Presenter: Professor Randall Davis, MIT CSAIL

Abstact: 

Hand-drawn sketches and diagrams are common in a variety of engineering 

domains, but there has historically been little support for this mode of interaction 

with engineering software. Typically what we draw on napkins, whiteboards, etc., 

has to be re-entered into a keyboard and mouse based system.

This talk will review the work my group and I did on this several years ago, 

showing what we built, what we learned, and what hard problems remain.

Bio:

Randall Davis joined MIT in 1978. He is a Professor in EECS and has served in 

various leadership positions in CSAIL over that time (eg  Associate Director 

2012-2014). He and his group have being working to create methods that support 

natural interaction, i.e., the kind of interactions people often have around 

whiteboards, with a rich mixture of drawing, gesturing, and speaking. They did 

foundational work in sketch and gesture understanding, building systems that 

could understand the kind of freehand sketches commonly drawn by engineers, 

and then animate the drawing, showing how the device would behave in real use. 

They pioneered the concept of symmetric multimodal interaction, i.e., systems in 

which the user can sketch, gesture, and draw (the multimodal part) and in which 

the system can sketch, gesture, and draw in response (the symmetric part).

Zoom info: https://mit.zoom.us/j/98299901039