ASCM 2009 Special Session on Digitising Mathematics: From Pen and Paper to Digital Content

JAL Resort Sea Hawk Hotel Fukuoka Japan, Dec.14-15
Organisers: Alan P. Sexton and Volker Sorge (University of Birmingham, UK)

Mathematical knowledge today is available in forms that are overwhelmingly presentational in nature. Documents are printed on paper or, if electronically available, are generally either images scanned from paper, or are electronically born in a format designed for presentation, such as PDF, Tex, MS Word. Electronically capturing and communicating the mathematical meaning of such content is a major challenge requiring research into a large and diverse set of technologies. Solving these problems is necessary to allow more efficient and practical interaction with current and future mathematical software systems.

The aim of the session is to bring to together researchers working on different aspects of capturing original mathematical input and transferring it to digital format. We invite original research submissions on all aspects of both interactive and passive capture and analysis of mathematical texts, expressions and diagrams from presentational sources or from interactive graphical input devices. Amongst others, input sources and devices of interest include paper, optically scanned images, photographs of whiteboards, PDF documents, Tex sources, Microsoft Word files, tablet computers, electronic pens, electronic whiteboards.

Potential topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
-- OCR for Mathematics
-- Character Recognition of Specialist Fonts and Symbols
-- Mathematical Formula Recognition
-- Recognition and Interpretation of Mathematical Diagrams
-- Recognition of Handwritten Mathematics
-- Pen-based Mathematical Input Interfaces
-- Interpretation of Digitised Content
-- Audio-visualisation of Scanned Documents
-- Digitisation Workflows and Projects
-- Segmentation of Mathematical Documents
-- Structure Analysis of Mathematical Documents
-- Context Analysis in Mathematical Documents
-- Ground truth sets of Mathematical Symbols and Expressions

Submissions

Extended abstracts of maximum four pages should be submitted to the ASCM-DM09 EasyChair web site: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ascmdm09, by 12th October 2009. Note that this deadline is later than that for general ASCM/MACIS submissions, and, given the tight schedules involved, no extensions will be possible.

Submissions should be as PDF documents in ASCM/MACIS format: http://gcoe.math.kyushu-u.ac.jp/ascm-macis2009/for_authors.html.

Authors of accepted abstracts will then be asked to submit a full paper (up to 10 pages in the same ASCM/MACIS format). The full text of all contributed papers will be available in proceedings which will be published in the Math-for-Industry Lecture Notes series (http://gcoe-mi.jp) and distributed at the conference.

After the conference, authors of selected papers will be invited to publish revised, extended versions of their work either in a special issue of the journal Mathematics in Computer Science or in a Springer Verlag Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence Volume.

Important Dates

Session Organisers