Brian Eoff

Free-sketch recognition: putting the chi in sketching

Sketch recognition techniques have generally fallen into two camps. Gesture-based techniques, such as those used by the Palm Pilots Graffiti, can provide high-accuracy, but require the user to learn a particular drawing style in order for shapes to be recognized. Free-sketch recognition allows users to draw shapes as they would naturally, but most current techniques have low accuracies or require significant domain-level tweaking to make them usable. Our goal is to recognize free-hand sketches with high accuracy by developing generalized techniques that work for a variety of domains, including design and education. This is a work-in-progress, but we have made significant advancements toward our over-arching goal.

Sketch-based educational games: "drawing" kids away from traditional interfaces

Computer-based games and technologies can be significant aids for helping children learn. However, most computer-based games simply address the learning styles of visual and auditory learners. Sketch-based interfaces, however, can also address the needs of those children who learn better through tactile and kinesthetic approaches. Furthermore, sketch recognition can allow for automatic feedback to aid children without the explicit need for teacher to be present. In this paper, we present various sketch-based tools and games that promote tactile learning and entertainment for children.

Plurality: a context-aware personalized tagging system

We present the design of Plurality, an interactive tagging system. Pluralitys modular architecture allows users to automatically generate high-quality tags over Web content, as well as over archival and personal content typically beyond the reach of existing Web 2.0 social tagging systems. Three of the salient features of Plurality are: (i) its self-learning and feedback-sensitive capabilities based on a users personalized tagging style; (ii) its leveraging of the collective intelligence of existing social tagging services; and (iii) its context-awareness for optimizing tag suggestions, e.g., based on spatial or temporal features.

EUROGRAPHICS Tutorial on Sketch Recognition

Sketch recognition is the automated understanding of hand-drawn diagrams. Despite the prevalence of keyboards and mice, hand-drawings still pervade in education, design, and other diagrams. This full day tutorial explains why sketch recognition is important, the underlying algorithms, how sketch recognition can be used in traditional interfaces, and the field’s experiences with sketch recognition used in different domains.

CrowdTracker: enabling community-based real-time web monitoring

CrowdTracker is a community-based web monitoring system optimized for real-time web streams like Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz. In this demo summary, we provide an overview of the system and architecture, and outline the demonstration plan.