Intelligent Workstations for Professionals

Physicians, lawyers, engineers, architects, financial analysts, and other pro­ fessionals articulate an increasing need for support by intelligent workstations for decision making, analysis, communication, and other activities. "Intelligent Workstations for Professionals" is the collection of papers presented by inter­ national scientists at a symposium and workshop in March 1992. Requirements from potential users, studies of their behavior as well as approaches and aspects oftechnical realizations of "intelligent" functions are introduced. Eight contributions from members of the Center for Information and Tele­ communication Technology (Clrn of Northwestern University, Wisconsin­ Whitewater University, and the Children's Memorial Hospital deal with the latest findings of the UNIS (Users' Needs for Intelligent Systems) project, which is designed to identify needs and wishes from professionals for intelligent sup­ port systems and the potential barriers to adoption and use of such systems. The remaining papers concentrate on new approaches and techniques that en­ hance the "intelligence" of future workstations. They tackle issues like architectural trends in workstation design, the combination of workstations with HDTV and speech processing, automatic reading and understanding of documents, the automated development of software, or the processing of in­ exact knowledge. These papers were contributed by members of the DFKI GmbH (German Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence), GMD mbH (German Society for Mathematics and Data Processing), Siemens Gammasonics Inc., Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG and Siemens AG.