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### Earlier News (2008-2017)

#### 2017

• (Nov.) Kenny Davila's work on extracting whiteboard contents from lecture videos is being presented as a poster at ICDAR 2017. Source code and data from the work are available online here.
• (Nov) The lab's work was featured in a meeting with the RIT Board of Trustees. Mahshad Madhavi and Wei Zhong represented the lab. We thank Nicholas Paulus for preparing the poster used in the session.
• (Sep) The lab welcomes Mahshad Mahdavi, a new PhD student in the Imaging Science program. Mahshad will be working on machine learning techniques for extracting and recognizing formulas in documents.
• (Sep) Recent DPRL alumnus Lakshmi Ravi (MSc, 2017) has secured a position as a Data Scientist on Amazon's Alexa Machine Learning group in Boston.
• (Aug) PhD student Thomas Choi (at INSA Rennes (France), co-advised by Prof. Zanibbi) had his paper on bootstrapping small samples for recognizing accidentals in music notation accepted for publication at GREC 2017. There are many talks on Optical Music Recognition (OMR) planned for the workshop, so we expect this to be an exciting GREC!
• (Aug) We are very happy to introduce the new members of the DPRL in Fall 2017:
Rahul Dashora (MSc student) will work on improving the lab's Hierarchical Contextual Parsing (HCP) technique for parsing mathematical notation in PDFs, images, and handwriting.
• Xuan Huan (MSc student) will work on creating a new web-based system for formula entry and search (based on the lab's 'min' system)
• Ritvik Joshi (MSc student) will work on extracting formulas from PDF documents.
• Wei Zhong (PhD student) is working on math-aware search engines.
• (Aug) Kenny Davila has accepted a post-doctoral fellowship with the well-known CEDAR/CUBS lab at the University of Buffalo. Among the lab's many other accomplishments, CEDAR/CUBS contributed to the first automated mail-sorting system for the US Postal Service.
• (July) The Tangent-S formula retrieval system has been released, and is available as open source. The changes for this version were made by Kenny Davila.
• (July) Kardo Aziz has successfully defended his MSc thesis, titled Better Text Detection through Improved k-means-based Feature Learning. In his thesis, Kardo proposes a technique called Visual Similarity Sampling (VSS), which selects training samples using the average similarity of image patches within and between text and non-text classes. He has found evidence that this can improve results over pure uniform sampling when the sample size is fixed, by exploiting representative and discriminative patch characteristics when constructing a training set.
• (July) Kenny Davila has successfully defended his PhD dissertation, titled Symbolic and Visual Retrieval of Mathematical Notation using Formula Graph Symbol Pair Matching and Structural Alignment. Kenny's dissertation was co-advised by Prof. Zanibbi and Dr. Stephanie Ludi (Univ. North Texas). Kenny created a formula search engine capable of using visual structure, semantics, or just the symbol layout of formulae. From this, he is able to use this to do cross-modal searches to locate formulae in lecture videos from rendered LaTeX formulae. He also created a system that can be used to search for formula, and then jump to a video frame where selected ink from the whiteboard is first drawn (YouTube demo).
• (June) The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has funded a proposal by Prof. Zanibbi and C. Lee Giles (Penn State) to integrate math-aware search into the CiteSeerX platform.
• (June) Michael Condon successfully defended his MSc thesis, Applying Hierarchical Contextual Parsing with Visual Density and Geometric Features to Typeset Formula Recognition. Michael made changes to formula structure representations for punctuation and refined other techniques from Lei Hu's HCP parsing algorithm, applying these to recognizing typeset math. His parser obtains very high expression recognition rates for formulas from the infty dataset (almost 91% parsing from connected components). Source code and data used for his work will be made available in the coming weeks.
• (June) Kenny Davila's paper Whiteboard Video Summarization via Spatio-Temporal Conflict Minimization has been accepted for publication at ICDAR 2017 (the leading document analysis and recognition conference). There is a YouTube video demonstrating his new system for summarization and navigation of lectures using whiteboard content summaries As far as we know, this is the first system that supports lecture video navigation using whiteboard contents directly.
• (May) Congratulations to Lakshmi Ravi, who received 2nd place for her MSc Project Poster, titled "Parsing Handwritten Math Formulas." Lakshmi will soon be starting work in the Alexa group at Amazon in Seattle. She will be doing work in Natural Language Processing (NLP).
• (May) Prof. Zanibbi received the Golisano Computing College Outstanding Scholar Award for a strong track record of research and scholarship that is "integral to, and not separated from, all aspects of a student's educational experience at RIT." Thanks from Prof. Zanibbi to all dprl students from the last ten years who made this possible. This award primarily reflects your hard work and accomplishments - thank you.
• (Apr.) Prof. Zanibbi gave a brief presentation at the RIT GCCIS Research Showcase about the lab, dprl@10: The Document and Pattern Recognition Lab's First 10 Years. A sincere thanks and congratulations to all of the dprl students from these first 10 years!
• (Apr.) Chinmay Jain has secured a Software Engineer position involving machine learning for customer recommendations with BBVA Compass.
• (Apr.) Congratulations to Kenny Davila whose paper Layout and Semantics: Combining Representations for Math Formula Search" has been accepted for poster presentation at SIGIR 2017, the leading Information Retrieval conference.
• (Apr.) Kenny Davila will be giving a public talk at RIT about his research on math formula retrieval in documents and videos Monday, April 17th at noon in the Bamboo Rooms (Campus Center 003), as part of the Move 78 Seminar Series.
• (Apr.) The lab gives a warm welcome to Wei Zhong, who will be joining the DPRL as a PhD student in Fall 2017. Wei will be doing work in math-aware search engines. For a glance of his current work in this area, you can try his Approach0 system for searching Math StackExchange posts here.
• (Mar.) Le Duc Anh from the Nakagawa Lab in Japan visited the lab for a week in early March, to talk with us about his work in handwritten math recognition. His picture can be found under the "Members" link. Anh recently defended his PhD, and will begin working on Computer Vision and Machine Learning at a company in Tokyo next month.
• (Feb.) Michael Condon has secured a job working as a Pattern Recognition Software Engineer at Apple in Cupertino, CA. He is joining a team that worked on handwriting recognition for the Apple Watch.
• (Jan.) The web page for ICFHR 2018 is now online, including a call for papers. Please consider submitting your work to the conference, and joining us in Niagara Falls!
• (Jan.) Prof. Zanibbi will be the new Communications Officer for the IAPR Technical Committee No. 11 ('Reading Systems').

#### 2016

• (Dec.) Congratulations to Chinmay Jain, whose poster received 2nd place in the Best MS Poster competition! Chinmay's poster is available here.
• (Nov.) The lab welcomes Jahongir Amirkulov to the lab. Jahongir is an undergraduate Computer Science student who will be working on the min math search interface in the spring semester.
• (Oct.) Congratulations to Lei Hu, who received a best poster award at the international ICFHR conference for his paper, MST-Based Visual Parsing of Online Handwritten Mathematical Expressions.
• (Oct.) The call for papers and web pages for the International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR 2018) are now online. Prof. Zanibbi is Co-Chairing the conference, which will be held August 6-10, 2018 at RIT.
• (Oct.) Kenny Davila's work in handwriten symbol generation from examples has been cited in a UIST 2016 paper by Taranta, LaViola et al. (Video Demonstration)
• (Aug) We welcome Lakshmi Ravi, Michael Condon, Kardo Aziz and Chinmay Jain to the lab (all are CS MSc students). Lakshmi, Michael and Chinmay will be doing work on recognizing handwritten and typeset mathematical notation, while Kardo will be doing work on detecting text in natural scenes for both English and Arabic.
• (July) Lei Hu and Prof. Zanibbi have had two papers on recognizing handwritten math accepted for publication at ICFHR, being held in Shenzhen, China this October. These papers summarize Lei's doctoral dissertation research.
• (July) The CROHME 2016 handwritten math recognition competition has ended! Congratulations to MyScript and Wiris for obtaining the highest recognition rates. Details of the competition will appear in an upcoming paper at ICFHR.
• (June) The new Tangent 0.3.1 formula search engine has been released (see Software link, above). This new version was a joint RIT-Univ. Waterloo collaboration, created by K. Davila, A. Kane, F.Wm. Tompa, and Prof. Zanibbi.
• (May) The NTCIR-12 MathIR Task Overview paper is now available. The paper describes the math search competitions held as part of the upcoming NTCIR-12 conference being held in Tokyo.
• (May) Kenny Davila, Andrew Kane, Frank Tompa and Prof. Zanibbi's paper about the Tangent math search engine at the NTCIR-12 math retrieval competitions is now available. For the competition we improved support for wildcard matching, and explored new metrics for formula similarity.
• (May) Congratulations to Yi Huang, who has accepted a position at BOSE corporation in Boston.
• (May) Congratulations to Kenny Davila who has successfully defended his PhD dissertation proposal entitled "Appearance-Based Retrieval of Mathematical Notation in Documents and Lecture Videos". The proposal builds upon Kenny's earlier research, including his recently accepted SIGIR 2016 paper describing modifications to the Tangent formula search engine.
• (Apr.) Congratulations to Dr. Siyu Zhu, who has successfully defended his doctoral dissertation entitled "Text Detection for Natural Scenes and Technical Diagrams with Convolutional Features and Cascaded Classification." Part of Siyu's doctoral research was recently accepted for publication at CVPR 2016. Siyu's innovative, but relatively simple text detection system obtained the highest rates for the standard ICDAR 2015 Focused Scene Text benchmark at the time of publication.
• (Apr.) Congratulations to Dr. Lei Hu, who has sucessfully defended his doctoral dissertation entitled "Features and Algorithms for Visual Parsing of Handwritten Mathematical Expressions." His dissertation presents new visual features and parsing algorithms (including parser ensembles) for recognizing handwritten mathematical notation, which illustrate that competitive recognition results may be obtained using very minimal language models - existing state-of-the-art approaches use expression grammars, which are defined and refined manually.
• (Apr.) Congratulations to Kenny Davila, who has received a travel award from the ACM to attend SIGIR 2016 in Pisa, Italy.
• (Apr.) Source code for Siyu Zhu's text detector for natural scenes is available from the Software link above.
• (Apr.) Congratulations (again) to Kenny Davila, who has been selected to participate in the Doctoral Consortium at SIGIR 2016.
• (Mar.) Congratulations to Kenny Davila, who co-authored a paper on scalable formula search entitled Multi-Stage Math Formula Search: Using Appearance-Based Similarity Metrics at Scale, which was accepted for publication at ACM SIGIR 2016 being held in Pisa, Italy. Kenny's co-authors include Frank Tompa and Andrew Kane from Univ. Waterloo, and Prof. Zanibbi. SIGIR is the leading international conference on Information Retrieval.
• (Mar.) Congratulations to Siyu Zhu, whose paper "A Text Detection System for Natural Scenes with Convolutional Feature Learning and Cascaded Classification" was accepted for publication at CVPR, the leading international computer vision conference. Siyu obtained state-of-the-art text detection results for the ICDAR 2015 Robust Reading Competition (Focused Scene Text Localization task).
• (Jan.) We welcome Yi Huang to the lab. Yi will create a web-based evaluation framework for handwritten math recognition systems, and look to extend this to support other recognition tasks (e.g. from computer vision and/or acoustics).

#### 2015

• (Dec. 2015) Congratulations to Kedarnath Calangutkar, whose poster tied for second place in the fall Master's project poster session. The title of his poster is Classification of Handwritten Math Symbols using Random Forest and Hybrid Features. In his work, Kedar combined pen/touch stroke features with shape based features previously used by Lei Hu and Kenny Davila and made modifications to the features, leading to an improved recognition rate.
• (Nov. 2015) A paper on unsupervised spoken word localization in lecture videos by Zack Miller, Manish Kanadje, Prof. Zanibbi and other members of the AccessMath project has been accepted for publication in Pattern Recognition Letters. The paper title is Assisted keyword indexing for lecture videos using unsupervised keyword spotting, and demonstrates the high accuracy of our system for both videos recorded at RIT, along with some Linear Algebra lectures recorded at MIT (demonstration).
• (Nov.) A paper by Siyu Zhu, C. Riedl (Northeastern), M. Hearst (UC Berkeley), K. Lakhani (Harvard) and others entitled Detecting Figures and Part Labels in Patents: Competition-Based Development of Graphics Recognition Algorithms has been accepted for publication in the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition. The paper summarizes both technical and organizational aspects of a competition held jointly by the USPTO, the Harvard-NASA Competitions Lab, and TopCoder.
• (Oct.) A demonstration the dprl's work on unsupervised keyword spotting for lecture audio is now available. Examples are provided for words located in Linear Algebra lecture videos recorded at both RIT and MIT. The demo is available here. This work was completed by lab alumni Zack Miller and Manish Kanadje, as part of the NSF-funded AccessMath project. Ben Miller-Jacobson is extending the work for his MSc thesis.
• (Oct.) Congratulations to Kedar Calangutkar, who has secured a position with Google in Mountain View.
• (Sept.) Lab alumni Keita Wangari (now a User Experience (UX) Researcher at Google) wrote a short blurb summarizing her Master's degree experience, in which she completed her degree largely online: (link).
• (Sept.) A paper describing the CROHME handwritten math competitions has been accepted for publication in the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), written by Drs. Viard-Gaudin and Mouchere (Univ. Nantes, France), Dr. Utpal Garain (ISI, India), and Prof. Zanibbi. The paper title is Advancing the State-of-the-Art for Handwritten Math Recognition: The CROHME Competitions, 2011-2014.
• (Sept.) Prof. Zanibbi gave a talk at the RIT Center for Imaging Science, Math Search for the Masses: Multimodal Search Interfaces and Appearance-Based Retrieval. A YouTube video of the talk is available online here.
• (Aug.) New Members. The lab welcomes two new MS Computer Science students to the lab: Kedarnath Calangutkar will be working on handwritten math recognition and math search interfaces, and Ben Miller-Jacobson will work on keyword spotting in audio.
• (Aug.) (update) Manish Kanadje has been offered admission to two prestigious Computer Science PhD programs, at the University of Waterloo, Canada, and also the University of Melbourne, Australia.
• (Aug.) Our new math formula search engine (Tangent 0.3) is now available for download, along with sample results. Tangent 0.3 was created by Kenny Davila and Prof. Zanibbi in collaboration with Frank Tompa and Andrew Kane (Univ. Waterloo, Canada). Earlier work on Tangent was done by Nidhin Pattaniyil and David Stalnaker. The new version obtains state-of-the-art results on the NTCIR-11 Wikipedia math formula retrieval task, and provides an intuitive organization and visualization of search results (i.e. formula matches).
• (Aug.) Prof. Zanibbi will join the Editorial Board of the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR) in September.
• (July) The NTCIR-12 MathIR Competition is starting soon - please consider registering and participating if you would like to help advance work in this emerging area of Information Retrieval (IR) research.
• (June) Houssem Chatbri, Kenny Davila, and Profs. Kameyama and Zanibbi have had their paper, "Shape matching using keypoints extracted from both the foreground and the background of binary images" accepted for publication at the International Conference on Image Processing Theory, Tools and Applications being held this November in Orleans, France. This work was completed during Houssem's visit to the dprl in Feb-March. He and Dr. Kameyama are from the University of Tsukuba, Japan.
• (June) To our surprise, Prof. Zanibbi's 'where, what, and how' summary of pattern recognition has appeared in a book about Big Data.
• (June) LgEval has been updated. This version fixes some bugs that missed valid segmentation edges, and corrects corresponding '*S' entries in .diff files. The new version can be obtained using git, by issuing:
• (May) Manish Kanadje has successfully completed his MSc project on indexing math lecture videos. His tool allows a user to create an index of video excerpts. Spoken keywords recorded on a laptop by the instructor can be used to generate candidate regions to include in the index. His keyword spotting results substantially improve upon Zack Miller's earlier work, and a related paper is in preparation (Poster).
• (May) The paper for Prof. Zanibbi's upcoming invited talk at CICM 2015 is now available: Math Search for the Masses: Multimodal Search Interfaces and Appearance-Based Retrieval. Awelemdy Orakwue (BSc. student) is a co-author on the paper. The paper has also been indexed in the arXiv.
• (Apr.) Profs. Charles Bigelow and Zanibbi have had their paper, "Analysis Of Typographical Trends In European Printing 1470-1660" accepted for presentation at the American Printing History Association (APHA) conference being held in October at RIT.
• (Mar.) dprl alumni Keita Wangari (MSc HCI, 2014) has accepted a position with Google Research in Mountain View, CA as a User Experience (UX) Researcher.
• (Mar.) Additional stories about the Tangent math search engine have appeared online: Making Search Engines Understand Math (EE Times), RIT Takes Lead in Formula Search Engine Racing (Campus Technology), and Demystifying Mathematics with Tangent Search Engine (Technology.org). The EE Times story was later picked up by ACM TechNews.
• (Mar.) Houssem Chatbri will be giving a talk on sketch-based retrieval in lecture videos on Friday March 4th at 12pm in GOL-1455.
• (Feb.) Today (Feb. 4) an RIT University News story on the Tangent math search engine appeared. The story features David Stalnaker, Nidhin Pattaniyil, and Kenny Davila.
• (Feb.) The research methods and writing text Writing for Computer Science (3rd ed.) by Justin Zobel will be published in the coming days. Prof. Zanibbi contributed some of the exercises in the new edition.
• (Feb.) The lab welcomes Houssem Chatbri (PhD student, Univ. Tsukuba, Japan), who will be visiting during Feb.-March. He will collaborate with Prof. Zanibbi on math retrieval research.

#### 2014

• (Dec.) Prof. Zanibbi will be an invited speaker at the 2015 Conferences on Intelligent Computer Mathematics (CICM).
• (Dec.) Nidhin Pattaniyil has received a travel award from the NTCIR-11 conference organizers.
• (Nov.) The lab welcomes Manish Kanadje. For his MSc project in Spring, Manish will be working on audio search, and search tool and user interface integration for the AccessMath project.
• (Nov.) Zachary Miller will begin work as a research programmer in the Buckler Lab at Cornell University this December.
• (Oct.) David Stalnker's paper Math expression retrieval using an inverted index over symbol pairs has been accepted for oral presentation at Document Recognition and Retrieval XXII (2015) in San Francisco.
• (Oct.) Nidhin Pattaniyil extended David's work for his MSc project (paper, slides, poster), adding support for matrices and combining expression retrieval with text search to create an entry for the international NTCIR Math Retrieval Competition. The competition was held for the upcoming NTCIR-11 conference in Japan. David and Nidhin's system performed best for retrieving Wikipedia expressions, and had the best overall top-5 results and second-highest 'highly relevant' top-5 results for combined text and math queries for 100,000 documents from the arXiv.
• (Oct.) A paper co-authored by Chris Riedl (Northeastern, former Harvard post-doc), Marti Hearst (UC Berkeley), Siyu Zhu, Richard Zanibbi and researchers from the Harvard-NASA Tournament Lab (Karim Lakhani et al.) describing an online competition for labeling parts in US patent diagram images has been posted on the arXiv. The data and source code for the top-5 placing systems in the competition are available through the UCI Machine Learning Repository. It has been a challenge to find a home for this paper due to its interdisciplinary nature (despite some very positive reviews), but hopefully an appropriate venue will be found in the near future.
• (Sept.) Prof. Zanibbi gave a talk in the Human-Computer Interaction Seminar at the University of Waterloo on Sept. 26th, entitled "Creating User-Friendly Math Search Engines." The talk covered search interface designs and math retrieval algorithms developed in the DPRL. Our thanks to Dr. Edward Lank for the invitation to give this talk.
• (Sept.) The successful ICFHR 2018 Rochester bid has been announced on the GCCIS Web Pages.
• (Sept.) Prof. Zanibbi submitted a successful bid to host the 2018 International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition in Rochester, at RIT. The bid is available here, and the presentation slides (presented by Umapada Pal at ICFHR 2014 in Crete) are available here. If you work in handwriting recognition, we hope to see you in 2018!
• (Aug.) Kevin Talmadge has succesfully completed his Master's Project on applying the Recognition Strategy Library to analyzing a math recognition system.
• (June) As part of an Image and document processing, recognition and interaction seminar held at IUT/Univ. Nantes (France, on June 30), Prof. Zanibbi gave a talk on human math retrieval studies and math search engines (work done with Keita Wangari, Matthias Reichenbach, David Stalnaker and Nidhin Pattaniyil.) Other presenters were researchers from Australia, Brazil, and China. (program; slides)
• (June) Amit Pillay has successfully defended his MSc thesis, Intelligent Combination of Structural Analysis Algorithms: Application to Mathematical Expression Recognition, which presents a method for combining DRACULAE math notation parsers using a Graph Transformer Network (GTN). This technique was successful in increasing spatial relationship detection accuracy.
• (May) Congratulations to Kenny Davila, who has succesfully completed his Research Potential Assessment, which is required for PhD students at the end of their first year.
• (May) The lab welcomes Kevin Talmadge, who will be working on the new Python-based Recognition Strategy Library for his MSc Project in the summer.
• (May) Congratulations to Zack Miller, who received the best poster award for the RIT Computer Science MSc Poster Presentation Session for Spring 2014 (poster).
• (May) Congratulations to Zack Miller, Nidhin Pattaniyil and Christopher Sasarak, who have all successfully completed their MS Projects (their presentation posters are available from the "Publications" link above).
• (Apr.) Kenny Davila's paper describing a state-of-the-art classifier for handwritten mathematical symbols has been accepted for oral presentation at ICFHR 2014 being held in Greece this coming September.
• (Apr.) Keita Del Valle's paper describing a user study of the min math entry and search interface has been accepted for publication at ACM SIGIR 2014. SIGIR is being held in the Gold Coast, Australia in July.
• (Apr.) Matthias Reichenbach's paper on the effect of rendering math expression in search hits has been accepted for publication at ACM SIGIR 2014.
• (Mar.) The lab has released a number of systems for math recognition and retrieval as open source on GitHub (DPRL GitHub Page). We hope to add some more information to these pages soon.
• (Mar.) Kenny Davila has released his collection of isolated handwritten math symbol classifiers under GNU GPL v.3 (available here). In benchmarking experiments, the best classifiers (using an SVM with RBF kernel) have recognition rates that match or exceed the best published rates for the MathBrush handwritten symbol data set.
• (Mar.) As part of his upcoming sabbatical, Prof. Zanibbi will be a Visiting Professor at IRCCyN/IVC (Nantes, France) during June and July, and at the University of Waterloo Computer Science Department (Canada) in October.

#### 2013

• (Dec.) Keita Del Valle Wangari has successfully defended her HCI MSc thesis, Discovering real-world usage scenarios for a multimodal math search interface.
• (Dec.) The lab welcomes Zack Miller to the lab. For his MSc project, Zack will be working on keyword spotting in audio for the AccessMath project.
• (Dec.) The lab welcomes Nidhin Pattaniyil to the lab. Nidhin will working on combined text and math search for his MSc project.
• (Nov) Siyu Zhu has successfully defended his PhD dissertation proposal. Well done, Siyu!
• (Nov) Lei Hu has successfully defended his PhD dissertation proposal. Congratulations, Lei!
• (Oct) Kenny Davila's paper describing a system for image-based retrieval of mathematics in lecture videos has been accepted for presentation at the 2013 IEEE WNYIP conference being held at RIT in November.
• (Aug) David Stalnaker has successfully defended his MSc thesis, Math Expression Retrieval Using Symbols Pairs in Layout Trees.
• (July) Christopher Sasarak will be giving a presentation on his work with recognizing ASL in video using the Recognition Strategy Language at the Undergraduate Research Symposium on Friday August 2nd at 2:15pm (at the RIT Inn).
• (June) The Video CAPTCHA demo is now back online (the experiment version - data is not being collected at this time). Please note that the "P" or "F" at the bottom right after submitting tags indicates whether the challenge was passed or failed (we are still working to recover small portions of the code).
• (June) Lei Hu and Siyu Zhu will be participating in the Doctoral Consortium at the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition in August.
• (June) Francisco Alvaro and Prof. Zanibbi's paper on using shape descriptors for symbol and expression layout classification has been accepted for publication at ACM DocEng 2013.
• (June) Congratulations to Alex Canter, who has successfully defended his MSc project on OCR attacks applied to Video CAPTCHAs.
• (June) The lab welcomes Justin Kelly to the lab. Justin is a BSc (Computer Science) NSF REU student who is working over the summer on recognizing math in images.
• (June) The lab welcomes Dr. Harold Mouchere from Univ. Nantes, France, who is visiting the lab and collaborating with Prof. Zanibbi during the month of June.
• (May) Congratulations to Matthias Reichenbach, who has successfully defended his MSc project on the effect of rendering math expressions on relevance assessment for math search.
• (May) Congratulations to Kenny Davila Castellanos on successfully defending his MSc project on image-based search of whiteboard notes in math lecture videos. Kenny will start his PhD in the DPRL for the AccessMath project this summer, co-supervised by Prof. Zanibbi and Prof. Ludi.
• (May) Congratulations to George (Huaijin) Chen on successfully completing his senior undergraduate Imaging Science project on using inpainting to hide text and prevent OCR attacks against Video CAPTCHAs.
• (May) Prof. Zanibbi has been awarded an NSF REU grant, which will be used to fund undergraduate researchers in the DPRL lab during summer 2013.
• (May) ImagineRIT will be held on Saturday, May 4. The lab will be demonstrating the ${m}_{\mathrm{in}}$ math search interface in the atrium of the Golisano college.
• (May) Lei Hu and Siyu Zhu had papers describing a system for detecting text in patent document images (Siyu) and using shape contexts to segment handwritten mathematical symbols (Lei) accepted for publication at the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition being held in Washington, DC in late August.
• (April) Congratulations to Matthias Reichenbach, who has secured a position with Square in San Francisco.
• (April) Congratulations to George Chen on being accepted for PhD study in Computer Science at Rice University.
• (Mar.) Prof. Zanibbi gave a talk on the dprl's work in math recognition and retrieval Creating User-Friendly Systems for Math Search as part of the RIT Imaging Science Seminar Series.
• (Feb.) CROHMELib v. 0.1 and LgEval v. 0.2 have been released.
• (Jan.) The ${m}_{\mathrm{in}}$ math search interface will be demonstrated at the 20th Document Recognition and Retrieval Conference being held in San Francisco Feb. 5-7th.
• (Jan.) The 3rd international Competition on Recognition of Handwritten Mathematical Expressions (CROHME) has begun! Data and tools are available. The registration deadline is Feb. 15th.
• (Jan.) The lab welcomes Francisco Alvaro, a PhD student from the University of Valencia, Spain, who will visit the DPRL between January and May of this year, as he carries out his research in mathematical notation recognition.
• (Jan.) The LgEval library (a python library for evaluating structural pattern recognition algorithms by Profs. Zanibbi and Mouchere) has been posted on the Software page.

#### 2012

• (Dec.) The lab welcomes Alex Canter to the lab, who will be looking at applying OCR to text extracted from natural scenes.
• (Nov.) Siyu Zhu and Lei Hu have received RIT Graduate Research and Creativity Awards (\$500 each), to be used in support of their travel to DRR in San Francisco, and ICPR in Japan, respectively.
• (Nov.) Drs. Zanibbi and Blostein's survey on math recognition and retrieval will be published in the next issue of the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition.
• (Sept) The DPRL will have two oral paper presentations at DRR XX in San Francisco this coming February - one on image-based math symbol recognition (S. Zhu and L. Hu), and another on evaluating structural pattern recognition (and in particular, math recognition) (R. Zanibbi, in collaboration with H. Mouchere and C. Viard-Gaudin of Univ. Nantes, France)
• (Sept) The lab welcome Matthias Reichenbach to the lab. Matthias is an MSc in HCI student, who will be completing a project on human relevance assessments for math search.
• (Sept) Christopher Sasarak has received a student travel award in support of his poster presentation at HCIR 2012.
• (Sept) The lab welcomes Awelemdy Orakwue (NSF REU Student) and Keita Del Valle (MSc Student, Human-Computer Interaction), both of whom will be working on HCI aspects of math recognition and retrieval.
• (Sept) David Stalnaker has been offered a position with Google.
• (Sept) C. Sasarak, K. Hart, R. Pospesel, D. Stalnaker, L. Hu, R. LiVolsi, S. Zhu and Prof. Zanibbi have had their paper "min: A Multimodal Web Interface for Math Search" accepted for poster presentation at the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval being held at IBM Research in Cambridge, MA.
• (Aug) Profs. Ludi, Agarwal, Gaborski and Zanibbi have been awarded an NSF grant for improving mathematics lectures for low vision students, through developing a new application integrating video, note-taking and search, including search for mathematical notation.
• (Aug) Prof. Zanibbi and Dr. Dorothea Blostein's book chapter entitled "Processing Mathematical Notation" will appear in the upcoming Handbook of Document Image Processing and Recognition, to be published by Springer-Verlag.
• (June) Prof. Zanibbi gave a second talk entitled A new metric for stuctural similarity with application to parser combination at Polytech Nantes (France) on June 27.
• (June) Two papers from the DPRL have been accepted for publication in the International Conference on Pattern Recognition proceedings:
1. Lei Hu, Kevin Hart, Richard Pospesel and Prof. Zanibbi's paper describing a handwritten math recognition system, and
2. Robert LiVolsi, Prof. Bigelow and Prof. Zanibbi's a paper on automated font metric collection for studying font metrics through history.
• (June) Prof. Zanibbi will be giving a talk entitled Some Recent Developments in Math Retrieval at the Université de Nantes, France on June 14.
• (June) Prof. Zanibbi is spending the month of June as a Visiting Professor at the IRCCyN/IVC research center located within Polytech Nantes, France.
• (May) We welcome George Chen to the lab. For his senior undergraduate project in Imaging Science (2012-2013), George will be working on locating and hiding text in videos for Video CAPTCHAs.
• (May) The DPRL lab will be demonstrating the min math search interface at ImagineRIT on Saturday, May 5. If you are on campus that day, we invite you to stop by our table in the Golisano College Atrium.
• (April) Prof. Bigleow, Robert LiVolsi and Prof. Zanibbi presented preliminary results for historical trends in font metrics at the Reading Digital Syposium on April 28.
• (April) The lab welcomes Christopher Sasarak. Christopher will be working on the min interface and math recognition algorithms over the summer as an NSF REU student.
• (March) David Stalnaker will be working as an intern at Google this summer (Seattle, WA).
• (Feb.) Robert LiVolsi has secured a job with Google (Cambridge, MA).
• (Feb.) Prof. Zanibbi will be giving a seminar on current math recognition and retrieval research in the DPRL at Lehigh University on March 14.
• (Jan.) The lab welcomes Meridangela Gutierrez Jhong. Meridangela is an undergraduate research assistant, who will be carrying out work on math retrieval in LaTeX documents.

#### 2011

• (Dec.) The lab welcomes David Stalnaker, a BSc/MSc student in Computer Science who will be working as a research assistant on the math recognition and retrieval project.
• (Dec.) The lab welcomes Robert LiVolsi, a BSc/MSc student in Computer Engineering who will be working with Profs. Zanibbi and Bigelow on their Google-funded historical font analysis study.
• (Nov.) Prof. Charles Bigelow and Prof. Zanibbi's proposal "Google Books, Readability and Culturomics" has been funded through Google Research Awards.
• (Nov.) Thomas Schellenberg has successfully defended his MSc thesis, Layout-Based Substitution Tree Indexing and Retrieval for Mathematical Expressions.
• (Oct. and Nov.) Prof. Zanibbi gave talks on math recognition and retrieval research in the DPRL at the Rochester chapter meetings for the SPIE and IEEE Computer Society (slides are available from the IEEE web page).
• (Sept.) The lab welcomes Siyu Zhu to the lab. Siyu is a PhD student in Imaging Science, and will be working on math retrieval using images.
• (Sept.) Thomas Schellenberg, Prof. Yuan and Prof. Zanibbi's paper Layout-based substitution tree indexing and retrieval for mathematical expresions has been accepted for presentation at Document Recognition and Retrieval 2012.
• (Sept.) Lei Hu and Prof. Zanibbi presented research papers on HMM-based math symbol recognition and image-based math retrieval, along with a poster describing a new metric for evaluating math recognition systems at ICDAR 2011 in Beijing. The metric was developed in collaboration with researchers from Universite de Nantes (France) and Queen's University (Canada).
• (Aug.) Ben Holm has successfully defended his MSc thesis, Evaluation of RSL History as a Tool for Assistance in the Development and Evaluation of Computer Vision Algorithms.
• (July) The lab welcomes Lane Lawley. Lane is a second-year RIT BSc Computer Science student who has volunteered to assist Bo Ding with his research into text detection in natural scenes.
• (July) Prof. Zanibbi and Prof. Dorothea Blostein's survey on recognition and retrieval of mathematical notation has been accepted for publication in the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition.
• (June) Lei Hu, Li Yu, Amit Pillay, and Prof. Zanibbi have had three papers accepted for the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition being held in Beijing, China this fall. Both Lei and Li's papers were accepted for oral presentation at the conference (see the Publications link, above).
• (June) Prof. Zanibbi will receive his third US Patent in late June for work on business document region labeling with John Handley and other researchers from the Xerox Research Center in Webster, NY.
• (May) Congratulations to Lei Hu, who has successfully passed his first-year PhD student assessment (roughly speaking, his 'comprehensives').
• (May) The lab welcomes Bo Ding, an MSc in Imaging Science student to the lab. Bo will continue David's work on detecting text in video.
• (May) David Snyder has successfully defended his MSc in Imaging Science, titled "Text Detection in Natural Scenes through Weighted Majority Voting of DCT High Pass Filters, Line Removal, and Color Consistency Filtering".
• (May) The lab will present a system for pen/finger-based math entry at ImagineRIT on May 7th that runs on iPads, as well as desktops and laptops. Please note that this system is only in its early stages. A link to the interface is provided above under the Software link.
• (April) The lab welcomes Kevin Hart to the lab. Kevin will be completing an NSF REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) project in the lab this summer.
• (March) Prof. Zanibbi has been awarded an NSF REU supplement for his math recognition and retrieval research project.
• (Jan.) David Snyder has been awarded an RIT Center for Imaging Science Research Micro-Grant, "Increasing the Security of Video CAPTCHAs through Text Detection and Removal."
• (Jan. 2011) Prof. Zanibbi will be the conference co-chair for Document Recognition and Retrieval 2012, and will be the conference chair in 2013.

#### 2010

• (Nov. 2010) The lab welcomes Thomas Schellenberg to the lab. Thomas will be working with Prof. Zanibbi and Prof. Bo Yuan on math retrieval.
• (Sept. 2010) The lab welcome Richard Pospesel. Richard will be working on math recognition and retrieval interfaces.
• (Aug. 2010) Prof. Zanibbi and Prof. Bo Yuan have had a paper on mathematical information retrieval accepted at the Document Recognition and Retrieval XVIII Conference being held in San Francisco this coming January.
• (Aug. 2010) The lab welcomes Lei Hu, who is starting his PhD in Computing and Information Science this fall. Lei will be working on math recognition and retrieval.
• (Aug. 2010) Prof. Zanibbi has been awarded a research grant for work on math recognition and retrieval from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
• (May 2010) Richard Pospesel, a Master's student in the RIT Computer Gaming Program will continue Amit Srinet's work on recognition of machine drawings at InspectionEasy (a Rochester company) over the summer. Richard was a student in Prof. Zanibbi's Pattern Recognition course (Winter 2009).
• (May 2010) Li Yu's Pen-Based Math Search work was presented at Imagine RIT. Li also recently completed his MS thesis, entitled Image-Based Math Retrieval Using Handwritten Queries.
• (May 2010) Amit Srinet will be working at Virtual Solutions in Cambridge, MA this summer.
• (Mar. 2010) The lab welcomes Ben Holm. He will be working on the Recognition Strategy Language under the supervision of Prof. Zanibbi and Prof. Fluet.
• (Mar. 2010) Amit Srinet is working with InspectionEasy (a Rochester company) on the recognition of machine drawings. The DPRL is acting as a consultant for the project.
• (Feb. 2010) A poster on Amit Pillay and Prof. Zanibbi's neural combination of 2D math notation parsers was presented as poster at the CEIS University Technology Annual Showcase on Feb. 25.
• (Feb. 2010) The RIT Center for Imaging Science has awarded funds to support research on Video CAPTCHAs during the summer of 2010 (to be carried out by Dave Snyder and Prof. Zanibbi).

#### 2009

• (Nov. 2009) The lab welcomes Dave Snyder (Imaging Science Master's student) as a new member.
• (Nov. 2009) Ling Ouyang has defended and submitted his Master's Thesis, A Symbol Layout Classification for Mathematical Formulas Using Layout Context.
• (Nov. 2009) Video CAPTCHAs were written about in the November/Decmber issue of the RIT Newspaper, the RIT Athenaeum.
• (Oct. 2009) The lab welcomes Amit Srinet (Computer Science Master's student) as a new member.
• (Sept. 2009) Ling Ouyang will present his paper, Identifying Layout Classes for Mathematical Symbols using Layout Context at the IEEE Western New York Image Processing Workshop
• (July 2009) Kurt Kluever's video CAPTCHA work has been featured in a story at ZDNet UK
• (July 2009) R. Zanibbi, D. Blostein, and J. Cordy's paper White-Box Evaluation of Computer Vision Algorithms through Explicit Decision-Making has been accepted for podium presentation at the International Conference on Computer Vision Systems.
• (May 2009) Li Yu, Ling Ouyang, and Amit Pillay have had abstracts accepted for presentation at the 3rd International Workshop on Pen-Based Mathematical Computation.
• (April 2009) Amit Pillay has been awarded a CS Department Graduate Alumni Scholarship
• (April 2009) Ines Pavon has been awarded the Outstanding 5th Year Student award, and was recently accepted for graduate study by the University of California at San Diego (UCSD)
• (April 2009) Kurt Kluever and Richard Zanibbi have had a paper on YouTube-based video CAPTCHAs accepted for presentation at the 2009 Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security
• (February 2009) The DPRL will be presenting work in pen-based equation editing and video CAPTCHAs at the "WOW! Center" (Field House) during ImagineRIT (May 2, 2009)
• (Feburary 2009) The lab's director was mentioned in a newspaper article published in the Democrat and Chronicle, regarding participation in the Center for Electronic Imaging Systems (CEIS) University Technology Showcase.
• (January 2009) Richard Zanibbi gave a talk on video CAPTCHAs at the Center for Imaging Science at RIT. The talk can be seen online here (requires Adobe Acrobat Connect).