Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed a system that can interpret sketches drawn on computer tablets. The sketch-recognition technology grew out of a collaboration with Pfizer, says MIT Ph.D. student Tom Ouyang. “We once visited their labs, and we noticed that on all their whiteboards and even on some of their windows they had all these chemical structures drawn using dry-erase markers, and when we talked to them they mentioned that they used these graphical diagrams all the time,” Ouyang says. The system combines information about the physical appearance of the final sketch with information about how it was drawn. Ultimately, the researchers see the software as part of a larger project to make interactions with computers as natural as interactions with human beings. “We want to interconnect this with some of the other things we’ve done with speech and Web-based lookup so that one could walk up to the whiteboard and sketch a molecule and say, ‘Has anybody published anything like this?’” says MIT professor Randall Davis.

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The Future of Identity in the Information Society (FIDIS) is a network of excellence established to prepare Europe for emerging digital identity issues. “We concluded that it is not one, single concept, but rather it is a host of pieces of information about an individual,” says FIDIS’ Andre Deuker. According to FIDIS, a person’s identity comprises all of the pieces of information that define a particular individual, from their DNA to how they like their coffee. One FIDIS project is photo response non-uniformity, which can identify the camera that took a particular picture by looking at the information underlying a specific image. Other FIDIS initiatives include special radio frequency identity tags and identity management systems (IMSs). FIDIS examined several IMS platforms and created a database for them, with the hopes that it will lead to greater interoperability between systems.

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Researchers at the University of Washington (UW) and Cornell University are developing PhotoCity, a system that uses graphics algorithms to create three-dimensional (3D) renderings of buildings, neighborhoods, and cities from unstructured collections of two-dimensional digital photos. To improve the quality of the renderings, the researchers plan to combine their system with a social game that permits teams to add images where they are needed to improve the visual models. The researchers also plan to accept public submissions, in an effort to collect 3D renderings of cities such as New York and San Francisco. The emergence of such collaborative systems has great promise for capturing the creative abilities of people and networked computers, says the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Peter Lee.

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