Guidelines for National Updates

What are National Updates intended for?

A "National Update" is not just a formality that must be performed because it is on the Agenda of a meeting. It is one support for the ongoing work of the group. A National Update is supposed to do several things.

  1. It is to allow the members of the group to understand the nature and depth of work on the topics of interest to the group in each of the member countries.
  2. It provides a means for members to access researchers, developers and military project managers who are working on projects of special interest where collaborative action might prove mutually beneficial.
  3. It serves as a progress report on the work of the participants in the group.

Opening the relevant work in the nations to the view of the group members increases the likelihood of effective collaborations. The leverage afforded by such collaboration is the sole reason for the existence of international Research Task Groups. Collaborations under the umbrella of an RTG need not be between the institutions to which the participants belong, but can hardly be otherwise unless the participants in one nation are aware of work in another. National Updates are one way of aiding the RTG do perform its real work, which is to enhance the research, the development, and the use of the subject technology in the participating nations.

National Updates are now being archived on the vistg.net Web site, so as to be publicly accessible to interested researchers. This means that contributors should ensure that the material in the update does not violate their national copyright laws. If there is any doubt about the use of an image or text, it is best to ask permission from the institution that appears to own the copyright.

Why should a National Update be in writing?

To serve its major functions, a National Update should be provided in writing. There are several reasons for this:

  1. The contact information in the document is presumed to be correct, and not subject to transcription errors by the Secretary.
  2. The reports are directly accessible by the members receiving them, and are likely to be more accurate and complete than the Secretary's recording of verbal reports during the meeting..
  3. Verbal expansion of the written reports is both more informative and takes less time than a series of one-shot verbal presentations going round a table. Time is always short when there is real work to be done at the meeting.
  4. The usefulness of the reports is greater in the period between meetings than during the meeting.
  5. To be required to create the reports in writing demands more forethought on the part of the national representative than does an ad-hoc verbal presentation from the presenter's memory.

It is not necessarily true that a written report must be on paper. The discussion group http://www.vistg.net/private/discuss will be in a position to serve as an archive of reports available to all members of VisTG (currently with the official name IST-021/TG007). Reports are also being made directly available on a separate Web page within http://www.vistg.net, which means that they can be submitted in HTML, from which participants can make a print out for themselves if the reports are provided sufficiently in advance of the meeting for which they are prepared..

What should be in a National Update?

Since the intention of a National Update is to bring significant developments in a nation to the notice of the participants in the other nations, the first thing is the identification of those "significant developments." Many different kinds of development might be thought worthy of notice. Here are a few:

For each such item, at a minimum, the National Update should include

  1. A brief label for the item, for examplea project title or a name for the system deployed. (This should always be the first element)
  2. A description, as long or as short as the presenter deems necessary.
  3. Contact information for the item, preferably including e-mail and Web URL. The formal name of the institution9s) involved whould be included.
  4. A date when the update was created, since later events might invalidate it

    5. Beyiond this minimum requirement, other elements may be useful, including, but not limited to:

  5. A category description representing the nature of the information
  6. A link through which the reader can communicate with the person who created the update.

If the presenter wishes to include judicious personal observations on the item, there seems no reason not to do so, since the content of the National Update is intended for the other national participants to judge whether it will influence their own work.

How should a National Update be submitted?

At a minimum, the National Update should be available for perusal by the members at the meeting, while the presenter makes any necessary verbal elaboration and possibly answers questions on the included items.

If the National Update is submitted electronically sufficiently in advance of the meeting, the presenter may assume that the participants will have had the opportunity to make their own paper copies, or may read the update on their laptops at the meeting, and therefore need not supply paper copies at the meeting. Electronic submission may be by e-mail to the vistg mailing list (vistg@noc.drenet.dnd.ca) or by submission to the vistg private discussion board when that becomes fully operative.

How are data for the National Update obtained?

How to obtain data for the updates is a matter for each National Representative or other presenter (in other RTGs, some nations have more than one update presenter). To assist, here is a form e-mail circular letter sent by the Canadian representative on IST/RTG-001 on Speech Technology to many Canadian speech researchers in advance of the March 2001 meeting of the group.

Dear speech, language and audio technology professional:

This message is to inquire about your current activities in speech R&D. I am the Canadian delegate of the NATO research task group on military applications of speech processing. TG-01 meets every 6 months and each country prepares a written national update which is shared with the other participating NATO nations.

More specifically, the aim of the research study group on speech processing is to conduct mutual research projects in the various areas of speech processing, to assess speech input and speech output systems, and to promote the exchange of information about research activities in the participating nations. Activities of the TG-01 are based on selected efforts from the following areas:

National updates are designed to allow participating nations to learn about the main thrusts of work on speech in the other nations. These reports include information about new projects, results on current programs, future national congresses, symposia and workshops, new publications, new contracts, databases, applications of speech technology, new products or prototypes etc...

The emphasis in a national update is, of course, on matters specific to Canada, but information is also welcome on trans-national developments with which you are closely concerned, such as participation on speech-related committees and congress organisations.

I will compile and write the Canadian national update for the next RTG-01 meeting that will be held in March 2001. I hope you will keep us informed of your new developments again this time. I would also appreciate references for journal articles, conference papers and graduate theses which you or members of your group have appeared in the past few months or which will be published in the next few months.

If you desire to send a new contribution you can use your previous contribution(s) as a reference and concisely update the information that you communicated the last time. If it is the first time you write a contribution, please provide some background information about your corporation and your R&D projects.

You can also send commercial information (brochures) on products that you have developed and relevant URLs.

The previous update and notes from the last meeting are appended to this message .

If you wish to share information with the NATO community, please do not hesitate to forward your information to me, Carl Swail, by the 19th of March preferably via the INTERNET or by contacting me at 613- 998-5581 (Tel) 613-952-1704 (fax).

One further item of interest, the group will be meeting here in Canada in the spring of 2002, a year away. At this point, I am looking for organisations which would be interested in hosting a visit and possibly providing a meeting room. If you are interested, please get in touch with me in the next few months as the arrangements will have to be made this fall.

Please let me know if you wish to continue to receive this information, even if you don't have anything to contribute at the moment. Also, if there is someone you know of who should be added to my list, please let me know.