Motorola Lexicus Division’s Scientist Selected as Finalist in Discover Magazine’s Technological Innovation Award
NEW YORK — April 25, 1996 — Discover Magazine announced today that Motorola Lexicus Division's (NYSE: MOT) WisdomPen(TM) Chinese Handwriting Recognition Software is a finalist in the 1996 DISCOVER Magazine Awards for Technological Innovation.
Dr. Kannan Parthasarathy, who led a team of international scientists in Palo Alto, Calif., will be honored by Discover Magazine as the innovator of Motorola's WisdomPen software. Parthasarathy and his team developed the WisdomPen software algorithm, which enables Chinese writers to input over 19,000 Chinese characters into Windows(TM) 95 applications using a pen and a digitizer-tablet attached to a standard desktop or notebook computer.
WisdomPen software will be demonstrated at the Discover Magazine Technology Expo at Walt Disney World Resort's Epcot in Orlando, Fla., May 31 through June 2.
THE INNOVATION:
Motorola's WisdomPen software is the world's first highly accurate walk-up-and-use Chinese character recognizer. It presents a major technological breakthrough; with no training, WisdomPen has over 95% accuracy in real usage situations. Continuing in the Motorola Lexicus tradition, this new technology recognizes "cursive" style characters, thereby enabling faster and more natural handwriting.
"The technology will revolutionize the use of personal computers and microprocessors in Asia," said Elton Sherwin, Lexicus VP of Marketing. "Users no longer need to learn the English keyboard to enter Chinese characters into PCs, PDAs, and notebook computers."
Running on desktop and notebook computers, the recognizer has two dictionaries, which together contain the whole Chinese character set (over 19,000 characters.) It works on a complex writing model computed for each character; the model is applied using advanced pattern recognition technologies.
THE INNOVATOR:
Parthasarathy received a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India in 1986, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Yale University in 1991. While at Yale, he was a recipient of the Yale Fellowship and the Connecticut High Technology Graduate Scholarship from the State of Connecticut.
His seminal work with Professor K. S. Narendra at Yale on the identification and control of nonlinear dynamical systems using neural networks was selected as the best paper by the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks in 1990.
After joining Motorola in 1994, Parthasarathy started to write the core algorithm for the Chinese handwriting recognition software. He has studied Chinese for one and a half years, and continues his language studies with fellow Motorola Lexicus employees. Parthasarathy resides in Northern California with his wife and 19 month-old daughter.
BACKGROUND:
There are over one billion writers of Chinese characters in the world. Regardless of the dialect of Chinese they speak (Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, etc.), they write one of two character sets: Traditional or Simplified.
Traditional is the superset of characters which is used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Simplified, which was developed in the PRC, combines traditional characters and some simplified versions of characters. Japanese kanji characters have considerable overlap with traditional and to a lesser extent simplified Chinese characters.
TECHNICAL CHALLENGE:
Chinese characters are written with a series of strokes — as few as one to more than 17. Children learn a set stroke sequence for each character but there are variations in adult's stroke order. The concept of "cursive" writing in Chinese characters exists, but in a different form than in English and other roman character languages, where letters within a word run together.
"In cursive Chinese, the strokes within a character run together, which can make recognition of real writing very difficult," said Professor Chao Fen Sun of Stanford University. Motorola's WisdomPen software is the first cursive Chinese character recognizer.
Founded in 1992, Lexicus was acquired by Motorola Inc. in 1993 and is now part of Motorola's Messaging, Information and Media Sector. Motorola is one of the world's leading providers of wireless communications, semiconductors, and advanced electronic systems and services. Major equipment businesses include cellular telephone, two-way radio, paging and data communications, personal communications, automotive, defense and space electronics and computers. Motorola's 1995 sales were $ 27.0 billion.
Note to Editors: Motorola is registered trademark and WisdomPen is a trademark of Motorola Inc.
CONTACT:
Motorola, Lexicus Division
Wako Takayama, 415/462-6801
[email protected]
http://www.mot.com/lexicus/