I am a Professor of Computer Science at RIT. My research interests include pattern recognition and machine learning, with applications in document recognition and information retrieval. I've worked on math-aware search engines and recognizing math notation (most recently with the MathSeer project), locating text in pictures, and audio-visual search in lecture videos. Please click on the links above for information about my teaching, research, publications (including .pdfs), software produced by or associated with the dprl, and resources for students.

I direct the Document and Pattern Recognition Lab (dprl) and am affiliated with the Artificial Intelligence Cluster in the Computer Science Department. I am on the Editorial Board of the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), and am a member of the IEEE Computer Society, ACM, and International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). I served as the Communications Officer for IAPR Technical Committee No. 11 ('Reading Systems') during 2017-2018, recently joined the IAPR Conferences and Meetings Committee and I Co-Chaired the International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition (ICFHR 2018).

Notes for students:

• Currently there are no open PhD positions in the dprl.
• Master's students:
  • I am not taking on any new MSc students at the moment,.
  • RIT students interested in doing an Independent Study, Master's project or thesis should consult the DPRL Project and Thesis Guidelines.

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News (dprl News)

NSF Molecule Maker Lab Institute. The Molecule Maker Lab Institute at UIUC (MMLI) has been funded as one of the new NSF AI institutes (RIT news story). I am a member of this exciting new project. I will be working on extraction, search, and knowledge graph creation in the chemical synthesis literature for the project. An exciting application is using AI to develop better methods for creating solar cells. To my complete surprise, there was local radio and television coverage for this story, and even a press release from Chuck Shumer's office (US Senator for New York). Dr. Mahshad Mahdavi. Congratulations to Mahshad Mahdavi, who successfully defended her dissertation in Imaging Science in August (title: Query-Driven Global Graph Attention Model for Visual Parsing: Recognizing Handwritten and Typeset Math Formulas)! Gavin Nishizawa, BS/MS. Congratulations to Gavin Nishizawa, who successfully defended his Master's thesis in August (title: Visual Structure Editing of Math Formulas)! RIT News Story on MathDeck and MathSeer. In June 2020, RIT released a news story about MathDeck and the MathSeer project. MathDeck released. The dprl released MathDeck in mid-April 2020, a math-aware search interface that introduces a new 'chip and card' metaphor for creating, editing, reusing, and collecting information about formulas. (Please note: MathDeck works best with Google Chrome) ECIR 2020 The dprl had three papers on accelerated formula search, the new MathDeck search interface, and the ARQMath task accepted at ECIR! Congratulations to Wei Zhong, Behrooz Mansouri, Gavin Nishizawa, Abishai Dmello, Jennifer Liu, and Yancarlos Diaz on a job well done! [ publications page ] ARQMath The ARQMath lab for CLEF 2020 has begun! If you would like to join in the planning discussions and/or participate, please join the ARQMath forum. ICDAR Papers. My PhD students Mahshad Mahdavi and Kwon-Young Choi have had their papers on formula recognition in typeset images and detection of accidentals in scans of printed musical scores accepted for publication at ICDAR. Both papers present novel recognition models employing CNNs. ICDAR 2019 will be held in Sydney, Australia this fall. ECIR 2019 Best Applications Paper. My PhD student Wei Zhong received the Best Applications Paper award at ECIR 2019. His paper's title is Structural Similarity Search for Formulas using Leaf-Root Paths in Operator Subtrees. MathSeer Pages. (March, 2019) Web pages for the MathSeer project are now online. JCDL 2019 Paper. My PhD student Behrooz Mansouri had a full paper on log analysis for math searches in a general-purpose search engine paper accepted to JCDL 2019, which will was held at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in June. Nominated for a Best Paper award. ECIR 2019 Papers. My PhD student Wei Zhong and my former PhD student Kenny Davila have both had full papers on math formula search accepted for oral presentation at ECIR 2019 in Cologne, Germany. Wei's paper received the Best Applications Paper Award. Best Paper Award at ICFHR 2018. My former PhD student Kenny Davila and I received the award for Best Paper at ICFHR (Aug 2018). The paper title is "Visual Search Engine for Handwritten and Typeset Math in Lecture Videos and LaTeX Notes." Tangent-V ('visual' search). Kenny Davila's Tangent-V system for visual search in binary images in now available for download. An accompanying paper is being presented at ICFHR 2018 in Niagara Falls in early August. Kenny applied Tangent-V to searching for math in lecture notes, and in automatically generated keyframe summaries of whiteboard contents in math lecture videos.