In(k)formation
Mudit Agrawal
Class: Info-centric design of Systems
Spring ‘07
3rd April 2007
University of Maryland, College Park
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Motivation
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With the digital age, is it possible to revolutionize
publishing?
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Will paper be still around after 10 years as the chief
source of ink or printed information?
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If not, how and where will our ink-information be
stored?
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If yes, will it be any different?
3rd April 2007
University of Maryland, College Park
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Contents
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Information storage media
Paper Industry
Electronic Paper
Digital Paper
Stylus and Digital Pens
Applications
Proposal for digital-exam!
3rd April 2007
University of Maryland, College Park
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Information Storage
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Old Storage media
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petroglyphs
Today’s digital environment
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simple,
low capacity
difficult to duplicate
difficult to distribute
huge storage capacities
simple distribution.
Nature’s storage media
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Tree rings - analog representation of the patterns of flood and
drought.
Crystal structures - representing patterns and arrangements of
atoms and molecules.
DNA, digital encoding of information in patterns of genes and
proteins.
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Digital Age
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Data is stored all around you
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On
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floppy disks,
barcodes,
identification and bankcards.
Data can be in many forms:
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identification numbers,
photographs,
computer files,
audio and videotape,
CD-ROMs
DVD-ROMs
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Still!
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A recent estimate of information
storage estimated 1% is stored in
recordable media such as disk drives
and CD-ROM, 4% in photographic
microfilm and fiche, and 95% on paper.
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University of Maryland, College Park
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Statistics!
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A tree can produce about 80,500 sheets of paper
It requires about 786 million trees to produce the
world's annual paper supply
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University of Maryland, College Park
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Paper!
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Printed Paper is
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Cheap,
Cheerful,
Ubiquitous
It's The Bedrock Of A Billion-Dollar Global Industry
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Why paper still?
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Of course, because paper has entrenched advantages.
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tangibility: pretty much everyone prefers paper to screens.
You can carry it around;
it's compact,
it's convenient
doesn't break.
It doesn't need outside power.
totally reliable.
In other words, it's everything a laptop computer is not.
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University of Maryland, College Park
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Traditional Paper 
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Inspite of all these added advantages,
conventional paper lacks
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Fast and efficient search
Reusability
Piles!
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Tablet PC or Notebook?
NO!
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Electronic Paper
And
Digital Paper
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Electronic Paper
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Mimics appearance of regular ink on
paper
Doesn’t use backlight to illuminate
pixels
Reflects light like ordinary paper
Bistable
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Electronic Paper … (continued)
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Intelligent Paper
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First developed in the 1970s by Nick Sheridon at
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center.
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Gyricon – first electronic paper
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Concept from Dot-matrix printer – words and
pictures can be broken into dots or pixels
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University of Maryland, College Park
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Electronic Paper … (continued)
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Contained polyethylene spheres between 20 and
100 micrometres across.
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Each sphere is composed of
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negatively charged black plastic on one side and
positively charged white plastic on the other
each bead is thus a dipole.
The spheres are embedded in a transparent
silicone sheet, with each sphere suspended in a
bubble of oil so that they can rotate freely.
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University of Maryland, College Park
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Electronic Paper … (continued)
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The polarity of the voltage applied to each pair of
electrodes then determines whether the white or
black side is face-up, thus giving the pixel a white or
black appearance.
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Negative charge to electrode  black pixel
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Applications
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Phillips and Sony developing commercial
applications.
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Shipped developer kits of 6 inch, 800x600
resolution electronic paper on November 1,
2005.
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In February 2006, the Flemish daily De Tijd
distributed an electronic-ink version of the
paper
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University of Maryland, College Park
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Applications … (continued)
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Flexible display cards enable generation of a onetime password to reduce online banking and
transaction fraud.
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Compared with existing key fob tokens, display
cards offer a flat and thin alternative to existing key
fob tokens for data security.
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Motorola's new style mobile phone, called the
Motofone, also uses a monochrome electronic
paper screen
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University of Maryland, College Park
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Are we missing something?
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Digital Paper and Pen
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Motivation: Handwriting!
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Need for an interactive paper
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Precursors:
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Wacom Tablet
Pegasus Pen
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Wacom Tablet
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Wacom Tablet
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cordless, battery-free and pressure-sensitive pens
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uses a patented electromagnetic resonance
technology
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tablet provides power to the pen through resonant
coupling
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A grid of wires that transmits a send and receive
signal
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Application: GKB
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Wacom  GKB  Details…
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Wacom  GKB  Details…
The channel mode of the gesture keyboard.
In (a), the gestures are of same shape but spaced
out in different (x,y) coordinates whereas, in (b),
the gestures occur in same space but separated in
the shape dimension.
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Pegasus Pen
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Digital Paper and Pen
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Anoto!
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Paper
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with proprietary patterns of dots printed on it.
each dot is spaced about 0.3mm apart
the full pattern consists of 669,845,157,115,773,458,169 dots
encompasses an area exceeding 4.6 million km²
this corresponds to 73 trillion sheets of letter-size paper.
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Pattern
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Anoto Pen
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Process
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The digital pen takes digital snapshots of the
pattern
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A calculation of the exact position of the
digital pen is made
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Possible to retrieve
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what has been written with the digital pen and
where on the paper this was written.
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The system
Other Pens
• Logitech IO pen
• Magicomm G303
• Maxell digital pen
• Nokia SU-1B pen
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University of Maryland, College Park
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Implications!
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Media of storage reversed!
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Pen stores the data, not paper
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Move around with your pen, and dock
in, to transfer the data wherever you
want!
3rd April 2007
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Applications:
Paper Presentation Tool
for giving PowerPoint presentations controlled by a paper-based user interface
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University of Maryland, College Park
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Applications:
Encyclopedia
combining printed information with content delivered on a CD-ROM
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University of Maryland, College Park
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Applications:
Semi-digital City Map
providing supplementary digital information about restaurants, cinemas,
shopping facilities etc
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University of Maryland, College Park
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Applications:
Scientific Annotations
publication annotation application was designed to support
researchers in their annotations, recommendations and
cross-referencing of articles
3rd April 2007
University of Maryland, College Park
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Applications:
Print-n-Link
Print-n-Link uses technologies for interactive paper to enhance
the reading process by enabling users to access digital information
and/or searches for cited documents from a printed version of a
publication
3rd April 2007
University of Maryland, College Park
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Applications:
Laboratory Notebooks
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Research lab notebooks are pocket
books for documenting scientific
experiments
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Click and search for related field
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Match the results
3rd April 2007
University of Maryland, College Park
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Application:
Handwriting Recognition!
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Process:
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Smoothing
De-hooking
Normalization
Ink vector interpolation in spatial
domain (from temporal)
Training a classifier for simple
generic shapes
Pre-processed ink for recognition
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Applications:
Others
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Ambulance
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X-ray annotations
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Doctor e-diagnosis
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University of Maryland, College Park
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Digital-Exam System Proposal
Prepare the versions
Of Question paper
Associate Patterns with
each version
Distribute papers to students
Answer matching
Result generation
Dock and transfer
the ink
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Examination
University of Maryland, College Park
Distribute Pens to students
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Gmail Paper!
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Google Paper is a new feature being
promoted on the Gmail home page.
You can request a physical copy of any
email with the click of a button, and
Google will deliver paper printouts to
you in 2-4 days via the mail.
1st APRIL 
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University of Maryland, College Park
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References
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http://invsee.asu.edu/nmodules/ismmod/intro.html
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http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info2003/print.htm
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper
http://www.sipix.com/technology/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wacom
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.05/ff_digitalink_pr.html
http://www.eetindia.com:8088/ARTICLES/2006AUG/C/2006AUG28_I
NDIADESIGNS_HPLabsIndia.HTM
Kauranen(o.J.): The ANOTO pen - Why light scattering matters.
IZMF (2004)
http://www.globis.ethz.ch/research/paper/applications
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University of Maryland, College Park
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