פותחים שנה בפקולטה עם הרבה בירות נקניקיות ברד 
והופעה של 'להקה רנדומלית' - סתם עוד להקה רנדומלית

~~Electrical Engineering-Systems Department

*** SEMINAR ***

George Kour
(M.Sc. student under the supervision of Prof. Dana Ron and Dr. Raid Saabni)

on the subject:

Real-time Segmentation and Recognition of On-line Handwritten Arabic Script

Despite the long standing belief that digital computers will challenge the future of handwriting, pens and papers remain commonly used means for communication and recording of information in daily life. In addition to the growing use of keyboard-less devices such as smart-phones and tablets, which are too small to have a convenient keyboard, handwriting recognition is receiving increasing attention in the last decades.
Correct and efficient recognition of handwritten Arabic text is a challenging problem due to the cursive and unconstrained nature of the Arabic script. While real-time performance is necessary in applications involving on-line handwriting recognition, conventional approaches usually wait until the entire curve is traced out before starting the analysis, inevitably causing delays in the recognition process. This deferment restricts on-line recognition techniques from achieving high responsiveness demands expected from such systems, and prevents implementing advanced features of input typing, such as automatic word completion and real-time automatic spelling correction.
This work presents a real-time approach for segmenting and recognizing handwritten on-line Arabic script. We demonstrate the feasibility of segmenting Arabic handwritten text during the course of writing. The proposed segmentation approach is a recognition-based method that operates in the stroke level and nominates candidate segmentation points based on morphological features. Using a fast Arabic character classifier, the system attaches a score to the sub-strokes induced by the candidate points, which captures the likelihood of the sub-stroke to represent a letter.
A candidate filtering followed by a segmentation selection process are activated when the entire stroke is available.
A nearest neighbors based character classifier that employs a linear-time embedding of the Earth Mover's Distance metric to a norm space is presented. The transformation of the feature space vectors into the wavelet coefficient space, facilitates accurate similarity measure and sub-linear search methods. We show that the resulting character segmentation and classification information can be used to significantly reduce the potential dictionary size and accelerate a holistic recognition process.

~~Electrical Engineering-Systems Department

*** SEMINAR ***

Shlomi Kushchi
(M.Sc. student under the supervision of Prof. Shlomo Weiss)

on the subject:

Cloud Computing Through In-Flight WiFi Limited Bandwidth Airplane Communication

  High bandwidth internet usage is a known problem while travelling. For instance when flying on airplanes. The problem arises from the obvious reason, the plane is up in the air where there are no antennas. Moreover, while flying from one continent to the other the airplane is flying over oceans where no infrastructure is available. Communication is available, but the bandwidth is limited. That means that under that current infrastructure it is very difficult to provide a good connection to the passengers. That also reflects on the pricing.
  We suggest a novel approach to deploy virtual desktops on such platforms. In this approach the graphical part of the application is separated from the remaining parts. The applications execute in the cloud and the GUI is displayed on the client side. The application is not affected by the remote execution and behaves as if it executes on a private computer.
  Our approach requires almost no changes in the transition from a desktop application to a cloud application. Separating the GUI part of the application is done by intercepting all the applications GUI function calls and transmitting them to the client. With a dedicated environment at the client side the function calls are executed properly. In the proposed approach the separation of the graphics part, which runs on the client, and the remainder of the application, which executes in the cloud, is done with minimal changes in the application and results in competitive bandwidth relative to familiar protocols. In this paper we will demonstrate this concept on a Windows based clients, but the same concepts can be implemented on other platforms as well.