Introduction

Name: Aaron Wolin

Year: First Year PhD student

Email: awolin at neo dot tamu dot edu

Academic Interests:

My current academic interests consist of Sketch Recognition, AI, and HCI. I’ve been involved with sketch recognition projects for over a year now and find them very exciting from an HCI and AI perspective. The use of a pen as input heavily constraints traditional mouse and keyboard input possibilities while simultaneously allowing for new applications, such as handwriting programs. Sketch recognition also requires a great deal of AI since computers need to have knowledge of what is being drawn.

Relevant Experience:

• Impro-Visor – Research application from Harvey Mudd College teaching amateur jazz musicians to compose solos. Musicians enter notes to a solo within a composition window and advice concerning the musical “correctness” would be displayed to them. The advice manager also allows students to pick from good scales and tones that might fit their solo. http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~keller/jazz/improvisor.html

• Circuit Diagram Recognizer – This is a continuing sketch recognition research project at Harvey Mudd College. The overall goal of the project is to provide students feedback on their drawn circuit diagrams, such as from class notes. An ideal situation would be for an engineering student to draw a diagram free hand with an accompanying truth table, run it through our recognizer, and then see if the circuit diagram has been implemented correctly based in the truth table provided. The project is heavily AI based since we do not constrain student drawing styles. http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~alvarado/research/sketch.html

• Document Finding (before OCR) – Another project at Harvey Mudd College involved me working with a document digitizing company called Laserfiche. Our project’s focus was to find and crop documents in pictures taken by digital cameras. This essentially uses the camera as a scanner and would allow for more portability of document digitizing and OCR software.

Why I'm taking this class:

Although I’ve already had some sketch recognition experience my research has been focused on free-style sketch recognition. There are many other areas (gesture based systems, sketch beautification) that I have not explicitly worked with, and I want to expand my knowledge of the field.

What I hope to gain:

A general expansion of my sketch recognition knowledge, as well as having fun and learning techniques that can be applied to my research.

What I'll be doing in 5 years:

I'll (hopefully) be finishing up my research and time here at Texas A&M.

What I'll be doing in 10 years:

I don't know, going to Mars. My current thoughts are to go into industrial research, but anything can change in 10 years. Four years ago I wouldn't have said I'd be going to graduate school. In 10 years anything can happen.

Non-academic interests:

Reading, movies, playing poker, concerts, board games, mixology

Fun Story:

Every year at Harvey Mudd my friends and I would make our own sushi. One of my friends had some sushi making supplies and he taught everybody how to make rolls. During our third year we discovered a website where you can get really fresh fish, but the catch was that you had to order over $50 worth in order to qualify for shipping. The last two years we had so much fish after we had gorged ourselves we were shouting at people outside our door to come on in and eat sushi.