The Past and Future of the Smart Board Project

This project has made substantial progress toward targeting specific goals, gaining student involvement, and producing prototype software. Currently, a team of four undergraduate programmers at Caltech is making rapid progress toward creating a software infrastructure that includes handwritten character recognition, font manipulation, via "smart text," morphing of hand-written to typeset text, and a simple gesture-driven system for performing vector calculus. By the fall of 1997 Caltech will have at least one and possibly two new graduate students dedicated to this project.

The Smart Board project has attracted the attention of numerous other groups, including both CDS (control and dynamic systems) and electrical engineering at Caltech, and research groups at both Silicon Graphics and Apple Computer. The project now has a rather diverse group of participants and is gaining momentum

Collaboration with Peter Perona's vision laboratory at Caltech has been extremely fruitful, bringing together researchers in graphics, vision, and artificial intelligence. It has also been mutually beneficial to the two laboratories, since vision-based methods will be driven largely by the demands of this project.

After extensive research into previous work from the 1960's up through the present, the goals of the project have remained essentially identical with those expressed in the original proposal. Several new techniques have been identified as useful tools, such as stochastic grammars, and "continuation-based" computing, and the scope has been broadened slightly to include graphical methods relevant to computer science, such as diagrammatic interaction with finite state machines and manipulation of predicate calculus.


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