University of Houston
Department of Computer Science
In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Science


Chang H. Yun
will defend his thesis

A Prototype Educational Interface – Based on Handwritten and Verbal Interaction

Abstract

We introduce a prototype educational software interface based on handwritten and verbal interaction.  The interface fully incorporates handwriting recognition technology and speech recognition and synthesis technologies to enhance the interaction between a user and a computer.  At present most human-to-computer interaction involves the keyboard or the mouse for the human and text or the graphic for the computer.  Our method enhances the human-to-computer setting to a more user-friendly level using the currently available human-computer interface tools.  Doing so, the human-to-computer communication interaction can be enhanced to that of approximating human-to-human communication.  Thus, our new method presents a potential to deliver to the educational environment a modern technology-driven tool capable of enhancing the learning experience.

We chose the Tablet PC as the primary hardware.  It is an ideal tool that for speech and writing technologies as it provides modest mobility and reasonable computing power.  The software that enables us to implement the speech and the handwriting technologies comes from two Microsoft system development kits (SDKs), Speech SDK 5.1 and Tablet PC Platform SDK 1.7.  The communication between a server (an automatic advanced tutor system) and clients (human students with Tablet PCs) is handled by .NET Remoting under Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1.  Upon these foundations, we designed a prototype educational application interface for solving arithmetic questions either with the handwriting or the speech with Visual Basic .NET 2003.

Date: Friday, July 29th, 2005
Time: 4:00 PM
Place: 550-PGH



Faculty, students, and the general public are invited.
Thesis Advisor: Dr. Olin Johnson