Arizona Technology Enterprise, ASU's Technology Transfer Group, Facilitates Sponsored Research Agreement Between the Partnership for Research in Spatial Modeling (PRISM) and In-Q-Tel

February 2, 2005
Phoenix, AZ

Arizona  State University's Partnership for Research in Spatial Modeling (PRISM), today  announced that In-Q-Tel, a private venture group funded by the Central  Intelligence Agency (CIA), has executed an agreement to support the development  of PRISM's handwriting recognition and document segmentation technology.

"This  partnership has enhanced the development of our volumetric modeling technology  for handwriting recognition and will potentially provide the Intelligence  Community with access to software that recognizes and automatically separates  mixed graphical, print and handwritten content for search, retrieval and  cataloging", said PRISM founder Anshuman Razdan,  Ph.D. "We are enthusiastic about our work."

PRISM's  technology applies proprietary modeling software and algorithms to extract  information about the spatial and topological characteristics of features on a  page. The software is capable of separating features such as handwriting,  borders, and graphics that until now could not be processed by traditional  optical character recognition (OCR) software.

The  software incorporates batch processing and can store information about the  features of multiple documents in a database for straightforward binning and  identification of documents. PRISM's patented approach has the potential to  improve the speed and efficiency of analyzing documents for analysis.

"ASU's  3-D handwriting technology offers unique capabilities for recognizing  handwriting and segmenting documents," said Gilman Louie, In-Q-Tel's  president and CEO. "In-Q-Tel is very pleased with its partnership with  ASU's PRISM. They have made significant progress toward a solution that will  not only have broad utility for the Intelligence Community but potentially  attractive commercial applications as well."

About AzTE & ASU
Arizona  Technology Enterprises at Arizona State University works with university  inventors and industry to transform scientific progress into products and  services. Arizona Technology Enterprises transfers technologies invented at ASU  to the private sector by mining university research, prosecuting patents,  negotiating licenses, and marketing inventions.

About PRISM
PRISM  is the focal point at Arizona State University for interdisciplinary research  in modeling and visualization to permit intelligent analysis and create spatial  and dynamic knowledge.