also have cognitive abilities. It must have a model of the user, of the world on which he acts, of the relationship between those two elements, but also of the task that has to be carried out, and of the structures of the dialog. It must be able to conduct a reasoning, to plan a linguistic or non-linguistic act in order to reach a target, to achieve problem solving and aid to the decision, to merge information coming from various sensors, to learn new knowledge or new structures, etc. Multimodal communication raises the problem of co-reference (when the user designates an object, or a spot, on the computer display and pronounces a sentence relative to an action on that object ("Put that there"). Communication is a global operation, and the meaning comes from the simultaneous co-occurrence of various stimuli at a given time, in a given situation. It is also necessary in the design of a HMC system to adjust the transmission of information through the various modalities in order to optimize the global communication. The machine transmits to the human a real representation of the world, a modified reality or a fictitious world. If the world also includes humans, the model gets more complex. The machine then interacts with several participants, who share a common reference. This reference can be a fiction generated by the machine.
3.0	A Long-Term Interdisciplinary Research
This research area is large. Initially, laboratories used to work on the different communication modes independently. Now, interdisciplinary research projects or laboratories address several modes in parallel (11, 23, 29). It appears that it is important to understand the human functions, in order to get inspiration when designing an automatic system, but, moreover, in order to model in the machine the user with whom it has to communicate. Not only modeling those functions, but also modeling the world in which they occur. This gives an idea of the size of the effort that has to be achieved, and it extends Human-Machine Communication to various research domains such as room acoustics, physics or optics. It is important to link the study of both the perception and the production modes, with the machine playing the role of an information emitter or receiver, at various degrees going from a simple signal coding/decoding process to a complete understanding/generating process, for voice as well as for writing or visual information. Artificial systems can also extend human capabilities: speaking with different timbres, or in several languages for example.
4.0	Progress in Spoken Language Processing
Large progresses have been made in the recent years in the field of Spoken Language Processing, and especially Speech Recognition (25). First operational systems were able, in the early 80's, to recognize a small vocabulary (40 to 50 words), pronounced in isolation for a single speaker. Those systems were based on pattern matching using dynamic programming techniques. Several improvements were made possible among each of the 3 axes (from isolated to continuous speech, from speaker-dependent to speaker-independent and on the increase in the size of the vocabulary), with a similar approach. But the use of statistical models, such as Hidden Markov Models (HMM) allowed for a large improvement on the 3 axes simultaneously, while also increasing the robustness of systems. It allowed to include in the same model various pronunciations by the same speaker or pronunciations by various speakers. It also allowed to use phone models instead of word models, and to reconstruct the word, including the various pronunciations reflecting the regional variants, or foreign accents, for the same language, from the phone models. Using context-dependent phones, or even word-dependent phones, helped taking into account the coarticulation effect, while solving the problem of a priori segmentation. A similar statistical approach was also used for language modeling, using the counts of the succession of 2 or 3 words in large quantities of texts corresponding to the application task (such as large quantities of correspondence for mail dictation). New techniques allowed for better recognition in noisy conditions, or when using different microphones and for processing spontaneous speech, including hesitations, stuttering etc. Those progresses result now in the availability of systems which can be used on specific tasks. But the development of those systems for each application is a very large effort, as it is needed to constitute (record and transcribe) a large database reflecting as closely as possible the future use of the system in operational conditions. The problem of dialog modeling is also still a very difficult area. The design of task-independent systems is therefore presently the challenge. Also, as a general problem, the actual use of prosody in spoken language understanding is an open issue.
One could also report progress in other fields of spoken language processing. In text-to-speech synthesis, the quality was generally improved by using concatenative approaches based on real speech segments. Intelligibility and naturalness were improved, even if the prosody still needs much improvement. This corpus-based approach allow for voice conversion from one speaker to another, by using techniques developed for speech recognition, and for relatively easy adaptation to a new language. The techniques developed for speech recognition were also successfully used for speaker recognition, language identification or even topic spotting. They were also imported in the field of Natural Language Processing, allowing for progress in the specific field of written language processing, as well as in the contribution of this field of research to speech understanding and generation.
5.0	Linking Language and Image, and Reality
With the coming of "intelligent" images, the relationship between Language and Image is getting closer (11). It justifies advanced human-machine communication modes, because it requires such modes. In an "intelligent" synthetic image (which implies the modeling of the real world, with its physical characteristics), a sentence such as "Throw the ball on the table" will induce a complex scenario where the ball will rebound on the table, then fall on the ground, which would be difficult to describe to the machine with usual low-level computer languages or interfaces. Visual communication is directly involved in human to machine communication (for recognizing the user, or the expressions on his face, for example), but also indirectly in the building of a visual reference that will be shared by the human and the machine, allowing for a common understanding of the messages that they exchange (for example, in the understanding of the sentence "Take the knife which is on the small marble table." Instead of considering the user on one side, and the machine on the other side, the user himself can become an element of the simulated world, acting and moving in this world, and getting reactions from it.
6.0	Common Methodologies
One can find several similarities in the researches concerning those different communication modes. In Speech and Vision Processing, similar methods are used for signal processing, coding and pattern recognition. In Spoken and Written Language Processing, part of the morphological, lexical, grammatical and semantical information will be common, together with similar approaches in the understanding, learning and generating processes. The same pattern recognition techniques can also be used for Speech and Gesture recognition. Human-Machine communication is central in the debate between Knowledge-Based methods and Self-Organizing ones. The first approach implies that the experts formalize the knowledge, and it may result in the necessity of modeling the law of physics or mechanics, with the corresponding equations. The second approach is based on automatic training, through statistical or neuromimetic techniques, applied to very large quantities of data. It has been applied with similar algorithms, to various domains of HMC, such as speech recognition or synthesis, character or object visual recognition, or to the syntactic parsing of text data. The complementarity of those two approaches has still to be determined. If it may appear that the idea of introducing by hand all the knowledge and all the strategies which are necessary for the various HMC modes is unrealistic, the self-organizing approach raises the problem of defining the training processes, and of building sufficiently large multimodal databases (one should compare the few hours of voice recordings that can be presently used by existing systems to the few years of multimodal perception and production that are necessary in the acquisition of the language by human beings). Apart from the theoretical issues, the availability of computer facilities having enough power and memory is crucial. This critical threshold has been attained very recently for speech processing, and should be reached in the near future in the case of computer vision.
7.0	The Need for Large Corpora in Order to Design and Assess Systems
A system which has been tested in ideal laboratory conditions, will show much worse performances when placed in the real context of the application, if it was not designed in order to be robust enough. The problem of the assessment of the HMC systems in order to evaluate their quality and their adequacy with the application which is aimed at, is, in itself, a research domain. This evaluation implies the design of large enough data bases, so that the models will include the various phenomena that they must represent, and so that the results are statistically valid. In the domain of speech communication, such databases have been built in order to assess the recognition systems on specific tasks. Similar actions also started in the case of Natural Language Processing, and of Image Processing, which requires quantities of information which are even larger. This approach has been used extensively in the case of the design of Voice Dictation systems. In this case, the language model can be built relatively easily from the huge amount of text data which are available in various domains (newspapers, legal texts, medical reports and so on). The acoustic model can also be built from sentences, extracted from this text data, which are read aloud. It is somehow more difficult to apply this approach to spontaneous speech, that will be found in actual human-human dialogs, as there is no available corpora of transcribed spontaneous speech comparable to what can be obtained for text dictation data, in order to build the language model. However, using an already existing speech recognition system developed for voice dictation, in order to recognize spontaneous speech and build the corresponding language model could be considered, as soon as the recognition rate will be good enough to reduce the number of errors to a threshold acceptable for hand-made correction, and to detect the possibility of such errors (by using measures of confidence). Reaching this threshold will probably allow for a big progress in speech recognition systems abilities, in the framework of a bootstrapping process, as it would allow to use speech data of unlimited size, such as those continuously provided by radio or TV broadcast. This approach could be extended to multimodal communication. It will then raise many research problems related to the evaluation of multimodal communication systems, and to the corresponding design, acquisition and labeling of multimodal databases. It is also necessary to define a metric in order to measure the quality of the systems. Finally, the ergonomic study of the system aims at providing the user with an efficient and comfortable communication. It appears that the design of the systems should aim at copying the reality as much as possible, in order to place the human in an universe that he knows well and which looks natural to him.
8.0	Multimodal Spoken Language Communication
Humans use multimodal communication when they speak to each other, except in the case of pathology or of telephone communication. Both the movements of the face and lips, but also the expression and posture will be involved in the spoken language communication process. This fact, together with interesting phenomena, such as the "Mac Gurk" effect and the availability of more advanced image processing technologies, induced the study of bimodal (acoustical and optical) spoken language communication. Studies in speech intelligibility also showed that having both a visual and an audio information improves the information communication, especially when the message is complex or when the communication takes place in a noisy environment. This lead to studies in bimodal speech synthesis and recognition.
In the field of speech synthesis, models of speaking faces were designed and used in speech dialog systems (5, 7, 18). The face and lips movement were synthesized by studying those movements in human speech production, through image analysis. It resulted in text-to-talking heads synthesis systems. The effect of using the visual information in speech communication was studied, in various ways (using the image of the lips only, or the bottom of the face or the entire face) was studied and showed that the intelligibility was improved for the human "listener", especially in a noisy environment. In the same way, the use of the visual face information, and especially the lips, in speech recognition was studied, and results showed that using both information gives better recognition performances than using only the audio or visual information, especially in a noisy environment (14, 24, 31, 33). The use of lips visual information was also interestingly used for speaker recognition (19).
This visual information on the human image has been used as part of the spoken language communication process. However, other types of visual information related to the human user can be considered by the machine. The fact that the user is in the room, or is seated in front of the computer display, or the gaze can be used in the communication process (waiting for the presence of the human in the room to synthesize a message, or choosing between a graphic or spoken mode for delivering information, if the user is in front of the computer or somewhere else in the room, adjusting the synthesis volume depending on how far he is from the loudspeaker, adapting a microphone array on the basis of the position of the user in the room (31) or checking what the user is looking at on the screen in order to deliver an information relative to this area). Face recognition may also help in order to synthesize a message addressed to a man or a woman, or specifically aimed at that user. Even the mood of the user could be evaluated from his expression and considered in the way the machine will communicate with him (15, 16). Reciprocally, the expressions can vary in the synthesized talking head in order to improve the communication efficiency and comfort. It has been shown for example that eyelids blinking is important for a better presence and communication, or having a simple groan from the talking head while the machine computes the answer to a question in a human-machine dialog (7).
9.0	Multimodal Communication
Communication can also use different, both verbal and non-verbal, media. A. Waibel proposes a multimodal (speech, gesture and handwriting) interface for an appointment scheduling task (31). Those different modes can be used to enter a command, or to provide a missing information or to solve an ambiguity, following a request from the system. Berkley and Flanagan (6) designed the AT&T HuMaNet system for multipoint conferencing over the public telephone network. The system features hands-free sound pick up through microphone arrays, voice control of call set up, data access and display through speech recognition, speech synthesis, speaker verification for privileged data, still image and stereo image coding. It has been extended to also include tactile interaction, gesturing and handwriting inputs and face recognition (12). In Japan, ATR has a similar advanced teleconferencing program, including 3D object modeling, face modeling, voice command and gestural communication. Rickheit & Wachsmuth (26) describe a "situated artificial communicators" project using speech input by microphone, and vision input (for gestural instructions) by camera to command a one-arm robot constructor. At Apple Computer (27), A. James & E. Ohmaye have designed the puppeteer tool aiming at helping designers to build simulations of interaction for people. Puppeteer supports user input in various forms (icons selection, typing or through speech recognition), and combines animation and speech synthesis to produce talking heads. At IRST, Stringa & cols. (28) have designed, within the MAIA project, a multimodal interface (speech recognition and synthesis, and vision) to communicate with a "concierge" of the institute, which answers questions on the institute and its researchers, and with a mobile robot, which has the task of delivering books or accompanying visitors. In the closely related domain of multimedia information processing, very interesting results have been obtained in the Informedia project at CMU on the automatic indexing of TV broadcast data (News), and multimedia information query by voice. The system uses continuous speech recognition to transcribe the talks. It segments the video information in sequences, and uses Natural Language Processing techniques to automatically index those sequences from the result of the textual transcriptions. Although the speech recognition is far from being perfect (about 50% recognition rate), it seems to be good enough for allowing the user to get a sufficient amount of multimedia information from his queries (32). Similar projects started in Europe, and better recognition performances, more complex image processing (including character recognition) and multilingual information processing are aimed at for the future.
10.0	Experience in Spoken Dialog Systems Design at Limsi
Several multimodal human-machine communication systems have been developed at LIMSI, as a continuation of our work in the design of vocal dialog systems. This issue was first studied in the design of a vocal pilot-plane dialog system sponsored by the French DoD. A cooperative effort with the MIT Spoken Language Systems Group aimed at developing a French version for the MIT Air Travel Information Service (ATIS), called L'ATIS (8). "Wizard of Oz" experiments were conducted very early, and the linguistic analysis of the resulting corpus in a train timetable inquiry system simulation was conducted (20). The Standia study of automated telematic (voice+text) switchboard has been conducted as a joint effort between the "Speech Communication" group and the "Language & Cognition" group. The design of a voice dialog system has been explored within the framework of a multimedia air-controller training application, in the Parole project (21). The goal was to replace the humans who presently play the role of the pilots in those training systems by a spoken dialog module. Speech understanding uses speech recognition in conjunction with a representation of the semantic and pragmatic knowledge related to the task, both static (structure of the plane call-signs, dictionary, confusion matrix between words...) and dynamic (dialog history, air traffic context...). The dialog manager determines the meaning of a sentence by merging those two kinds of information: the acoustic evidence from the speech recognition, and the knowledge information from the task model. It then generates a command that modifies the context of the task (and the radar image), and a vocal message to the air-controller student, using multivoice speech synthesis. The whole system is bilingual (French and English), and recognizes the language which is used. It is able to generate pilot's initiatives, and several dialogs can be held in parallel.
11.0	The Multimodal-Multimedia Automated Service Kiosk (MASK) Project
In the ESPRIT "Multimodal-Multimedia Automated Service Kiosk" (MASK), speech recognition and synthesis are used in parallel with other input (touch screen) and output (graphics) means (13). The application is to provide railway travel information to the railway customers, including the possibility to make reservations. The complete system uses a speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system, with a vocabulary of about 1500 words. The signal acquisition is achieved by using 3 microphones and the system has to work in the very noisy environment of a railway station. The acoustic model and the language model have been built by using a prototype, and by recording speakers having to fulfill a set of scenarios. The language model is based on trigrams, trained on the transcription of about 15K utterances. The semantic analysis is conducted by using a case grammar similar to the one developed for the Parole project. A dialog manager is used, to determine a final complete semantic scheme which accesses a DBMS containing the railway travel information, and to generate a response including both graphical and vocal information. The vocal information is provided through a "concatenated" speech approach, in order to obtain the best possible quality. The system is presently mostly monomodal. In the near future, it should allow the users to either use speech or tactile input, or to use both together. However, first Wizard of Oz studies seem to show that subjects tend to use one mode or the other, but not both at the same time, at least within a single utterance (while they may switch to another mode during the dialog, if one mode appears to be unsatisfactory).
12.0	The LIMSIDraw, Tycoon and Meditor Multimodal Communication Systems
A first truly multimodal communication system has been designed using vocal and gestural input, and visual output communication. The task is the drawing of colored geometric objects on a computer display (30). The systems uses a Datavox continuous speech recognition system, a high definition touch screen, and a mouse. Each of those communication modes can be used in isolation, or in combination with the others in order to give a command to the system. Each input device has its own language model, and is connected to an interpreter, which translates the low-level input information (x,y coordinates, recognized words...) into a higher level information, accompanied by timing information, which is inserted in a waiting list, as part of a command. Each interpreter uses the information provided by a User Model, a Dialog Model and a Model of the Universe corresponding to the application. The Dialog Manager analyses the content of the waiting list and launches an execution command towards the output devices when it has filled the arguments of the specific command which was identified, taking into account the application model. In order to assign the proper value to the argument, the dialog manager uses two types of constraints: type compatibility (the value should correspond to the nature of the argument) and time compatibility (the reference to the argument and the corresponding value should be produced in a sufficiently close time interval). The manager has two working modes: a designation type mode, without feed-back to the output, and a small movement type mode, where the user can follow on the screen his input until a stop condition occurs (such as handing-up from the screen). The multimodal grammar of the user interface is described by an Augmented Transition Network structure (3). The experiments which were conducted with the system clearly show that gestural interaction is better for transmitting analog information, while speech is better for transmitting discrete information.
Several developments followed this first attempt. A tool for the specification of multimodal interface has been designed. It considers multimodality types, based on the number of devices per statement (one versus several), the statement production (sequential versus parallel), and the device use (exclusive versus simultaneous). Another approach for modalities integration was experimented as an alternative to Augmented Transition Networks. The TYCOON system (22) is based on a neuromimetic approach, called Guided Propagation Networks, which uses the detection of temporal coincidences between events of different kinds (in this case multimodal events). It features a command language which allows the user to combine speech, keyboard and mouse interactions. A general modality server has been designed in a Unix environment, which has the role of time-stamping events detected from those different modalities. A multimodal recognition score is computed, based on the speech recognition score, the correspondence between expected events and detected events, and a linear temporal coincidence function. It has been applied to extend the capabilities of a GUI used for editing Conceptual Graphs, and in the design of an interface (speech + mouse) with a map, in an itinerary description task.
Based on the previous LimsiDraw system, an application of multimodal communication for the design of a text editor for the blind has been achieved (4). The system uses a regular keyboard, a braille keyboard and a speech recognition system as inputs, a text-to-speech and a sound synthesis systems and a braille display as outputs. The system allows for the following functions : read a text with embedded character attributes, such as style, color, fonts; select, copy move or delete parts of a text; modify text or attributes; search strings of text with specific attributes; read parts of text using speech synthesis; insert, consult and modify additional information on words (annotations). Most of the input operations involve tactile (through braille keyboard) accompanied by speech communication. Output information integrates tactile (braille) and spoken modalities. A first stage evaluation was conducted, addressing three kinds of exercises (coloring words having a given grammatical category, getting definition of some words by speech synthesis, text editing using cut, copy and paste commands). Those experiments showed that the multimodal communication appeared as very natural, and easy to learn. Future work will address the major problem of how to adapt Graphical User Interface (GUI) for blind users.
13.0	Transmodal Communication and the Tactile Communication Mode as an Alternative to Speech
Another interesting aspect of the works in this area is the possibility to transfer the information from one modality to another, such as vision to speech, or speech to gesture in order to help the handicapped people to better communicate with the machine. Activities may be reported in the field of generation of a text from a sequence of video frames. Initial systems would generate a text corresponding to a complete image sequence, while current systems, such as VITRA are able of producing text incrementally about real-world traffic scenes or short video clips of soccer matches (35). Reciprocally, other systems would generate images from a text, such as the works related to the production of cartoons directly from a scenario. Of great interest is also the bimodal (text+graphics) automatic generation from concepts. It has been applied in the automatic design of directions-for-use booklets. It includes both a graphical and a textual part, and automatically decides on which is the information that should be provided graphically, what should be the information provided by text, and how they should relate to each other (1, 34). Very interesting results have also been obtained by transcribing a visual scene to a tactile information, as it seems that blind people would rapidly learn to recognize such transcribed scenes (17).
The gestural communication mode may be used as an alternative to speech, especially when speech is used for communicating with other humans, so that communicating also by speech with the machine would bring confusion. In this framework, we conducted experiments on the possibility of using free-hand gestural communication for managing a slide presentation during a talk (2). The HMC is thus monomodal (gestural) although the complete communication is multimodal (visual, gestural and vocal), and multimedia. The gestural communication was made through a VPL DataGlove. The user could use 16 gestural commands (using the arm and the hand) to navigate in the hypertext and conduct his presentation, such as going to the next, or to the previous, slide, to the next, or previous chapter, or highlighting a zone of the slide. Although, it appeared that the system was usable after some training, some user errors were difficult to handle : those caused by the "immersion syndrome" (the fact that the user will also use gestures that are not commands to the system, but which accompany naturally his verbal presentation), or errors caused by hesitations when issuing a command, due to the stress. It appeared that, while it was easy to correct a clearly misrecognized gesture, it was more difficult to correct the result of an insertion error, as it is difficult to figure out what was the gesture which caused that error and to remember what is the counter gesture.
Another use of gestural communication was for sign language communication (ARGO system). In this framework, a VPL DataGlove was used in order to communicate with the machine. The "speaker" produces full "sentences", which include a sequence of gestures, each of them corresponding to a concept, according to the French Sign Language (LSF). The HMM software developed at Limsi for continuous speech recognition was used for recognizing the sequence of concepts. The meaning of the sentence is transcribed on a 3D model of the scene, as it highly depends on the spatial layout (place of the "speaker" in relation to the places where the "actors" he is speaking of are standing) (10).
14.0	The MIX3D and Sammovar Projects
A more ambitious project is now being conducted, including computer vision and 3D modeling, natural language and knowledge representation, speech and gestural communication. The aim of the project is to design a system able to analyze a real static 3D scene by stereovision, and to model the corresponding objects (object models will benefit from the real world input and will in turn improve the scene analysis system). The user will have the possibility to designate, to move and to change the shape of the reconstructed objects, using voice and gestures. This project will address the difficult problem of model training in the framework of multimodal information (how non-verbal (visual, gestural) information can be used in order to build a language model, how linguistic information can help in order to build models of objects, and how to train a multimodal multimedia model).
A first step has been achieved in this project with the design of a multimodal X Window kernel for CAD applications (9). The interface is made up of a keyboard, a mouse and a speech recognition system. The output comprises a high quality graphic display and a speech synthesis system. The designer uses both the mouse and the voice input to design the 3D objects. The user inputs graphic information with the tactile device, while attaching or modifying information by voice on the corresponding figures. If necessary, the system provides an information through speech synthesis, informing the user that the action has been properly completed. The multimodal interface allows the user to concentrate his attention on the drawing and object design, as he doesn't have to use the same tactile device to click on a menu and as he also doesn't have to read a written information somewhere else on the display. The interaction is still not synergetic, but sequential. The same interface has also been applied to the design of 2D objects, including hand drawing, followed by the naming of a geometrical type for the previously drawn object. The final shape is generated as a results of the integration of those two kinds of information.
15.0	Spoken Language Processing and Multimodal Communication in the European Union Programs
The European Union launched several Framework Programs in the R&D area, which lasted 4 to 5 years : FP1 (1984-1987), FP2 (1987-1991), FP3 (1990-1994), FP4 (1994-1998), and it is now preparing the next program, FP5 (1998-2002). The activities in spoken language processing and more generally in Multimodal communication, took essentially place in 2 programs : ESPRIT, now called the IT (Information Technology) program, and TELEMATICS, with a specific action line on Language Engineering. But those topics may also be present in other programs of the commission.
The ESPRIT / IT program was managed by DGXIII-A, and is now managed by DGIII in Brussels. The pilot phase of this program started in 1983. The following programs took place until now, with some overlap between the different phases : ESPRIT I (1984-1988), ESPRIT II (1987-1992), ESPRIT III (1990-1994) and ESPRIT IV (1994-1998). The underlying policy of the projects is cooperation, not competition, within projects. There is not much cooperation between projects and all projects are with a limited time duration.
We may identify 31 Spoken Language projects in various areas, from 1983 on, in different topics related to speech processing, and each topic contains several projects :
Basic research in speech communication : ACTS, ACCOR I/II, VOX, SPEECH MAPS
Speech technology improvements : SIP, IKAROS, SPRINT, PYGMALION, HIMARNET, WERNICKE, SPRACH
System assessment and evaluation : SAM 1 / 2 / A, 449
Multilingual Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech systems : 291/860, POLYGLOT
Spoken dialog : PALABRE, SUNDIAL, PLUS
Robust speech I/O Systems : ARS, ROARS,ROBUST
Speech and the office workstation: SPIN, IWS, MULTIWORKS
Telecommunication applications : SUNSTAR, FREETEL
Computer Aided Education applications / Language Training : SPELL I / II
Games : IVORY
Multimodal dialog for information services applications and Multimedia info processing : MASK, MIAMI, THISTL
Apart from those Spoken Language Processing projects, there were also several Natural Language Processing projects, in different areas :
Basic research in NL processing : DYANA I / II, DANDI
Multilingual NL processing : TWB, INTREPID, EMIR
Lexicons : MULTILEX, ACQUILEX I / II
Other projects are more remotely linked to spoken or written language processing : HERODE, SOMIW, PODA, HUFIT, ACORD...
On Fall 1993, the ESPRIT management asked for a study of the impact of ESPRIT Speech projects and produced a report.
The results of this study stated that a 126 MEcu effort has been devoted to speech (total budget) within Esprit. This corresponds roughly to a total of 1,000 Man-Years, over 10 years (1983-1993). It is estimated that this represents about 12% of the total European activity on speech. This means that Esprit funded 6% of total activity, which is considered to be a small share of the total effort.
22 projects have been conducted and 9 of those projects produced demonstrators. In 1993, 13 industrial companies reported intention to put products on the market, with an extra effort of 18 MEcu. 4 were already on the market in 1993 and reported a 2 MEcu income on that year, and all 13 estimated to reach a 100 MEcu income by 1996, while 2 SMEs were to make 90% of that income. This represents a return of investment of 1.3% by 1993 and 72% by 1996, which is considered to be low.
The reasons for this low performance was analyzed as due to the fact that no exploitation plans were mentioned in the projects from the beginning, no market investigation was conducted, and the attitude of large industrial groups was more as "technology watch." Since then, large groups quitted the speech scene or still stayed as "technology watch." Those groups are ready to buy elsewhere (illustrating the « not-invented-here syndrome »). The Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are more active, for « staying alive » reasons. The projects were too much technology-pull, not enough market-push, while speech was still the "cherry on the cake" for many customers.
In the present IT program (1994-1998), and although there is a specific « Language Engineering » program in the Telematics action, it was said that « Speech and Natural Language Processing » was also most welcomed (especially the technology development within Long Term Research) but there is no specific area for it in the program. Human-Machine Communication activities, including verbal and non-verbal communication, may be found in Domain 1 (Software Technologies) / Area 4 (Human-Centered Interfaces), with applications to manufacturing, command & control, training, transport, entertainment, home and electronic business systems. It is contained in 3 action lines : User-Centered development, Usability and User interface technologies (Virtual Reality, multimodality, NL & speech interfaces). The goal is to study the application-user interface interaction. The same topic may also be found in Domain 3 (Multimedia systems), within Area 1 (Multimedia Technology) and Area 2 (Multimedia objects trading and Intellectual Property Rights).
Domain 4 (Long Term Research) is structured in 3 different areas : Area 1 : Openness to ideas, Area 2 : Reactiveness to Industrial Needs, and Area 3 : Proactiveness. One of the 2 action lines (the other one being « Advanced Research Initiative in Electronics ») within Area 3 is « The Intelligent Information Interfaces » (I3), which addresses the concepts of a broad population, interacting with information in a Human-centered system. The project should address new interfaces and new paradigms. This resulted in the start-up of the I3Net network, made up of a small set of founding members, who also gathers representatives from each projects retained by the European Commission in this area. The action is structured into 2 schemata : The Connected Community (mostly dealing with Augmented Reality), and The Inhabited Information Spaces (addressing the Large scale information systems with broad citizen participation).
In Domain 5, one spoken language project is developed within the Open Microprocessor Systems Initiative (OMI) : IVORY, with applications in the domain of games. In Domain 6 (High Performance Computing & Networking (HPCN)), it is present in Area 4 : Networked Multi-site applications.
The Telematics program is managed by DGXIII in Luxembourg. It included 12 Sectors, with a 900 MEcu budget : Information Engineering , Telematics for Libraries, Education and Training, Transport, Urban and rural areas... Within Telematics, the "Linguistic Research Engineering" (LRE) lasted from 1991 to 1994, with a budget of 25 MEcu coming from the EU. It was followed by a Multilingual Action Plan (MLAP) (1993-1994), with a 8 MEcu budget from the EU. Finally the Language Engineering program (LE) (1994-1998) is now on-going. The total budget spent in this program is presently 80 MEcu, 50 MEcu coming from the EU. Those programs are the follow-up of the Eurotra Machine Translation program, and they now include Spoken language processing. The program is Application and User oriented, and the idea when it was launched in 1994 was to possibly make good applications with still imperfect technologies.
In Linguistic Research and Engineering (LRE) and in MLAP, 8 projects were related to speech on a total of 56 projects. It included projects on several R&D areas : Assessment (SQALE (Multilingual Speech Recognizer Quality Evaluation)) ; Spoken Language Resources (EUROCOCOSDA (Interface to Cocosda / Speech resources), RELATOR (Repository of Linguistic Resources), ONOMASTICA (Multilingual pronunciations of proper names), SPEECHDAT (Speech DBs for Telephone applications & Basic Research)) ; Language Acquisition (ILAM (Aid to Language Acquisition)) ; Railway Inquiry Systems (MAIS (Multilingual Automatic Inquiry System), RAILTEL (Spoken dialog for train time-table inquiries)).
In the on-going Language Engineering (LE) program, 8 projects are on speech on a total of 38 projects. Those projects may also be gathered in several R&D areas. Spoken dialog (ACCESS (Automated Call Center Through Speech Understanding Systems), REWARD (REal World Applications of Robust Dialogue), SPEEDATA (Speech recognition for data-entry applications), ARISE (Telephone-based railway inquiries )); Car navigation (VODIS : (Advanced Speech technologies for Voice Operated Driver Information Systems)); Speaker recognition (CAVE (Caller Verification In Banking and Telecommunications)); Spoken Language resources (SPEECHDAT-2 (Speech Databases for Creation of Voice Driven Teleservices)) and Language training (SPEAK (Language Training and authoring keys)). The 4th Call for Proposal was issued on December 1996 with a deadline in April 1997 and a budget of 21 MEcu. The present feeling is that there is a need now to invest again on Language Engineering Technologies development, in parallel with applications.
It also appears that there should be a permanent infrastructure. Such an infrastructure may be brought off in different areas : Coordination of research (ELSNET : European Language and Speech Network), founded in 1991), Standards (EAGLES : Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards) and Language Resources (ELRA : European Language Resources Association).
Other Programs also address Human-Machine Communication and Human Language Technology.
The MLIS (Multilingual Information Society) program, started for a duration of 3 years (1997-1999), with a budget of 15 MEcu. The main objective is to bring a technological support to Multilingualism in Europe. It is organized in 3 domains :
Cooperative service network for European Language Resources
Exploiting language technology, standards and resources
Promoting use of advanced language tools and services in the public sector
A Call for Proposal was issued in December 1996 on « Translation and language use in business environment ».
The INFO2000 program is scheduled from 1996 to 1999. The goal is the development of the Multimedia content industry and the use of Multimedia content. It contains 2 actions :
Production of high quality multimedia information content
Network of Multimedia Information Demonstration & support nodes
We should also mention DRIVE (on Education technologies and applications), AIM (on Medical applications) and TIDE (Aids to the handicapped) within the Telematics program.
Some spoken language processing projects also appear in the RACE / ACTS (Advanced Communication Technologies and Services) program, under different headings :
Interactive Digital Multimedia Services
High Speed Networking
Mobility and Personal Communication Networks
Intelligence in Networks and service Engineering
Quality, security and safety of communication services and systems
Apart from those technically oriented programs, other programs addressed Socio - Economic issues. The Forecasting and Assessment in the field of Science and Technology (FAST ) program lasted from 1978 to 1987, with a follow up in the MONITOR/FAST program (1989-1993). It included an Anthropocentric Production Systems (APS) part. The program was stopped, apparently due to the pressure coming from technologists, and to the difficulty to forward the recommendations to the designers.
More recently, the Targeted Socio-Economic Research (TSER) action was launched. It includes 3 sub-parts :
Evaluation of science and technology policy options (ETAN)
Research on Education and training
Research on social integration/exclusion in Europe
Transversal programs may also bring a support to the specific programs. Several actions may be found in HCM / TMR (Human Capital and Mobility / Training and Mobility of Researchers). The ERASMUS / SOCRATES program supports an academic training network in "Phonetics and Speech Communication." This program also allows cooperation actions with the USA. The PECO, INCO-COPERNICUS and INTAS programs allow for the cooperation with Central and Eastern European countries and FSU. The INCO-DC program allows for the cooperation with Mediterranean countries (Maghreb...) and others (India...)
A new transversal Thematic Call Workprogramme aims at promoting pluridisciplinary actions, which are trans-domain and trans-program (IT, ACTS, Telematics...). It contains 4 different topics : IT for Mobility, Electronic Commerce, Information Access & Interfaces, and Learning & Training in Industry.
Another transversal action is the Educational Multimedia Joint Call. It gathers expertise from different participants which may already be in different programs, and may get support from specific programs (Telematics, Information Technologies (IT) or Targeted Socio-Economic Research (TSER)), but also from Education (Socrates), Training (Leonardo da Vinci), or Trans-European Networks (TEN-Telecom) programs.
Finally, it should be stressed that those topics are included in one of the 3 priorities of the fifth Framework Program FP5 (1998 - 2002), now under discussion :
Unlocking the resources of the living world and the ecosystem
Creating a User-Friendly Information Society
Promoting competitive and sustainable growth
16.0	Conclusion
Research and development in Human-Machine Communication is a very large domain, with many different application areas. It is important to ensure a good link between the studies of the various parts which are necessary for building a complete system and ensure its adequacy with a societal or economic need, and to devote a large effort in the long term for the development of the various components themselves as well as for the integration of those various components at a deep level. The European Commission and the European laboratories developed a large effort in this area and prepare an even larger effort for the near future.
More information on the EU programs may be found at the EC servers : All programs : CORDIS Server : http ://www.cordis.lu/
Telematics : I*M Server : http ://www.echo.lu/
(1) Andre, E. and Rist, T, (1995), "Research in Multimedia Systems at DFKI", in Integration of Natural Language and Vision Processing, Vol. II : Intelligent Multimedia, P. Mc Kevitt Eds, (Kluwer Academics Publishers).
(2) Baudel, T. and Beaudoin-Lafon, M., (1993), "Charade: Remote Control of Objects using Free-Hand Gestures," Communications of the ACM, 36 (7).
(3) Bellik, Y. and Teil, D., "A Multimodal Dialogue Controller for Multimodal User Interface Management System Application: A Multimodal Window Manager," Interchi'93, Amsterdam, April 24-29, 1993.
(4) Bellik, Y. and Burger, D., "The Potential of Multimodal Interfaces for the Blind: An Exploratory Study," Proc. Resna'95, Vancouver, Canada, June 1995.
(5) Benoit, C., Massaro, D.W., and Cohen, M.M., (1996), "Multimodality : Facial Movement and Speech Synthesis," in Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology, E. Cole, J. Mariani, H. Uszkoreit, A. Zaenen, and V. Zue eds, (Cambridge University Press).
(6) Berkley, D.A. and Flanagan, J., "HuMaNet : An Experimental Human/Machine Communication Network Based on ISDN," AT&T Technical Journal, 69:87-98.
(7) Beskow, J., "Talking heads: Communication, Articulation and Animation", Proc. of Fonetik'96, Nasslingen, May 1996.
(8) Bonneau-Maynard, H., Gauvain, J.L., Goodline, D., Lamel, L.F., Polifroni, J., and Seneff, S., (1993), "A French Version of the MIT-ATIS System: Portability Issue," Proc. of Eurospeech'93, pp 2059-2062.
(9) Bourdot, P., Krus, M., and Gherbi, R., "Cooperation Between a Model of Reactive 3D Objects and A Multimodal X Window Kernel for CAD Applications," in Cooperative Multimodal Communication, H. Bunt, R.J. Beun eds, (Addison-Wesley).
(10) Braffort, A., "A Gesture Recognition Architecture for Sign Language," ACM Assets'96, Vancouver, April 1996.
(11) M. Denis and M. Carfantan, eds, "Images et Langages: Multimodalites et Modelisation Cognitive," Proceedings Colloque CNRS Images et Langages, Paris, April 1-2, 1993.
(12) Flanagan, J.L., (1996), "Overview on Multimodality," in Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology, E. Cole, J. Mariani, H. Uszkoreit, A. Zaenen, and V. Zue eds, (Cambridge University Press).
(13) Gauvain, J.L., Gangolf, J.J. and Lamel, L., "Speech recognition for an Information Kiosk," ICSLP'96, Philadelphia, 3-6 October, 1996.
(14) Goldshen, A.J., (1996), "Multimodality : Facial Movement and Speech recognition," in Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology, E. Cole, J. Mariani, H. Uszkoreit, A. Zaenen, and V. Zue eds, (Cambridge University Press).
(15) Hayamizu, S., Hasegawa, O., Itou, K., Tanaka, K., Nakazawa, M., Endo, T., Togawa, F., Sakamoto, K. and Yamamoto K., "RWC Multimodal database for interactions by integration of spoken language and visual information," ICSLP'96, Philadelphia, October, 3-6, 1996.
(16) Iwano, Y., Kageyama, S., Morikawa, E., Nakazato, S. and Shirai, K., "Analysis of head movements and its role in Spoken Dialog," ICSLP'96, Philadelphia, October, 3-6, 1996.
(17) Kaczmarek, K. and Bach-y-Rita, P., "Tactile Displays," in Advance Interface Design and Virtual Environments, W. Barfield and T.F. III eds, (Oxford University Press), in press.
(18) Le Goff, B. and Benoit, C., "A Text-to-audiovisual speech Synthesizer for French," ICSLP'96, Philadelphia, October, 3-6, 1996.
(19) Luettin, J., Thacker, N.A. and Beet, S.W., "Speaker Identification by lipreading," ICSLP'96, Philadelphia, October, 3-6, 1996.
(20) Luzzati, D., (1987), "ALORS: A Skimming Parser for Spontaneous Speech Processing," Computer Speech and Language, Vol. 2.
(21) Marque, F., Bennacef, S.K., Neel, F. and Trinh, S., "PAROLE: A Vocal Dialogue System for Air Traffic Control Training" ESCA/NATO ETRW, Applications of Speech Technology, Lautrach, September,16-17.
(22) Martin, J.C., Veldman, R. and Beroule, D., "Developing Multimodal Interfaces : A Theoretical Framework and Guided-Propagation Networks," in Cooperative Multimodal Communication, H. Bunt, R.J. Beun eds, (Addison-Wesley).
(23) Maybury, M.T., (1995), "Research in Multimedia and Multimodal parsing and generation," in Integration of Natural Language and Vision Processing, Vol. II: Intelligent Multimedia, P. Mc Kevitt eds, (Kluwer Academics Publishers).
(24) Petajan, E., Bischoff, B., Bodoff, D. and Brooke, N.M., "An Improved Automatic Lipreading System to Enhance Speech Recognition," CHI'88, pp. 19-25.
(25) Price, P., (1996), "A Decade of Speech Recognition; The Past as Springboard to the Future," Proceedings ARPA 1996 Speech Recognition Workshop, (Morgan Kaufmann publishers).
(26) Rickheit, G., Wachsmuth, I., (1996), "Situated Artificial Communicators," in Integration of Natural Language and Vision Processing, Vol. IV: Recent Advances, P. Mc Kevitt ed., (Kluwer Academics Publishers).
(27) Spohrer, J.S., (1995), "Apple Computer's Authoring Tools & Titles R&D Program," in Integration of Natural Language and Vision Processing, Vol. II: Intelligent Multimedia, P. Mc Kevitt Ed., (Kluwer Academics Publishers).
(28) Stock, O., (1995), "A Third Modality of Natural Language?," in Integration of Natural Language and Vision Processing, Vol. II: Intelligent Multimedia, P. Mc Kevitt Ed., (Kluwer Academics Publishers).
(29) M. Taylor, F. Neel, and D. Bouwhuis, eds, (1989), The structure of multimodal dialogue, (Elsevier Science Publishers).
(30) Teil, D. and Bellik, Y., "Multimodal Interaction Interface Using Voice and Gesture," in The Structure of Multimodal Dialogue II, M. Taylor, F. Neel and D. Bouwhuis eds, Proceedings, The Structure of Multimodal Dialogue Worskhop, Maratea, September, 1991.
(31) Vo, M.T., Houghton, R., Yang, J., Bub, U., Meier, U., Waibel, A. and Duchnowski, P., "Multimodal Learning Interfaces," in Proceedings ARPA 1995, Spoken Language Systems Technology Workshop, Austin, January 22-25, 1995, (Morgan Kaufmann publishers).
(32) Waclar, H., Kanade, T., Smith, M. and Stevens, S., (1996), "Intelligent Access to Digital Video: The Informedia Project," IEEE Computer, 29 (5).
(33) Waibel, A., Vo, M.T., Duchnowski, P. and Manke, S., (1996), "Multimodal Interfaces," in Integration of Natural Language and Vision Processing, Vol. IV: Recent Advances, P. Mc Kevitt Ed., (Kluwer Academics Publishers).
(34) Wahlster, W., "Multimodal Presentation Systems: Planning Coordinated Text, Graphics and Animation," in Proceedings Colloque CNRS Images et Langages, M. Denis and M. Carfantan eds., Paris, April 1-2, 1993.
(35) Wahlster, W., (1996), "Multimodality: Text and Images," in Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology, E. Cole, J. Mariani, H. Uszkoreit, A. Zaenen and V. Zue eds., (Cambridge University Press).


text:
Iran – Q&A – From the press briefing (20 November 2019)
Q: According to several sources, more than 100 people have reportedly been killed following the demonstrations in Iran; dozens of people have reportedly been arrested and the Internet remains shut down. What is your reaction following this strong response by the Iranian security forces?
A: France is following the demonstrations taking place in Iran with concern. It expresses its deep concern at reports that a large number of demonstrators have been killed in the last few days.
It reaffirms its attachment to respect for the freedom of expression and to access to means of communication, as well as to the right to demonstrate peacefully.
France calls on Iran to comply with its international human rights obligations, in particular the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
More information on the website of the ministry (in French)
Embassy of France in Iran
Embassy of Iran in France
The Iranian nuclear issue
Iran - Q&A - Excerpts from the daily press briefing (23.08.18)
Joint statement - Re-imposition of US sanctions due to its withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) (06.08.18)
Joint letter from the European parties to the Vienna Agreement to their U.S. counterparts (06.06.18)
Iran – Visit by Mr Jean-Yves le Drian (05.03.18)
Iran - United States - Q&A - Excerpts from the daily press briefing (19.02.18)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


High oil resistance and chemical resistance.
Group 2 tye endures upto 4.8 MPa(at 20°C) .
Well Balanced between flexibility and pressure-resistant performance,and high worability.Most suitable for general air pressure piping usage.
Ether polyurethane resin is used to prevent degradation by water or mold under high temperature and high humidity.
coil processing and welding can be performed on request.
A clean tube suitable for equipment and application with fluids such as clean air,N2 gas, pune water and various chemical liquids.
Environment friendly eco tube.when burned at 750°C,PL tube generates only carbon dioxide gas,no nitrogen oxides(NOx),no sulphur oxides and absolutely no dioxin.
Better Workability compared to copper piping if DK fittings are used .Tube and processing is not necessary.
Flame resistant tube with high self-extracting performance is compliant with V-0 of UL94 standard.
Marking along the tube as an insertion length indicator.
Copyright © 2019 Nitta Corporation. Powered by WordPress. Theme: Spacious by ThemeGrill.


In 2012 the Classic Sports Car Club launched it`s Special Saloons race series. In so doing it revived a whole genre of modified club racing that was once common in the UK but had been missing for too long. The cars involved were those from different strains of modified racing...70`s Super Saloons ( such as the iconic `Baby Bertha` Firenza , 80`s/90`s Thundersaloons , Modsports , Special GTs and a variety of other fascinating machinery. Most of the cars are unique and some havn`t been seen racing for decades so the series is a kind of timewarp for enthusiasts.
This website is endorsed by the CSCC and I am grateful for their continued support of this site.
or click the photo of Doc Merfield ( right ).
2 special guest cars were on view during the sunday for enthusiasts to have a close look at and many recalled seeing back in period...Tony Hazelwood's unique DAF V8 and the ex-George Whitehead WRA Anglia pushrod race cars .
The 3rd round is a return to Brands Hatch which traditionally provides some of the best racing of the season. Bank holiday monday August 26th for the visit to Kent for this one.
The 2019 season opener marks a return to Oulton Park on the Bank Holiday weekend , Saturday May 25th .
For the very first time the CSCC Special Saloons + Modsports are visiting the emerald Isle when they race at Mondello Park near Dublin in the Republic of Ireland over the weekend of July 13th/14th.
...and the season finale will be at Thruxton ,the third year running at the UKs fastest track when the CSCC return on Saturday September 21st.


There is no independent, permanent, unchanging "I" or "You" or "Ven. Chuan Guan", but our existence in the various roles that we play. That exist.
Given conditions, "you" exist, and as a son or daughter wrt to your parents, as a niece or newphew to your uncle and aunts, as a friend to your peers, as a colleague at work, etc. These roles collectively is who you are, yet none of it totally define you.
Eat to Live, Live to Eat, or Eat to … … ?
A while back, a devotee who is a cab driver was driving me back after a lunch offering and was having a counselling-on-wheels session with me.
He was rather troubled by some past injustice and just can't help but want to do something about it. He wants justice.
Below is a repost of some questions and answers that I thought would be helpful for all.
2) Also, can chanting a buddha's name really enhance a person's wisdom? Can I chant the buddha's name( or Bodhisattva's name. Say, Manjusri Boddhisattva's name) so that I can memorise and understand a lot of Mathematics equations well?
3) Why is it that Mahayana Buddhist are encouraged not to eat the 5 pungent plant?
Apologies for the delay in replies. Hope this is still helpful!
The first thing one should perhaps do is ask oneself why the addiction should be dropped. It has to be one's personal reasons. And by personal, I mean, reasons that matter to you and not from some guidebook.
Only when you have good enough reasons to do so, will the suggestions below work.
A way to reduce the addiction, is to Change the cycle. And by that, I don't mean stop using internet. I mean, using it in a different manner.
Tell someone you trust about your situation and see if they can help you out. Access the internet with him/her and limit it to that period. It should not be someone who also uses the internet for 6 hours or more a day!
Telling someone about it and making the above arrangement creates peer support so that you get someone you trust to help you out. Because you've made your plan open, you also get a little positive peer pressure to do it right!
Another way is to Break the cycle.
Get involved in other activities that does not require the internet. Let your friends know in advance that you will be off-line for a few weeks. This may be tricky if your school requires you to correspond on subject matters using the internet. If possible, get a trusted friend to assist in this area.
We humans typically choose the path of least resistance. Make it harder to access internet. Say, cut off your internet access at home? This may only prove to be useful if you are under direct supervision of your parents or guardian(s). If not, it is likely that you will circumvent the very obstacles you setup and then go on an internet-binge thereafter.
Whoever you are trying to help break the addiction, it may be helpful to bring the person to seek help in person.
Reciting the Buddha's name has been endowed with numerous "powers". My personal take is that while such claims had been experienced by individuals, it may be helpful to see how it can be practically put to practice.
For one, reciting the Buddha's name is a form of simple meditation that can lead to inner calm and tranquility. This clears up our mind and make it easier to focus and learn. In that way, recital of the Buddha's name can be helpful for your wisdom and studies. But you still need to do the studying!
It is like the sharpening of an axe; you still need to do the chopping!
The avoidance of the five pungent plants fall under the Bodhisattva vows. The five pungent plants are said to be strong stimulants that can agitate the mind. The aim of avoiding them is to reduce the impact of stimulants on our mind. This is especially true for those striving to be a Bodhisattva.
For most people who are not training on the path, the impact of the pungent plants may seem negligible. This is because our mind is already agitated by our constant pursuit of our wants, desires and cravings. It does not however mean that there is no impact; it just mean that we are unaware of the impact because our mind is too desensitized already.
out there to see or hear anything else.
First off, don't let go. Start by observing the people, matters and things that we cannot let go and find out what all this is about. Apply the Buddha's teachings on impermanence, dependent arising, emptiness (of inherent nature) or no-self to reflect and observe.
When we slowly see clearly the inter-dependent-arising relationship between all of us, we would not be so attached to our self and esteem, and our unreal projection on others will cease.
However, this gradual "letting go" in reality does not exist. Without attachment, there is no need to "let go". Further, "letting go" is not "giving up". "Let go" of our deluded thinking and attachment, not give up on people, matters and things.
Respecting people's choices. Should all choices be respected? Or are all choices worthy of respect? People's right to making choices should be respected, but there are good choices and there are bad choices. Good choices bring about welfare and happiness to oneself and others while bad ones bring uncertainty, fear and stress.
Respecting all choices without distinction would mean respecting bad choices as well. When bad choices are respected, we encourage bad choices to be made again in future.
Respect people's right to choices, including bad ones. But don't respect all choices indiscriminately, especially the bad ones.


REACH Veterinary Specialists is a 24-hour emergency and specialty veterinary hospital located in the beautiful mountains of Western North Carolina. We accept patients 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, including holidays.
Appointments are not needed for emergencies.
Non-emergency specialty care is available Monday through Friday from 8am to 5pm. Please call for an appointment once you have been referred by your primary veterinarian.
We understand that having your pet hospitalized can be stressful for your pet and your family. Your presence can often improve your pet's recovery and give your family peace of mind therefore, we encourage you to visit during your pet's stay with us. We ask that you call us at 828-665-4399 to schedule a visit so we will be available to answer any questions you may have. The timing of your visit is dependent on how your pet is doing as well as how other patients are doing.
REACH is conveniently located on Brevard Road (Route 191) directly between the Asheville Outlets, Fred Anderson Toyota or I-26 (South), and the WNC Farmer's Market, Moose Café or I-40 (North).


text:
Gas, Articles
Will Greece–Russia gas deal threaten EU Energy security?
Earlier this month, Russian President Vladimir Putin promised Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras that Greece would get "hundreds of millions of Euros every year" for bringing Russian gas into the EU. Gazprom's goal is to establish a new entry point to Europe bypassing the traditional route through Ukraine. Panagiotis Lafazanis, the Greek energy minister, announced last week that Athens may repay the advance provided by Moscow once the "Turkish Stream" extension becomes operational in 2019.
Based on a statement by Alexey Miller, Gazprom's CEO, the Greek portion of the pipeline project is expected to cost approximately €2 billion. During Tsipras's visit to Moscow, the two countries agreed to create a working group, which will draw up "road map" for energy cooperation between Moscow and Athens.
The 50 bcm pipeline could help the dire economic situation in Greece, but it has yet to be approved by the EU. It is likely to face significant political and regulatory difficulties in Brussels, which has become increasingly combative vis-à-vis Gazprom. On Wednesday, April 22, Anna-Kaisa Itkonen, the spokesperson on energy matters for the European Commission said: "we are ready to offer our assessment on any such agreement, any such deal, and its implications, when we have something to base our assessment on." There is little doubt that the EU will apply its anti-monopoly laws and unbundling regulations of the Third Energy Package strictly, as it did against South Stream.
Moscow is desperate to advance its Turkey Stream project, which is planned to replace the ill-fated South Stream project, "killed" by Putin in December of 2014. On April 7, 2015, the foreign ministers of Greece, Hungary, Serbia, Macedonia, and Turkey came together to express their support for the Turkish Stream. The ministers signed a declaration confirming "support to create a commercially viable option of route and source diversification for delivering natural gas from the Republic of Turkey through the territories of our countries to the countries of Central and South Eastern Europe."
It is clear that Russia is wooing these current and potential EU members in an effort to secure an alternative route for its gas. Moscow is also courting allies, including Greece, Hungary and the Czech Republic, before the sanctions extension vote scheduled for the fall of 2015.
Russia is itself to blame for the current difficulties in protecting its gas market share in Europe. Before the annexation of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine, the smart money was on South Stream – including this author. However, with tensions high, the future of Turkey Stream is in question.
EU's recent antitrust charges against Gazprom, accusing the Russian gas giant of abusing its dominant market position in Europe, are likely to escalate tensions between Moscow and Brussels. "All companies that operate in the European market – no matter if they are European or not – have to play by our EU rules," said Margrethe Vestager, the Competition Commissioner, who is playing a key role in bending Gazprom – and Russia – to Brussel's regulatory and political will.
The Southern Gas Corridor – the system of pipelines running from the Caspian region through Turkey to Southern Europe – is one of the most complex amd strategic elements to ensure Europe's energy supply for decades to come.
The implementation of this initiative will significantly affect the political climate in Eurasia. Turkey is a winner: it would serve as a transit country while satisfying domestic demand and gaining significant political good will with the EU.
Maros Sefcovic, EC's Vice-President for Energy Union just last week said, "The European Union will increase support to Turkey in realization of the project for building the Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP)." The EU realizes that TANAP/TAP plans to involve several potential suppliers from Europe's neighborhood, therefore increasing the energy security and delivery dependability.
The projected capacity of the entire corridor is 16 expandable to 30 bcm per year. However, other sources of gas for TANAP could potentially be countries like Turkmenistan, Northern Iraq (Kurdistan) and eventually Iran. The maximum existing gas export capacity from Turkmenistan is now close to 100 bcm per year, most of which goes to China.
The foreign ministers of Turkey, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan met in Ashgabat in January 2015, and invited Turkmenistan to join the TANAP project. The Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, noted that the three countries share a same vision of transporting Turkmenistan's natural gas to Europe through Turkey. Turkmenistan holds the world's fourth-largest reserves of natural gas.
It seems like the proud owner of the second largest gas reserves, Iran, also wants to get in on the TANAP/TAP actions. Earlier this month, the Turkish Energy Minister Taner Yıldız said, "It will be possible for Iran to take a stake in the TANAP project as long as certain commercial conditions are fulfilled."
Nevertheless, the Russian opposition to the Trans-Caspian Pipeline is strong. Putin and Erdoğan became so close, that Putin chose Turkey to replace the politically troubled South Stream.
Erdoğan is in a difficult position, as Turkey is forced to decide between its major energy and trade partner Russia and its long time ally Azerbaijan. The opaque relationship between Erdogan and Putin goes beyond the field of energy, as Turkish construction firms make billions of dollars in Russian projects, and millions of Russian tourists vacation in Turkey – no visas needed. Ankara did the minimum to protect the Crimean Tatars, whose ancerstors used to be Ottoman citizens and are Turkic Sunnis, unlike the Shia, mostly secular Azeris.
Even though adding Russian gas transit routes and becoming a regional energy hub may be attractive for Turkey with a domestic consumption of about 50 bcm annually and growing, many gas executives ask whether Turkish Stream and TANAP can coexist.
Several energy experts have expressed concern over economic and political risks at stake. Yet, for the TAP/TANAP consortium members, Turkey Stream should not immeditatly affect project implementation in any way. The EU leadership is frustrated with the Greek government trying to dance on all weddings, and with the pro-Moscow factions in Serbia, Bulgaria, and Hungary.
The EU political and law enforcement institutions are on track to decrease Russian lobbying capacity in Southern Europe in order to establish solid cooperation framework among the member states.
Building Turkish Stream, a new route for Russian gas to reach the EU, does not by any means decrease European energy dependence on the Kremlin. The EU is therefore likely to support projects that allow its members to kick the Gazprom habit, including TAP/TANAP.
* Ariel Cohen, PhD, is Director of the Center for Energy, Natural Resources and Geopolitics at the m and Principal of International Market Analysis, Ltd.
(naturalgaseurope.com)


text:
Getting more done
See all solutions for getting more done
File storage & sharing
Getting More Done Articles
See all solutions for working better together
Teamwork hub
Email & calendaring
Intranet & team sites
Enterprise social network
Teamwork articles
See all solutions for building your business
Customer scheduling & booking
Invoicing software
Mileage tracking & reporting
Staff scheduling
Build your business articles
Safeguarding your data
See all solutions for safeguarding your data
Security & compliance articles
Simplifying your IT
Cummins puts productivity, innovation into overdrive with Microsoft 365
(10,000+ employees)
North America/United States
Cummins manufactures and services diesel and alternative fuel engines and electrical generator sets. To accelerate productivity and reduce corporate silos, Cummins replaced its existing tools with Microsoft 365, introducing an information management and collaboration framework to anchor a new workplace culture. More than 58,000 employees connect in creative teams across functions and borders to focus on keeping Cummins ahead of competitors.
The sound of a Cummins diesel engine at idle—throaty rumbling over a purposeful, rhythmic ticking—is the company's iconic, auditory signature. It's the sound of power, dependability, and innovation, and it sums up the Cummins brand every time a driver turns the key. Today, as Cummins switches gears to maintain leadership in a rapidly evolving automotive and power industry, another sound signals a technology revolution at the company—and it's a lot quieter.
As Cummins launches into the world of electrified power—with acquisitions of Brammo and Johnson Matthey Battery Systems and the addition of the Electrified Power Business Segment—and unveils new programs like the Digital Accelerator that focuses on the digitization of Cummins's products, it is more important than ever to enable the talents of a global organization through increased collaboration.
Empowering innovation means harnessing the talents of all 58,600 employees in more than 190 countries, and Cummins chose Microsoft 365 as an enabler. According to Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Sherry Aaholm, "At Cummins, we're taking the lead on the importance of diversity within the business culture. When I joined, I was impressed by the number of women executive leaders and the value Cummins places on diversity in decision making—for us it is a competitive advantage. Microsoft 365 supports that culture through flexible tools that suit different ways of working so everyone can deliver their best work." Microsoft 365—a complete, intelligent solution that includes Office 365, Windows 10 Enterprise, and Enterprise Mobility + Security—helps empower Cummins employees to be creative and work together in an extremely secure way.
Driving market leadership through creative collaboration
Aaholm works with the business to provide better access to colleagues and corporate data for everyone at the company. "Is there a direct relationship between workplace innovation and technical product innovation at Cummins? Yes, I think so," she says. In the pursuit of creative collaboration that leads to product innovation, Cummins is migrating away from its existing platform and adopting Microsoft 365. "It's really hard to say we're a leading-edge product engineering company if our business tools are dated and do not appeal to the talent we want to attract and retain at Cummins. "With Microsoft 365, we empower employees to collaborate and innovate globally—in highly secure ways."
In India, Cummins has just completed a global engineering facility to emphasize fluid teamwork with modern work environments, rather than cubicles and offices. More than 2,000 engineers work here, building designs for Cummins to market around the world. "We know that engineers not only want a cool place to work, they also want cool tools to do that work," says Aaholm. "Microsoft 365 is a big part of that. In addition to CAD tools, our engineers rely on tools like Skype for Business Online and OneDrive to stay productive."
"As much as engineers need top-notch design tools, they are only as good as their ability to advocate for whatever wonderful thing they've just created," adds Carole Casto, Vice President of Marketing and Communications at Cummins. "They use the Microsoft 365 tools to promote their work to our leadership." For example, in November 2017, Cummins brought 55 Wall Street analysts to its headquarters to watch technical demos that brought life to its strategies for the future. "The whole day was a huge success in generating positive buzz among investors," says Casto. For weeks before the event, engineers in India collaborated with communications and IT staff in the United States using Microsoft 365 tools. "The result was a day of persuasive storytelling that showcased the technical capabilities we have coming in the near future at Cummins."
With Microsoft 365, we empower employees to collaborate and innovate globally—in highly secure ways.
Sherry Aaholm, Vice President and Chief Information Officer Cummins
Identifying the foundation of secure unified communications
Cummins began its digital transformation by defining priorities for a modern workplace, beginning with breaking down corporate silos, providing a standard set of integrated business productivity tools, and improving anytime, anywhere access to information and colleagues. "There is significant value in providing appropriate work environments for our employees, who no longer work the way a traditional manufacturing company might expect," says Aaholm. "Millennials—who make up 57 percent of our workforce—expect to collaborate in real time, with video calls, texting, and coauthoring." Aaholm enlisted Casto to work with IT on the company's Unified Corporate Communications (UCC) program, which aims to streamline corporate communications by introducing a standard business productivity solution. "Carole's team achieved a huge mindset shift by taking this program to the business, transforming the way everyone uses Office 365 tools. Today, we are well on our way to living and breathing a modern way of working."
"I was working on repositioning the Cummins brand as we introduce new, environmentally friendly technology solutions to the market," adds Casto. "So, I was excited when Sherry pitched the UCC program, because it dovetailed with my goals. Running our business productivity platform on Microsoft 365 is a perfect fit for our new image as a leading-edge technology company."
Running our business productivity platform on Microsoft 365 is a perfect fit for our new image as a leading-edge technology company.
Carole Casto, Vice President of Marketing and Communications Cummins
Managing the information life cycle
As a first step in the UCC program, Cummins needed to improve how it managed the vast amount of corporate data that formed the company's knowledge stores and intellectual property. "Mobile, collaborative workplaces require tight security protocols and tools to manage and deliver information while supporting key Cummins processes," says Josh Littrell, Director of Corporate IT at Cummins. "We used Microsoft 365 to do just that. Today, we have an enterprise data management solution that adheres to our document classification and retention policies using Microsoft SharePoint Online. This is huge from a compliance perspective for Cummins."
How big is the Cummins data universe? On average, employees create more than 500,000 emails and receive more than 3 million emails every day. Unstructured content on the company's file shares amounts to 1.8 petabytes. Before the program, this data resided in file shares, hard drives, and a corporate intranet with a less-than-stellar search function. "We care a lot about our data, where it's stored, and how it's classified," says Melanie Sandlin, Executive Director of Corporate Functions and Components IT at Cummins. "So, it was a huge benefit to discover that Office 365 provides the tools we needed to ensure searchability, security, and compliance across all data repositories. It gave us the green light to make our corporate data available to anyone, anytime, on any device."
This is where Charley Barth, Global Director of Enterprise Content Management at Cummins, and his team come in. When it comes to creating content, they established a three-tier framework for everyone at Cummins to follow: creation of a file on OneDrive, which may or may not include coauthoring with peers; publication on a revamped intranet, dubbed Cummins Connect, that's built on SharePoint Online; and archiving as a corporate record in a brand-new digital records center (DRC), also housed on the intranet.
"OneDrive and SharePoint Online form a consistent thread across the three tiers of our enterprise content management solution, culminating in our DRC where we apply governance to adhere to our global retention schedules, our information handling policies, and our access controls—all using out-of-the-box SharePoint Online capabilities," says Barth.
Barth and his colleague Brittany Kreigh, Digital Workplace Leader at Cummins, took this three-tier framework on a global roadshow and introduced it to the workforce as the foundation for creating and collaborating on documents and for archiving data in a way that adheres to corporate policies. (See Figure 1.)
With this approach, Cummins has improved its control over content creation, storage, and access and life cycle policies—a huge benefit for a company that rests firmly on the security of its intellectual property. "Since deploying Microsoft 365, from the business standpoint, we have significantly reduced the overall risk of losing valuable information," says Littrell.
Today, we have an enterprise data management solution that adheres to our document classification and retention policies using Microsoft SharePoint Online. This is huge from a compliance perspective for Cummins.
Josh Littrell, Director of Corporate IT Cummins
Employees endorsing new tools
During the initial phase of the rollout, Cummins took advantage of Microsoft FastTrack, the customer-success service for Microsoft cloud solutions. "This was a new platform for Cummins, and I'm not sure we could have succeeded without FastTrack," says Littrell. "The FastTrack Team shared knowledge and expertise that we use to this day."
Since Cummins Connect launched in February 2017, the number of employees using the intranet has more than doubled. Now, employees often start their day on the home page, catching up on enterprise communications, videos, and stories and reviewing their own regional news feeds. More than 62,000 employees have created upward of 16,000 sites, uploading 4.9 million files to Cummins Connect. Employees have moved more than 31 million files into OneDrive, equating to 81 terabytes of data. "We are on a continuous improvement journey with the Microsoft 365 platform," adds Kreigh. "We'll be deploying Microsoft Teams and PowerApps next."
More than 50,000 employees use Cummins Connect every month, accessing their sites in 20 countries from corporate laptops and personal mobile devices, compared to 30,000 with the previous intranet. "Our polls showed that 80 percent of employees found the new tools more effective in getting their jobs done, compared to our previous technology," says Kimberly Trubiro, Corporate Communications Manager at Cummins.
Finding data fast saves time, expedites service
In addition to a more engaging, modern user interface, Barth credits the powerful enterprise and local site search capabilities as one reason for the popularity of the new intranet. It helps that the company introduced mandatory metadata completion before a document is checked into a site on Cummins Connect and that each site is configured with its own metadata, making documents even more searchable.
"Thanks to Microsoft 365, the speed of finding information has improved exponentially compared to our old environment," says Barth. "You can find people, you can use keyword searches and discover people related to that keyword, and you can use enterprise search to troll through OneDrive, Cummins Connect, wikis, blogs, and the DRC. I wish we could put a dollar figure on the productivity savings of being able to find documents and people with just a few clicks."
Improved search is making an impact on customer service. At the customer care center, employees quickly respond to a caller who has an issue with a specific turbo charger, for example, to discover preexisting solutions. "This opens up the ability for cross-functional service engineer teams to assess the number of issues showing up with a product and pass that along to the process improvement and production development teams for further investigation," says Littrell.
Driving productivity and innovation with effortless collaboration
With Microsoft 365 firmly in place as the foundation for a modern workplace at Cummins, the company's workplace culture shifted rapidly toward highly secure, streamlined digital collaboration and information management. Employees everywhere now incorporate Skype for Business Online video calls into their workdays. "It really opens up the face of dynamic collaboration when you can see the person you are talking to and read their facial expressions," says Aaholm.
Casto uses Skype for Business Online to build better relationships with partners. "We have a video call quarterly with a PR firm that's helping us with our brand work at Cummins," she says. "When you have a new partner and you are engaged in feedback sessions, video calls provide real-time insight into how people are feeling. It has been very helpful in getting positive results from our partnership. And I don't have to travel to their offices!"
Today, approximately 17,000 people use Yammer for enterprise social networking. Despite reporting structures that span the globe, employees across the company openly communicate and connect without worrying about translation issues. They converse in 19 languages, thanks to the translation feature in Yammer.
Recently, Aaholm and Casto worked together remotely and in real time on Microsoft PowerPoint slide content for presentations at a key management conference. "We shared documents in OneDrive and Cummins Connect while we aligned the messaging of 42 presenters' worth of content," recalls Casto. "My team and I were making changes to the slides up to an hour before presenters went onstage. And last year, we used the tools to create integrated marketing plans for 25 business segments, opening up new dialogue about best practices inside marketing. This was the first time we were able to do this work internally. We simply didn't have the tools before."
The Cummins legal team uses OneDrive and Cummins Connect to iterate with product development as prototypes go through different versions. Staff in corporate communications use the tools for refining corporate messaging and to announce acquisitions, such as Brammo. The company's Six Sigma group has also embraced the new way of work. "I can't tell you how many times the same Six Sigma projects have been conducted over and over, because up until now, there was no way of tracking what documents and projects were completed," says Littrell.
Looking ahead to greater innovation
Cummins has made huge strides in transforming how people work, driving collaboration and productivity with digital tools to match the pace of change in today's automotive industry. It's also presenting a more technically savvy edge to its brand. Looking ahead, the company expects to see an acceleration in innovation as well. "You need to have the capabilities in the workplace that we get with Microsoft 365 for people to be able to think and collaborate in diverse ways—that's going to take us to the next level of innovation at Cummins," says Casto.
"At the end of the day, we must differentiate ourselves through our products and services," concludes Littrell. "Embracing the tools and capabilities we get with Microsoft 365 makes us more efficient at aligning our efforts around developing those products and services. Today, we're moving at a pace that promises to keep us ahead in the market."
www.cummins.com
Cummins Summary Slide.pptx
Related customer stories
TD Securities
TD Bank Group supports a culture of inclusion with assistive technologies
Clover Imaging Group
Global imaging and mobile remanufacturer simplifies endpoint security with Windows Defender ATP
NPAT
Northampton Primary Academy Trust empowers staff and students with Office 365
Are you ready to achieve your goals?
Get the Office you know, plus tools to help you work better together, so you can get more done—anytime, anywhere.
Learn more about Office 365


Faced with the prospect of flunking an intelligence I.Q. test, Bart switches exams with brainy Martin Prince. When school psychologist Dr. Pryor studies the results, he identifies Bart as a genius, to the delight of Homer and Marge, who enroll Bart in a new school.
On his first day at the Enriched Learning Center for Gifted Children, Bart feels out of place among other students with advanced academic skills. At home, however, he enjoys newfound attention Homer shows him. Hoping to stimulate her son with a little culture, Marge buys the family opera tickets.
Ostracized by his genius classmates, Bart visits his old school, where he is rejected by his friends and labeled a "poindexter." When Bart's science project explodes and nearly destroys his new school, he confesses to Dr. Pryor that Martin Prince is the real genius. Bart returns home and tells Homer that he switched tests, and although it was a stupid thing to do, he is glad that they are now closer together. An irate Homer chases Bart through the house.
Bart spells Kwyjibo with his scrabble pieces and claims it is a "Big dumb balding North American ape with no chin". Marge adds "and a short temper".