Without the corresponding language skills, it is not easy to go shopping in a foreign country, to find one’s way around or decipher a menu. With this problem in mind, a new mobile application developed by the Fraunhofer Institute of Germany will be rolled out at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, China.
The digital helper for the 2008 Olympic Games in China can provide users with the information they need via a digital handheld device, such as a PDA, which has an internet browser, a cell-phone connection and a GPS module. For example, when you want food, you just click on the food button. The software uses the GPS in your phone to figure out where you are and checks nearby restaurants against what it knows about your preferences. Once in the restaurant, you can write what you want in English and COMPASS will translate it into Mandarin, or whatever the local language is, both spoken and written.
Manfred Wojciechowski, who heads the Working Group on Technology at the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST, believes that "the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing could be an outstanding opportunity to launch COMPASS". The Fraunhofer researchers have been collaborating for many years with the Chinese Institute of Computing Technology ICT and CapInfo, a Beijing systems engineering company. Deutsche Telekom and the Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz DFKI (German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence) are also involved in the COMPASS project.
COMPASS 2008 has already successfully completed its first field trial in Beijing: 15 test candidates had to find a café nearby, take a taxi and, in China particularly important, haggle over a price. Everybody successfully met the challenges with which they were presented and, as Wojciechowski reports, "Last but not least, the shop assistants and taxi drivers were also enthusiastic about the system." The intricacies of the system are now to be further refined, "Above all, it’s important to establish the user’s trust in the system," stresses Wojciechowski. "Users have to be sure that the information in their profile is only used in their interests and to achieve this, it has to be up to them which information is made available and to whom." In the future, the digital companion will be able to help in other situations in which foreigners have difficulty understanding. (http://www.fraunhofer.de)
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