Translations off the Web
Train Tickets via the Internet
The Benefits of Sharing
Smart Card
Translations off the Web
Surfing the Web has recently become a lot easier for Japanese Internet users, thanks to an innovative Web-browser translator program called "Internet King of Translation." Developed jointly by a team at IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory (TRL) and the Embedded Systems Business Unit/Power System Software at Yamato, the program has been preloaded on IBM Aptiva® PCs sold in Japan since its introduction in September 1996. It is also available as a stand-alone product.
Version 2.0, released in mid-June of this year, adds several improvements, including an abstraction capability. "The abstraction engine," says TRL's Hideo Watanabe, "picks up important sentences, based on key words and other surface features, and then produces a summary of the main text, which is then translated into Japanese. The abstract is typically about 30 percent shorter than the original."
Internet King also incorporates two other innovations that greatly enhance the value of the translator. One, called Autopilot, was unique to the IBM product when first introduced. A "spider," or Web-crawling, program permits users to specify the URLs they would like translated and the time at which they want the system to carry out the task. It gives users the advantage of lower night-time phone rates, in addition to the efficiency of having multiple Web pages translated while they sleep.
The other key innovation in the Web translator is TRL's unique translation engine called PalmTree, which uses a technique called "pattern-based translation." The traditional technique first analyzes a sentence in the source language and then produces a source sentence structure that is converted into a corresponding structure in the target language. Finally, it generates a translation from the target structure.
The new approach compares a given sentence with predefined patterns. A pattern is a pair consisting of a grammatical fragment, or phrase - for example, one consisting of a noun and a verb - in the source language and its corresponding fragment in the target language. Since each fragment of a specific English sentence has a matching fragment in Japanese, the translation is simultaneously constructed as the English sentence is mapped into its constituent fragments, a process called synchronous derivation, whose theoretical basis was first described by linguists at the University of Pennsylvania.
The use of patterns also simplifies the task of enhancing the translation quality of MT (machine translation) systems and enlarging their dictionaries, which traditionally entails time-consuming tuning of the underlying rules. "With the new approach, tuning is as simple as adding new patterns to the dictionary," says team member Koichi Takeda. "That's something even an end user can do."
Train Tickets via the Internet
Experiencing travel online now means more than surfing the Web. A new service developed by the Swiss Federal Railways and IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory allows computer users anywhere to order train tickets, securely pay for them by credit card and automatically receive them by mail.
The new ticket-ordering system, introduced in July, is based on IBM's Net.Commerce product, which allows companies to present their products and services on the Internet. To order tickets, customers select their destinations and itineraries from the online schedule, obtain fare quotes based on specific requests, such as travel class and special fare offerings, and then complete the transaction with the click of a mouse. Swiss Railways sends the tickets and travel documents by overnight mail anywhere in Switzerland, or allows the customer to arrange pickup at designated Swiss rail stations.
The Internet ticketing solution is part of IBM's pioneering First-of-a-Kind program, which pairs industry customers with the resources of IBM Research and IBM's Industry Solutions Units.
"We can meet the specific needs of our customers through the Internet more quickly and more effectively, as well as develop new promotional opportunities that will grow our business," says Paul Blumenthal, director of passenger services for Swiss Railways. "Travel ticketing is an excellent way to demonstrate - and continue to test -the full potential of the Internet for electronic commerce applications," adds Phil Janson, manager of information technology solutions at the Zurich lab. "We're looking for ways to extend such systems and someday to offer such conveniences as delivering electronic tickets via the Internet for downloading onto travelers' smart cards."
For more information see: http://www.sbb.ch/
The Benefits of Sharing
Working at a computer screen is usually a solitary experience - but one that individuals frequently would like to share. Not only is collaborative computing desirable, it is also a very natural way of working. And it can be essential in a variety of important applications.
In the last two years, the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web has opened up a host of new collaborative possibilities. In response, scientists at the Tokyo Research Laboratory have focused their efforts on a broad range of Web collaboration technologies.
TRL started work on collaborative computing in the late 1980s. An early success was a technology for shared "whiteboards," which allowed remote users to write and annotate a common workspace. The technology was incorporated in IBM's Power Mobile Video Conferencing product, released in 1995.
Building on that work, a research team led by Makoto Kobayashi has recently achieved a significant advance. "We have developed the means to let two or more users share a Web browser in a fully interactive manner using a low-bandwidth communications channel," says Kobayashi.
The TRL technology, called WebShare, is intended to be used with other modes of communication, such as digital voice, or Internet telephony. But even with modem connections as low as 14.4 kilobits per second and when 9.6 kbps is allocated to voice communication, users experience a sense of natural responsiveness.
WebShare is a form of application-sharing software, a category in which Microsoft's NetMeeting® is perhaps the best-known product. While NetMeeting, unlike WebShare, enables entire applications such as spreadsheets or wordprocessors to be shared - by exchanging low-level graphic commands - it requires much greater bandwidth and cannot be done in real time. Moreover, the browser is the window onto the Internet, and the ability of two people to share it is the key to important business solutions.
WebShare offers an additional advantage not available with NetMeeting. "With WebShare one can share not only the screen but also programs embedded in the HTML pages, such as Java applets or Java script," says Kobayashi. Two pilot projects - one involving banking, the other, education - have demonstrated the value and competitive advantage of such collaboration.
In April, Fuji Bank, one of Japan's largest, became the first institution to use WebShare. Its customized system currently provides personalized assistance to customers accessing kiosk terminals in five unmanned branches. A Java applet hidden from the user
automatically connects the remote site to a call center, where an agent can help the customer navigate through, say, a loan application. The sites have proved very successful, and the bank reports that it has received more applications at the unmanned kiosks than at its regular offices.
In another application, WebShare is being used for projects with SECOM, a company whose services include home healthcare and education. The first project, called Tutor-on-Demand, allows a tutor to monitor and correct a student's work, as well as answer questions. The second, a First-of-a-Kind project called Virtual Campus, will use a multiparty, extended version of WebShare to connect live classes at the Tokyo National Astronomy Observatory to five public schools over the cable TV network.
The success of these early projects led to the formation, at the beginning of August, of the CyberCollaboration Solution Development group. This team of 42 people, based in Yamato, has worldwide responsibility for creating collaborative solutions. Its key technology is WebShare. "As applications become increasingly available," says Kobayashi, "browsers will become the meeting place of the future."
Smart Card Standard
A network computer system offers business users the opportunity to access information on corporate servers from remote public locations around the world. But designers of such systems face a problem of security: how can they ensure that only authenticated individuals gain access to networks and services from any network computer?
Smart cards may provide the best and easiest means. These resemble today's familiar plain magnetic-stripe cards, but are much more secure and powerful. Each card stores the cardholder's personal information in its highly secure, integrated chip. By entering a PIN code, the user identifies and authenticates himself or herself as the legitimate cardholder. Based on public and private keys stored in the card, the network computer identifies and authenticates the user to the network and service providers, and vice versa.
Europeans have already accepted smart cards, but the United States has lagged significantly in their adoption, mainly because of its different telecommunications cost structure. In the United States, where costs are low, most transactions involving magnetic-stripe cards can be carried online with the card issuer, thus permitting a security check. In Europe, high telecommunications costs make it prohibitive to check most low-cost transactions online. Thus, the security check is performed locally by the more secure smart card.
Gaining acceptance of smart-card entry to network computers in Europe and the United States demands standardized functions and interfaces for the integration of smart cards, card readers, and network computers from various vendors. Earlier this year, researchers at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory made a significant move toward that goal. They developed a proposal for a standard, called the Java(TM)-based OpenCard Framework, that has since been endorsed by Netscape, NCI (a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle Corp.) and Sun, as well as IBM.
The framework stems from work at Zurich last year that helped to create the first and, so far, only network computer to feature integral support for smart cards to sign on to networks. The standard provides an environment in which network computers, smart cards, service providers and application developers can cooperate with each other.
"The combination of smart cards, network computers and the Internet is a very powerful one - one that could turn out to be a key enabler for network computing," declares Zurich scientist Dirk Husemann. "A necessary prerequisite is software that can talk to any kind of smart card, using any kind of card terminal. The OpenCard Framework strives to fulfill that goal."
The new framework "extends the security of network computers to remote and mobile users," says Donna Van Fleet, vice president of software strategy at IBM's Network Computing Division. "This standard enables smart card holders the freedom to use a network computer at any location to check their mail, get updates from the office and find directions to their hotel or destination." The standard thus opens the way for a future in which hotels and such public venues as airports will provide access to computer networks through smart cards.
