2010年12月8日星期三

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

Comments:
Sam
Summary:
The paper proposes a novel pen-based modeless gestural interaction paradigm for mathmatics problem solving. The system recognized mathmatics expressions, associations between expressions and diagrams, and converted them to a MATLAB language. MATLAB is the background computational tool for MathPad.

Writing Expressions
Due to the difficulty on recognizing mathmatic expressions, the paper proposes a gesture-based method to assist the recognition. It is impossible to recognize the whole sketch for the system. A lasso and a tap are always used to help the recognizer find the area that to be recognized. And when users identify a recognition error, they can earse the offending symbols and rewrite them.

Making Diagrams
There are two operations about making a diagram, Nailing Diagram Components and Grouping Diagram Components.

Associations
There are two kinds of associations, explicit and implicit ones. Implicit assiociations are based on the familiar variable names and constant labels. Explicit associations are made by drawing a line and tapping on a drawing an element.

At the end of paper, the author provides an example 2D projectile motion scenario to help me understand how MathPad works.

Discussion:
Good work for free-hand mathmatic sketches. It works like a hand-draw MATLAB, the best computational tool in the world. The system is welcomed by a lot of users, as the user study shows.

What I am concerned with is how it can recognize those mathmatic symbols. However, there is very little content about it. And no recognition rate is provided in the paper. Also, the recognizer in the paper is still a user-dependent one. It means, the system should provide a recognize per user. It should be improved. My suggestion is that whether the system can provide a procedure that help a new user to train their own recognizer.

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