The Productivity From Information Technology (PROFIT) Initiative was established on October 23, 1992 by MIT President Charles Vest and Provost Mark Wrighton "to study the use of information technology in both the private and public sectors and to enhance productivity in areas ranging from finance to transportation, and from manufacturing to telecommunications." At the time of its inception, PROFIT took over the Composite Information Systems Laboratory and Handwritten Character Recognition Laboratory. These two laboratories are now involved in research related to context mediation and imaging respectively. OR[RING In addition, PROFIT has undertaken joint efforts with a number of research centers, laboratories, and programs at MIT, and the results of these efforts are documented in Discussion Papers published by PROFIT and/or the collaborating MIT entity.Correspondence can be addressed to:The Researchers at MIT have looked at the possibility of taking information directly from paper documents, especially handwritten documents, to computeraccessible media. Automated reading involves several steps as follows:Scanning of document; Location of area to be "read"; Decomposing the selected area into separate characters; Adjusting size and slant of each character; Recognizing each character; and Testing whether input has been correctly read.Based on several years of sustained research, the researchers have attained very high "reading" speed and accuracy, even in situations where the quality of the input material is poor. Patent rights for some of the new techniques have been applied for. Sponsor companies are eligible to test the new techniques in their respective environments at no charge.The work performed so far is described in a number of working papers. AbstractA knowledge based segmentation critic algorithm to enhance recognition of courtesy amounts on bank checks is proposed in this paper. This algorithm extracts the context from the handwritten material and uses a syntax parser based on a deterministic finite automaton to provide adequate feedback to enhance recognition. The segmentation critic presented is capable of handling a number of commonly used styles for courtesy amount representation. Both handwritten and machine written numeric strings were utilized to test the efficacy of the preprocessor for the check recognition system described in this paper. The substitution error fell by 1.0% in our early tests.

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Hearing Impaired (HI)

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In this study, we consider technologies of auditory multimedia as a mode of communication between a mobile device and blind students regarding instructional material. We propose an authoring system designed to create mobile tutorial modules (MTMs) for use by blind students. The system includes two major phases. In the first phase, the instructor submits the contents of a tutorial module in natural language into a server. The server saves the contents of tutorial modules in a database. The server then creates a website based on PHP with MYSQL. Thus, the system creates a website with all the material entered by the instructor. The second phase considers an Android environment with XML for the graphical user interface (GUI) and Java source coding for activities). An API library in the server manages the tutorial content into typical tutorial module. Because the application is designed for totally blind students, all the contents of the GUI are converted into corresponding text-to-speech data (Audio files) using Android. Finally, the blind student receives the MTMs as sound output from the device. We invited several instructors to experimentally evaluate some sample MTMs. The results show that the proposed approach was considered successful in this application. Additionally, an algorithm was applied to reduce the time required for multiple users to interact with the application. We also implemented text-to-speech on Android as well. The proposed approach was received positively by the participants and users.