In this paper, we describe our approach to extract salient events such as birth and death records from historical French parish documents that contain free-form handwritten text. The challenges posed by these documents to the current state of the art in handwriting recognition and information extraction go well beyond the generic challenges in recognizing handwritten text such as style variatio...

In China, efforts are being made to preserve historical documents in the form of digital data so that they can be effectively used while being protected. Stitching technology is expected to play a role in these efforts as it can be used to divide a large historical document into multiple areas, scan those areas using a compact contactless scanner, and seamlessly connect the resulting images. Si...

Theorizing on segmented assimilation has usefully spurred debate about the experiences and positions of the second generation in the US and, more recently, Europe. This theory has focused primarily on how young people fare in secondary school and the crucial role that families and ethnic social networks can play in supporting second-generation individuals. But what happens when young people lea...

Higher-dimensional automata constitute a very expressive model for concurrent systems. In this paper, we discuss " topological abstraction " of higher-dimensional automata, i.e., the replacement of HDAs by smaller ones that can be considered equivalent from both a computer scientific and a topo-logical point of view. By definition, topological abstraction preserves the ho-motopy type, the trace...

This paper describes the application of self-optimizing control to a large scale process, the HDA plant. The idea is to select controlled variables which when kept constant lead to minimum economic loss. In order to avoid the combinatorial problem common to the selection of outputs/measurements for such large plants, applications of singular value decomposition (SVD) based methods are used whic...

The objective of our work is to enable the reading of fragile scrolled historical parchments without the need to physically unravel them, thus providing valuable information to a wide range of scholarly disciplines. This problem has not been investigated by the computer vision community properly yet due to the need for parchment scanning technology: standard x-ray machinery is not sufficient as...

Annotation of digitized pages from historical document collections is very important to research on automatic extraction of text blocks, lines, and handwriting recognition. We have recently introduced a new handwritten text database, GERMANA, which is based on a Spanish manuscript from 1891. To our knowledge, GERMANA is the first publicly available database mostly written in Spanish and compara...

The main defects present in historical documents are darkness, non-uniform clarification, bleed-through and faded characters. To remove these defects binarization method is used. In this paper a phase based binarization method is studied in which phase of ancient document images is preserved. This method is derived in to three steps: preprocessing, main binarization and post processing. In prep...

It is difficult to find an existing single model which is able to simultaneously model exceedances over thresholds in multivariate financial time series. A new modeling approach, which is a combination of max-stable processes, GARCH processes, and Markov processes, is proposed. Combining Markov processes and max-stable processes defines a new statistical model which has the flexibility of model...