With the growing interest in and use of PDAs and tablet computers, pen-based interaction has become an area of increasing research interest with practical consequences. To date, however, most pen-based interaction is still done using either traditional mouse motions or with an artificial gesture language like Palm’s Graffiti.

This symposium aims to explore what it would take to make intelligent pen-based interaction feel much more like the kind of writing and drawing we routinely do on paper. What would it take to make sketching on a tablet computer, for example, feel as natural as sketching on paper, yet have the computer understand what is being drawn? Can we extend the interaction so that the system also understood the often fragmentary speech and the variety of hand gestures that go with drawing in environments like collaborative design reviews? How can multimodal input such as pen strokes, speech, and gestures be naturally combined and used for mutual disambiguation? Solving these challenges would provide an enormous advance over traditional tools for tasks like design and brainstorming.

The central goal of the symposium is to provide a focus for the growing community interested in making pen-based computing more natural by making it smarter, and interested in uses of pen-based computing that go beyond handwriting recognition. It will as well be an opportunity to cross-fertilize research in AI and HCI, aiming on one hand to make human-computer interaction more natural by making it smarter, and on the other to infuse AI research with the insights and expertise of the HCI community.

We welcome technical papers describing proposed or completed research activities; scene setting papers describing the history of the field and the current landscape; position papers outlining a research agenda for the field; position papers evaluating current ideas and approaches; interactive software and hardware demonstrations; or suggestions for panel discussions.

Natural Pen-Based Interaction Moderated Email Discussion List

Dates