QUICKSET

QuickSet is a collaborative, multi-modal system which uses a distributed multi-agent architecture. It uses unification of typed feature structures (see Section 2.2.1.3) to determine which command has been issued by a user, where each input modality helps to disambiguate the others because of the restricted unification possibilities suggested by each [6].

QuickSet is a framework of semi-autonomous agents which communicate asynchronously. The advantage of asynchronous communication being that an agent can request a certain functionality without worrying about who will provide it, where it resides (since the framework can run in a distributed environment), how to actually invoke it, or how long to wait for it.

QuickSet runs on many architectures and hardware platforms, and has been applied to a number of applications including:

• Simulation set up and control - QuickSet is used to interface with ModSAF simulator, a tool used by the US military for training platoon leaders and company commanders.
• Force laydown - QuickSet is used in a second US Military application called ExInit (Exercise Initialisation) which enables users to create large-scale exercises for simulation. Previous manual methods of initialising a large scale simulation would take several people around a year to create, whereas using QuickSet, a scenario containing over 60,000 entities took a single ExInit user around 63 hours (most of which was computation).
• Medical informatics - QuickSet is used to retrieve information about healhcare in Portland, Oregon. Users can inquire using speech and gesture about available health care providers. For example a user might say ``show me all psychiatrists in this neighbourhood <circling gesture on map>'', and the system would display several icons on the map. User's may ask follow up questions about individual providers, or about transport to and from health centres.