Welcome to the website of the Center of Excellence for Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR). A wide variety of documents are encountered by each of us everyday. They cover all spheres of our lives including commerce, education, law, health, religion, music and entertainment. Some of these documents have a simple and predictable structure such as a page in a printed book. Others have much more complex structure such as those involving figures, tables, logos, signatures, handwriting, etc. Discovering methods and algorithms for analyzing the structure and content of complex documents, and their generalization to related domains, is the focus of research at CEDAR.

The following is a special contribution to this blog from Henry Kautz, Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester. His research interests are in knowledge representation, satisfiability testing, pervasive computing, and assistive technology. He is currently President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). If you have comments on this essay, e-mail Henry or add an entry to the bottom of this blog post. Countless gallons of ink (real and virtual) have been spilled on the need to infuse the humanities into science and engineering education.

Stan Abrams is a Beijing-based IP/IT lawyer and law professor. Whether you're interested in Chinese or the effects of technology, this is a fun topic: Students from South-Central University for Nationalities in Wuhan, Hubei Province, recently conducted a survey of college students' abilities to write Chinese characters by hand. Of the 143 college students who participated, only 12 could write all 10 characters in the test correctly. I should point out that the test involved characters that are commonly written incorrectly, so the results may make the problem appear somewhat larger than it really is. Of course, there is a problem, and not a new one; moreover, it may be getting worse.

Sargur N. Srihari, director of the University at Buffalo's Center of Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR) and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, has won the 2011 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) Outstanding Achievements award. He is being honored with the award for his outstanding and continued contributions to research and education in handwriting recognition and document analysis, and for his service to the community. Srihari recently traveled to Beijing to accept the award and serve as a keynote speaker at the conference, held bi-annually by the International Association for Pattern Recognition. His speech, entitled "Probabilistic Graphical Models in Machine Learning," focused on the design of computer programs that learn and are able to modify their behavior in an environment of constantly changing information. Without machine learning, many computers that deal with rapidly changing data would require constant reprogramming.

Global robotics executives will converge on Boston this week as the leading business development event for the robotics industry has its 10th annual conference here, solidifying the Hub's reputation as a national leader in artificial intelligence bots. Cutting-edge innovators will display robots that teach special education students, toy robots, autonomous vehicles for mining and military manufacturing, wearable robots that help people with disabilities walk, and humanoid bots complete with arms and legs.

As a young high school teacher in 1982, Diane Souvaine leapt into graduate school for computer science having taken only one class in the subject. Computers, she believed, offered an exhilarating way to apply her math skills to real-world problems. And because computer science was coming into its own in the feminist age, she also hoped it would be more welcoming to women than her undergraduate math department. Today, Souvaine chairs the Tufts University computer science department, which has more female professors than male. But few younger women have followed in her generation's footsteps.

The OOH can help you find career information on duties, education and training, pay, and outlook for hundreds of occupations. Funeral service workers organize and manage the details of a funeral. Insurance underwriters decide whether to provide insurance and under what terms. They evaluate insurance applications and determine coverage amounts and premiums. Computer and information research scientists invent and design new approaches to computing technology and find innovative uses for existing technology. They study and solve complex problems in computing for business, medicine, science, and other fields. Mathematicians conduct research to develop and understand mathematical principles. They also analyze data and apply mathematical techniques to help solve real-world problems. Atmospheric scientists study the weather and climate, and how those conditions affect human activity and the earth in general. Economists study the production and distribution of resources, goods, and services ...

BERKELEY – When scale model helicopters pass through a makeshift "urban canyon" in a test field, or engage in a game of aerial "chicken", the drills may look like a robotic stunt show to outside eyes. Members of the university's Berkeley Aerial Robot (BEAR) program have successfully conducted a series of field tests with 130-pound helicopters that not only fly autonomously -- without human control -- but that also react to avoid obstacles in their flight path. "Our BEAR group is the first to successfully develop a system where autonomous helicopters can detect obstacles, stationary or moving, and recompute their course in real-time to reach the original target destination," said David Hyunchul Shim, a research engineer on the project who first began this work as a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in mechanical engineering. With these achievements, the researchers are inching towards a future of robo-copters that could maneuver through city streets or forested landscapes. The development of reliable systems that can handle obstacle-avoidance tasks is still several years away, researchers said, but the computational foundations for such unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been laid.

Computers can be programmed with rules to use information [information: data with context or meaning ] to make simple decisions. This is knowledge [knowledge: the ability to understand information and, to then form judgements, opinions, make predictions and decisions based on that understanding ] that has been passed on from the programmer. A simple example of this is a spreadsheet [spreadsheet: A spreadsheet is made up of cells, rows and columns. Each cell holds a piece of numeric (numbers) or alphanumeric (text) data. Cells can also contain formulae to calculate their contents.

Anybody who has been to British chef Heston Blumenthal's world-famous Fat Duck restaurant in the UK village of Bray will know that strange flavours do work together. There egg and bacon ice cream, snail porridge and tobacco-infused chocolate were born. Blumenthal has acquired something of a mad scientist reputation - half chef, half molecular physicist - but even he might raise an eyebrow at the possibility that a computer could create such daring and flavoursome recipes. But that is exactly what IBM is setting out to do as its increasingly intrepid supercomputer Watson takes on that most human of activities - cooking. Watson's flavourbots will be churning out recipes at the annual interactive, film and music festival SXSW, offering visitors to its base in Austin, Texas some hopefully algorithmically delicious dishes, served via a food van.