User talk:Ray Calvin Baker

Welcome to Wikimedia Commons, Ray Calvin Baker!

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-- 15:04, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

A Worthwhile Goal for Computer Science -- Can a Computer "Read"?

I recently had opportunity to see for myself how reasonable (?) it is to program a computer to read. Here is a web-camera photograph of a fragment of text from a book.

naive photograph

The point is not that this is a bad photograph (I freely admit that it is); the point is that any competent visual system must be capable of extracting useful text from a picture such as this. Deriving ASCII text from such a picture is only one aspect of 'reading". Even more difficult will be to derive "common sense" understanding of natural language from a file of text. A third challenge for Computer Science is to recognize objects from photographs, so as to guide machinery or robots to appropriately deal with such objects. I would like my scroll saw to be able to make parts without depending on my "hand-eye" coordination.

Let us all "dream on". Ray Calvin Baker (talk) 22:08, 18 May 2012 (UTC)