Sketch-interpreting software
Science writers know as well as anyone how much information a diagram can contain. We often labor to express in words what a researcher was able to convey in a single image.But while a drawing can be rich in information, it's information that's usually inaccessible to computers. If you draw a diagram on the screen of a tablet computer, like the new Apple iPad, the computer can of course store the drawing as an image. But it can't tell what the image means.MIT researchers intend to change that, with a new system that can interpret sketches. If a chemist, for example, uses a stylus — an inkless plastic pen — to draw a molecule on a tablet computer, the software can identify different types of chemical bonds and element symbols and determine the structure of the molecule. Similarly, if an electrical engineer draws a circuit diagram, the software will identify...