Sketch Understanding
Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium
Randall Davis, James Landay, and Tom Stahovich, Cochairs
Technical Report SS-02-08
156 pp., $30.00
ISBN 978-1-57735-153-5
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As computation becomes pervasive and embedded, people are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with WIMPy interfaces. If it's absurd to suggest to people that they interact with one another by sitting at a computer and silently typing, clicking, and dragging, why then do we interact with our software this way?
Researchers in a variety of contexts are working to enable more natural forms of interaction in a variety of modalities. This symposium will focus on sketch understanding as one such form of natural interaction.
By "sketch" we mean an informal drawing created with pen strokes. By "understanding" we mean reliably identifying the objects or concepts suggested by the pen strokes, despite the inaccuracies and ambiguities inherent in the medium. One measure of understanding is the ability to answer questions about the things depicted. Understanding a sketch of a physical device, for example, means being able to answer questions about how the device operates, what it might be useful for, how it might be constructed, etc.
This symposium considered all of the different levels of sketch understanding, starting with the low-level gathering and processing of pen signals up to the high-level reasoning about the things depicted.