by
Department
of Computer Science and Engineering
University
at Buffalo, The State University of New York
The
methodology of Artificial Intelligence was first tested in toy problems and game
playing, e.g., blocks world, chess and backgammon. Over
the last two decades AI methodologies have found their way into applications that are in the service of
society. The talk will describe a long-term project
that led to large scale deployment of systems for reading handwritten addresses
on postal mail-pieces in the United States, Australia and the UK,. A brief description of the history of CEDAR, where the work was
performed, will be given. The transition
of the methodology into tools for crime scene investigation, particularly those
involving questioned documents, latent fingerprints and shoe-prints , will also
be described. Some contributions to statistical
pattern recognition and machine learning methodologies from these applications will
be highlighted.
Sargur Srihari
is a SUNY Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and
Engineering at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. He founded CEDAR, the Center of Excellence for Document
Analysis and Recognition, with support from the United States Postal Service. Srihari currently teaches
courses in machine learning and pattern recognition. He
has been involved in several start-up
technology companies. Srihari
is a Fellow of the IEEE and the International Association for Pattern
Recognition. He received a B.E. in Electrical
Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and a
Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the Ohio State University,
Columbus.