SRI Speech Technology and Research Laboratory

Seminar Series

2001 Seminar Talks

Ian H Witten, Computer Science Department, University of Waikato, New Zealand.

Time: Wednesday, Dec 5, 2001, 11:00 AM
Title: Browsing around a digital library
Venue: EJ 124
Abstract:

What will it be like to work in the digital library of the future? We begin by browsing around an experimental digital library of the present, glancing at some collections and seeing how they are organized. Then we look to the future. Although present digital libraries are quite like conventional libraries, we argue that future ones will feel qualitatively different. Readers--and writers--will work in the library using a kind of context-directed browsing. This will be supported by structures derived from automatic analysis of the contents of the library--not just the catalog, or abstracts, but the full text of the books and journals--using new techniques of data mining.

About the speaker:

Ian H. Witten is professor of computer science at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. He directs the New Zealand Digital Library research project. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by demonstration. He has published widely in these areas, including six books, the most recent being Managing gigabytes: Compressing and indexing documents and images (second edition, Morgan Kaufmann, 1999) and Data mining: practical machine learning tools and techniques with Java implementations (Morgan Kaufmann, 2000). He received an MA in mathematics from Cambridge Unversity, England; an MSc in computer science from the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in electrical engineering from Essex University, England. He is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

Peter Garst, CIC Corp.

Time: Thursday, May 31, 2001, 10:30 AM
Title: Handwriting based interface for mathematical notation
Abstract:

The ultimate goal for a handwriting based interface for mathematical notation is to put together accurate recognition with efficient editing tools and good application integration in order to make the system easier to use than chalk. I will demonstrate and describe a system which takes a few steps in this direction. It implements a wide range of editing operations, such as adding ink to textual expressions, dragging parts of expressions to new locations, replacing parts of expressions by writing over them or dragging something new on top of them, and so on. The system relies on a flexible parser for both the original recognition and the editing operations. During editing operations the input to the parser is a complex mix of known and unknown characters, and known and unknown positional relations.