An emerging trend in robotics is the development of inherently safe, mobile robots that are designed to assist humans across a wide variety of tasks. Humans are good at intuitively perceiving and quickly adapting to the intentions and conventions of their human teammates with little or no explicit communications. Robots, on the other hand, face the challenge of optimizing and adapting their schedules to, what to them appears to be, their inherently unreliable, non-communicative, and irrational human teammates. A primary goal of my work is to equip robots with methods to quickly and robustly develop plans that (1) adapt to established conventions to successfully negotiate human-oriented environments and (2) augment the workflow of human workers to increase overall productivity, safety, and quality. In this talk I discuss a new, distributed robotic scheduling approach that builds on classical shortest-path algorithms to enable a robot to coordinate its activities with its human teammates while providing them flexibility and autonomy.

For many, “searching” is considered a mostly solved problem. In fact, for text processing, this belief is factually based. The problem is that most “real world” search applications involve “complex documents”, and such applications are far from solved. Complex documents, or less formally, “real world documents”, comprise of a mixture of images, text, signatures, tables, etc, and are often available only in scanned hardcopy formats. Search systems for such document collections are currently unavailable.

We describe our efforts at building a complex document information processing prototype. This prototype integrates “point solution” (mature) technologies, such as document readability enhancement, OCR capability, signature matching and handwritten word spotting techniques, search and mining approaches, among others, to yield a system capable of searching “real world documents”. The described prototype demonstrates the adage that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. Our complex document benchmark development efforts are likewise presented.

Having described the global approach, we describe some point solutions which we developed over the years. These include an image enhancer, an Arabic stemmer, and a natural language source integration fabric called the Intranet Mediator.