GOOGLE RESEARCH PROJECT FOR DCU
- 9 February 2006

The founding father and first President of the United States, George Washington, is posthumously assisting Dublin City University in a research project funded by the giant US web multinational Google.

In a rare outsourcing of research, Google has chosen DCU’s Adaptive Information Cluster (AIC) to take part in a project with two American universities, which is part of Google’s quest to make all information in the world searchable. This research could make invaluable manuscripts and rare historical documents – like the Book of Kells, or George Washington’s personal diaries – available and searchable on the web for scholars and interested people worldwide. Up to now, this kind of material is kept behind closed doors or is accessible for examination in digital libraries one page at a time, which is slow and cumbersome.

The DCU team, lead by Professor Alan Smeaton and Dr. Noel O’Connor, has internationally recognised expertise in video analysis and has applied this to making images of handwriting searchable.

Dr. O’Connor says: “With handwriting, which is at present not searchable, we are getting very good detection using the shape of a word – even though the writer will always alter the way he or she writes the same word each time. We’ve applied the approach to hundreds of pages of George Washington’s diaries and memoirs, getting very good results. For example, you can select the word “battle” and find all the references to that word in Washington’s writings”

“This will make historical manuscripts searchable for scholars and others in a way that has never been possible before.” says Prof. Smeaton. Libraries around the world are in the process of digitising their rare and historical manuscripts. So in the future, using this technology, Google search engines could make these manuscripts available and searchable worldwide.

DCU is also involved with the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies in the Irish Script on Screen (ISOS) project – digitising old manuscripts written in Irish. Thousands of images have been scanned with the intention also of making them searchable. The system is based on “object detection” in video – detecting and identifying images of people, cars, or other objects in different video frames, even though there may be altered positions or angles and applying this to differing slants or shapes of words in handwriting. The algorithms designed by DCU researchers can detect reasonable variations in shape, exactly the same variations that we have in our handwriting.

Professor Smeaton believes that the techniques being developed in this project could lead to handwritten manuscripts being available for searching in the giant Google index within a couple of years. “As a company, Google moves very fast and if the techniques we are developing in this project are as good as early results indicate, we can expect to see Google take up the outputs.”

The project is being carried out by the AIC at DCU in partnership with the University of Buffalo and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

The Adaptive Information Cluster (AIC) was established two years ago and is funded by Science Foundation Ireland. It is a multi-disciplinary research group involving leading researchers from DCU and UCD working in sensor science, software engineering, electronic engineering and computer science. Close collaboration with industry and state bodies to develop applications for this research is a priority for the AIC. Particular areas of interest are personal health management, environmental monitoring, personalized retailing and security and threat detection.

ENDS