"A meek endeavor to the triumph" by Sampath Jayarathna

Wednesday, December 08, 2010

Reading #20: MathPad2: A System for the Creation and Exploration of Mathematical Sketches

COMMENTS ON OTHERS:

            Francisco 

SUMMARY

              This paper presents MathPad2, a prototype application for creating mathematical sketches.  MathPad2 incorporates a novel gestural interaction paradigm that lets users modelessly create handwritten mathematical expressions using familiar math notation and free-form diagrams, including associations between then two, with only a stylus.

According to authors, Mathematical sketching is the process of making simple illustrations from a combination of handwritten 2D mathematical expressions and sketched diagrams. Combining mathematical expressions with diagram elements, called an association, is done either implicitly using diagram labels as input to an inferencing engine or manually using a simple gestural user interface. 

DISCUSSION

            It is hard to understand the novelty of the work other than using a gesture recognition system applied towards identifying mathematical expressions. Most of the gestures used for the work are of hackneyed nature, and the use of lasso capability to group stands as something original. In my personal opinion, the work is more of a functionality of a regular character recognition system and gestures are just used to trigger an execution of a function processing, or combining, or editing/deleting.

4 comments:

Francisco (Paco) Vides said...

Yes, the paper was quite dense mathematically speaking, but this gives proof that it has a solid background on the research. The classification can be improved, but they showed an interesting and novel approach.

Francisco (Paco) Vides said...

Ooops! previous comment was meant for reading 19. But now that i am here let me comment on this one: The claimed contribution of MathPad is basically in the gestural recognition, that employs a "fluent" set of gestures to work continuously in various domains such as diagram drawing and math equations. But I agree that the contributions need to be more clearly showed.

Jianjie Zhang said...

The paper is just to show a system can really solve some mathmatic problems. The most important part that how to recognizer the mathmatic expression, is not in the paper, maybe in another paper.

The recognizer maybe not novel, but the application is really novel. The paper was published ten years ago. It was novel at that time.

chris aikens said...

I think that MathPad was designed more to show that gestures can be used to carry out different tasks in different domains. Basically, this paper shows that sketch recognition can make computer-based math problems more intuitive to solve.