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search within historical documents.



http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,124686,00.asp
Google Takes a History Lesson
PC WORLD
Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service
Friday, February 10, 2006

Search company is funding research into technology that will enable
search within historical documents.

Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service
Friday, February 10, 2006

History buffs can search George Washington's manuscripts online 
today for terms like "revolution," but only thanks to the 
tireless workers who transcribed the hand-written documents into 
digital form. ...

Soon, many other hand-written historical documents could be made 
available for the public to search--and through considerably less 
effort--if a research project funded by Google and being executed 
by three universities works out as planned.

The project, announced by Dublin City University (DCU) this week, 
all started on a whim. DCU professor Alan Smeaton has been 
working on technology that can recognize objects that appear in 
videos. His technology can detect an object, like a car or an 
airplane, in the frame of a video, then extract the image to 
compare it to a database of images to identify it or enable it to 
be searched. ... Smeaton wouldn't say how much funding Google has 
committed but says it will cover a year's worth of work by three 
or four researchers at DCU, as well as the same number of 
researchers each at the University of Buffalo and the University 
of Massachusetts at Amherst.

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Chuck Hamaker
Associate University Librarian Collections and Technical Services
Atkins Library
University of North Carolina Charlotte
Charlotte, NC 28223
phone 704 687-2825