Title: Automated Sketch Recognition and the Future of Computer Aided Design

Speaker: Professor Thomas Stahovich
Department of Mechanical Engineering
University of California, Riverside

In many disciplines, sketches are an important problem solving tool, as they provide a convenient means for recording elusive thoughts, visualizing and testing emerging ideas, and compactly and efficiently representing various types of information such as spatial, temporal, and causal relationships. In engineering and architecture, sketches facilitate conceptual design by freeing the designer from the need to consider such details as precise size and shape, and instead enabling him or her to focus on more critical issues requiring creativity and abstraction.

Despite the practical importance of sketches and the availability of pen-based hardware, most contemporary engineering software cannot work from sketch input. We are working to change this by creating sketch understanding techniques that enable computers to work directly from the kinds of sketches engineers ordinarily draw. This talk will present techniques we have developed for interpreting hand-drawn sketches and transforming them into models suitable for use with engineering analysis tools.

The talk will include recent research results in the areas of sketch parsing and symbol recognition.  Parsing is the task of extracting individual symbols from a continuous stream of input, without requiring explicit cues from the user about where one symbol starts and the next begins. Recognition is the task of identifying the individual symbols located by the parser. The talk will also present several sketch-based engineering applications including a circuit analysis program called AC-SPARC and a sketch-based interface for Matlab’s Simulink called SimuSketch.

Brief Biograph:

Dr. Stahovich received his B.S in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 1988. He received his 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. His research interests include pen-based computing, design automation, design rationale management, and surgical planning.