Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Reading #20. MathPad: A System for the Creation and Exploration of Mathematical

COMMENTS:

SUMMARY:

Mathpad is a pen-based application created to draw mathematical equations and diagrams, and to help with problem-solving.  Mapthpad uses gesture recognition and parsing in order to recognize mathematical expressions and perform editing operations. 

The authors chose to use 3 recognition techniques to create their recognizer.  The first technique involves normalizing and filtering strokes.  The second technique seeks to reduce the number of possible recognized symbols using a combination of the calculated degree of difference between characters and the feature set classification.  The last technique is a fine classification o distinguish similar symbols.

DISCUSSION:

I think the MathPad application is a very useful tool that applies some of the functionalities of Matlab, only with a sketch-based interface.   The stroke grouping are done manually, wherein the user selects the set of strokes that make up an expression or a diagram.  I think it would be beneficial if MathPad could perform its own grouping as I can imagine that the bounding-box grouping feature provided in Mathpad could get a little tedious.  One feature I really like is that Mathpad allows users to make associations between expressions and diagrams in order to reflect changes from one associated element to the other.

No comments:

Post a Comment