Human-document interaction systems: a new frontier for document image analysis

© 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.All indications show that paper documents will not cede in favour of their digital counterparts, but will instead be used increasingly in conjunction with digital information. An open challenge is how to seamlessly link the physical with the digital – how to continue taking advantage of the important affordances of paper, without missing out on digital functionality. This paper presents the authors’ experience with developing systems for Human-Document Interaction based on augmented document interfaces and examines new challenges and opportunities arising for the document image analysis field in this area. The system presented combines state of the art camera-based document image analysis techniques with a range of complementary technologies to offer fluid Human-Document Interaction. Both fixed and nomadic setups are discussed that have gone through user testing in real-life environments, and use cases are presented that span the spectrum from business to educational applications.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Geostrategies of the European neighbourhood policy

The debate about the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) has, in essence, been about borders and bordering. Such departures could contribute — and often do so — to a rather fixed geopolitical vision of what the EU is about and how it aims to run and to organize the broader European space. However, this article aims to retain space for viewing the ENP as a developmental and somewhat fluid process. A conceptual framework, based on outlining three geopolitical models and a series of different geopolitical strategies employed by the EU in regard to its borders, is hence employed in order to be able to tell a more dynamic story regarding the developing nature of the ENP and the EU's evolving nature more generally. The complexity traced informs us that various geostrategies may be held at the same time at the external border. Moreover, the dominance of one geostrategy may be replaced by another or a different combination of them with regard to the same neighbourhood. It is, more generally, argued that if anything it is precisely this dynamism that should be championed as a valuable resource, avoiding the tendency to close off options through the reification of particular visions of the nature of the EU and its borders

Constructing Futures: Outlining a Transhumanist Vision of the Future and the Challenge to Christian Theology of its Proposed Uses of New and Future Developments in Technology

Transhumanists arc committed to re-evaluating the entire human condition and offering proposalsfor transcending mortality, principally by augmenting the human body with mechanical components or by transferring the human mind into intelligent hyper-computers. In this essay, the author\'s methodology is to critique the culture oftranshumanism, arguing, with Barbour, that all technology is tool whose use is determined by the cultural and socialframeworks within which it is utilized. Transhumanism is characterized as morally ambiguous, extremely individualistic, fixated upon health, vitality, and power, ideological, reductionist, and self-deluded. Its proposed use of technology is, thus, highly suspect and deserves a robust theological response

Advancing automation and robotics technology for the Space Station and for the US economy. Volume 1: Executive overview

In response to Public Law 98-371, dated July 18, 1984, the NASA Advanced Technology Advisory Committee has studied automation and robotics for use in the Space Station. The Executive Overview, Volume 1 presents the major findings of the study and recommends to NASA principles for advancing automation and robotics technologies for the benefit of the Space Station and of the U.S. economy in general. As a result of its study, the Advanced Technology Advisory Committee believes that a key element of technology for the Space Station is extensive use of advanced general-purpose automation and robotics. These systems could provide the United States with important new methods of generating and exploiting space knowledge in commercial enterprises and thereby help preserve U.S. leadership in space

Of highland-lowland borderlands: local societies and foreign power in the Zagros-Mesopotamian interface

Narratives of civilization are spun from the juxtaposition of a civilized self with that of a barbarous other. Such an opposition is never more easily constructed than from the distinctiveness of lowland and mountain topographies, environments, and life-ways. Studies of highland-lowland relationships across different periods, places and disciplines also place the two realms in conceptual opposition and only rarely engage in depth with the interaction that must underwrite all negotiations of identity. We can trace the first attested construction of such a dichotomy in the texts and iconography that detail Mesopotamia’s interaction with the Zagros highlands in the later third and second millennia BCE. The recent opening of the Kurdish Region of north-east Iraq to international archaeological research now provides us with the opportunity to investigate Bronze Age communities located in transitional and highland landscapes and their relationships with the lowlands. In this paper we take a critical approach to the conceptualization of highland-lowland interaction in the past and in modern scholarship and formulate a bottom-up, archaeological approach for the investigation of highland-lowland encounters. Drawing on our recent work in the Upper Diyala/Sirwan river valley, we present crucial new settlement and material evidence, which challenges traditional interpretations of the region as a homeland of mountain tribes and begin to write a more balanced, local account of socio-cultural development and external interaction between this borderland region and a series of Bronze Age imperial powers

The New Knowledge Environment: Quality Initiatives in Health Sciences Libraries

published or submitted for publicatio

Proceedings of the ECSCW'95 Workshop on the Role of Version Control in CSCW Applications

The workshop entitled "The Role of Version Control in Computer Supported Cooperative Work Applications" was held on September 10, 1995 in Stockholm, Sweden in conjunction with the ECSCW'95 conference. Version control, the ability to manage relationships between successive instances of artifacts, organize those instances into meaningful structures, and support navigation and other operations on those structures, is an important problem in CSCW applications. It has long been recognized as a critical issue for inherently cooperative tasks such as software engineering, technical documentation, and authoring. The primary challenge for versioning in these areas is to support opportunistic, open-ended design processes requiring the preservation of historical perspectives in the design process, the reuse of previous designs, and the exploitation of alternative designs. The primary goal of this workshop was to bring together a diverse group of individuals interested in examining the role of versioning in Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Participation was encouraged from members of the research community currently investigating the versioning process in CSCW as well as application designers and developers who are familiar with the real-world requirements for versioning in CSCW. Both groups were represented at the workshop resulting in an exchange of ideas and information that helped to familiarize developers with the most recent research results in the area, and to provide researchers with an updated view of the needs and challenges faced by application developers. In preparing for this workshop, the organizers were able to build upon the results of their previous one entitled "The Workshop on Versioning in Hypertext" held in conjunction with the ECHT'94 conference. The following section of this report contains a summary in which the workshop organizers report the major results of the workshop. The summary is followed by a section that contains the position papers that were accepted to the workshop. The position papers provide more detailed information describing recent research efforts of the workshop participants as well as current challenges that are being encountered in the development of CSCW applications. A list of workshop participants is provided at the end of the report. The organizers would like to thank all of the participants for their contributions which were, of course, vital to the success of the workshop. We would also like to thank the ECSCW'95 conference organizers for providing a forum in which this workshop was possible