Minutes of the 2019-03-24 IAB Business Meeting, Prague

1. Attendance

Present:

• Jari Arkko
• Alissa Cooper (IETF Chair)
• Stephen Farrell
• Wes Hardaker
• Ted Hardie (IAB Chair)
• Christian Huitema
• Mirja Kuehlewind (IESG Liaison)
• Zhenbin Li
• Allison Mankin (IRTF Chair)
• Gabriel Montenegro
• Cindy Morgan (IAB Executive Administrative Manager)
• Erik Nordmark
• Mark Nottingham
• Karen O’Donoghue (ISOC Liaison)
• Colin Perkins (incoming IRTF Chair)
• Melinda Shore
• Robert Sparks
• Jeff Tantsura
• Martin Thomson
• Brian Trammell
• Suzanne Woolf

Guest:

• Olaf Kolkman

2. Executive Session: IAB Chair Selection

In an executive session, the IAB selected Ted Hardie as the IAB Chair for 2019-2020. Brian Trammell recused himself from the discussion.

3. IAB Program Leadership

The IAB discussed the leadership of various IAB Programs.

Stephen Farrell will join Jari Arkko as co-lead of the IANA Program.

Brian Trammell will remain the IAB Lead for the IP Stack Evolution Program.

Zhenbin Li will join Mark Nottingham as co-lead of the Liaison Oversight Program.

Melinda Shore and Brian Trammell will remain as co-leads of the Plenary Planning Program.

Stephen Farrell will join Martin Thomson as co-lead of the Privacy and Security Program.

Christian Huitema will take over as the IAB Lead for the RSOC.

4. IAB Roles

The IAB liaison to the IESG will be finalized later this week.

Martin Thomson will serve as the IAB liaison to the 2019-2020 NomCom.

Christian Huitema will take over as the IAB stream manager.

5. Liaison Shepherds

The IAB reviewed the IAB shepherds for the various IETF liaison relationships, and made the following changes:

• Jeff Tantsura will be the liaison shepherd for 3GPP.
• Ted Hardie will be the liaison shepherd for the Community Coordination Group.
• Wes Hardaker will be the liaison shepherd for the ICANN Board of Directors.
• Ted Hardie will be the liaison shepherd for the ICANN NomCom.
• Ted Hardie will be the liaison shepherd for the ICANN RZERC.
• Ted Hardie will be the liaison shepherd for ISO/IEC JTC1 SC6.
• Alissa Cooper will be the liaison shepherd for ISO/TC46.
• Erik Nordmark will be the liaison shepherd for ISO/TC204.
• Stephen Farrell will be the liaison shepherd for Messaging Anti- Abuse Working Group (M3AAWG).
• Jari Arkko will be the liaison shepherd for the Multi Stakeholder Platform on ICT Standardisation.
• Martin Thomson will be the liaison shepherd for Unicode.

6. IAB conference call times, meeting frequency, and meeting length

The IAB agreed to change their conference call time to 1330 UTC from 16 March through 15 October and 2130 UTC from 16 October through 15 March.

The IAB agreed to experiment with the IAB meeting schedule between IETF 104 and the IAB retreat. Meetings will be scheduled for 60 minutes on the first, second, and third weeks of the month, with the option for the meeting on the second week of the month to be canceled if the IAB agrees to do so by the end of the previous week’s meeting.

7. Voice invocation and identifier comparison: How many layers to the API?

Ted Hardie observed that voice system inputs are getting more common, but they are being built without much regard for interoperability. Despite some very common linkages to external systems, ecosystems are siloed. Confusabilty for registered or local actions can be high.

When you say “Yelp me an open restaurant near here,” how do you know that you are getting Yelp.com’s service?

Currently, you are relying on the pipeline to have resulted in either a transcription that could be matched to yelp.com, a registered action produced by yelp.com, or a mark famous enough that the intent was reserved for that use.

Voice interactions can use multiple different pipelines:

• Locale–>Language model–>phoneme identification–>contextual orthography model–>transcript
• Language model stage one–>language model with identified language(s)–>intent model–>output action
• Hotword–>conversational script–>branching intent model–>output action

This variation can occur within a single mobile system now. At the moment, getting interoperability between voice interactions and non-voice interactions is largely luck. Ted Hardie asked if there is anything the IAB can to do to develop a real strategy?

Stephen Farrell said it would be good if the IAB could try to document some of the issues.

Christian Huitema observed that it is difficult to do this sort of thing without personalization; these systems require a lot of training data.

Erik Nordmark noted that there is nothing in a string of phonemes to indicate when something is an identifier. Martin Thomson added that there are holes where identifiers can exist without context, which makes it more challenging.

The IAB agreed to continue thinking about this issue.