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Opportunities for software contribution and collaboration in
Open Mind Handwriting Recognition
Led by Dr. Lambert Schomaker of the UNIPEN
Foundation, the Open Mind Handwriting recognition project
seeks to collect data and develop recognizers of a variety of
handwriting data, such as digits, isolated letters, and words
in a variety of western languages (primarily English). Handwriting
recognition requires large sets of training data (as do other
Open Mind projects) and our hypothesis is that such data can be
contributed by non-expert netizens over the web. You can read
background material at:
In a character-based approach, images of unknown recorded isolated
character patterns are presented on a netizen's browser. The netizen
then submits to the Open Mind host his or her classification of
the character by clicking the corresponding button on a simple
interface. For the case of words (having a known ASCII string
representation but an unknown location of the letters in the image),
the interface is a bit more complex but the general idea remains
the same: humans are quite good at pointing out the individual
characters in a word.
While a small-scale web-based labeling system has been written,
there is much software engineering to be done before it is "ready
for prime time." Several Linux example programs for labeling
are available to serve as an inspiration for developing the browser
version for netizens. Issues of browser independence, speed, load
optimizing, robustness, algorithms for ensuring data reliability,
and the balancing of client/server computation must be addressed
before the project is ready for load testing and public deployment.
We are seeking software engineers to contribute gratis to this
effort. Practical experience with Web-based user interfaces, Java,
Javascript, CGI programming and Linux (C language) will be required.
A pragmatic view, combined with sensitivity to user issues, would
be ideal. A knowledge of pattern recognition research, while desirable,
is not needed.
If you feel you would like to contribute, please send a short
e-mail describing your relevant background to me (not to the handwriting
project director himself). Of course, if you have particular questions,
please don't hesitate to contact me. In either case, please write
"Open Mind Handwriting" in your header.
Many thanks in advance.
--David G. Stork
stork@OpenMind.org
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The Open Mind Initiative is
a collaborative framework for developing 'intelligent' software
over the internet. Open Mind extends traditional open source
methodology to allow non-expert 'netizens' to contribute data
needed for such software.
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