We have developed Interaction Builder (IB), a rapid prototyping tool for constructing web-based Multi-Modal Interaction (MMI) applications. The goal of IB is making it easy to develop MMI applications with speech recognition, life-like agents, speech synthesis, web browsing, etc. For this purpose, IB supports the following interface and functions: (1) GUI for implementing MMI systems without the details of MMI and MMI description language, (2) functionalities of handling synchronized multimodal inputs/outputs, (3) a test run mode for run-time testing. The results of evaluation tests showed that the application development cycle using IB was significantly shortened in comparison with the time using a text editor both for MMI description language experts and for beginners.

We present a new method called the slope nucleation method (SNM) for the growth of high-quality organic 4-dimethylamino-N-methyl-4-stilbazolium tosylate (DAST) crystals. The SNM features the ability to control the nucleation position and the growth orientation of DAST crystals in spontaneous nucleated growth. X-ray diffraction (XRD) rocking curve measurements indicate that the SNM is effective for obtaining high-quality DAST crystals as compared to conventional spontaneous nucleation methods. We evaluated the electro-optic (EO) properties of DAST crystals by an external EO probing technique because DAST crystals are expected to be used in transverse-field probing. DAST crystals exhibits nearly five-times EO sensitivity enhancement as compared to inorganic KTiOPO4 (KTP) crystals at 90 kHz. The larger EO signal power obtained from the DAST crystal was almost constant at low frequencies (30 Hz to 90 kHz), whereas the KTP crystal could not respond below 180 Hz. We also observed excellent signals at all measured points due to the improved crystallinity of the crystal grown by the SNM.