Title: Intelligent pen-based interfaces and their applications to CAD and education.

T. StahovichUniversity of California, Riverside
Mechanical Engineering DepartmentAbstractSketching with pencil and paper has always been an important means of
communication and problem-solving for designers and engineers. There are a
variety of reasons for this. For example, sketches are a convenient tool for
examining geometric, temporal, and other such relationships, which cannot be described easily in words. Similarly, the simplicity and ease of creating a
sketch allows one to focus on problem solving rather than the communication
medium. Yet, despite the importance of sketches in engineering practice,
traditional engineering software can do little with them. We are working to
change this by creating sketch understanding techniques that enable software
to work directly from the kinds of sketches engineers ordinarily draw. This
talk will present techniques for interpreting free-hand sketches and
transforming them into models suitable for use with engineering analysis
tools. The talk will also present examples of pen-based engineering tools we
have developed with our techniques. Finally, the talk will conclude with a
discussion of recent applications of this work to the development of
pen-based educational software.BIO
Dr. Stahovich received a B.S in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 1988. He received an S.M. and Ph.D. from MIT in 1990 and 1995 respectively. He conducted his doctoral research at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. After serving as an Assistant and Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, Dr. Stahovich joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at UC Riverside in 2003. He also currently holds cooperative appointments in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Departments at UC Riverside. His research interests include pen-based computing, design automation, and design rationale management.

Location: Stauffer Science Lecture Hall, Rm 100

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: April Mundy