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10 Inventions On Keyboard Key Switch Mechanism, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

The key switches of the keyboard of a computer system are generally comprised of a key cap having a plunger, conductive rubber disposed above a membrane circuit and compressed by the plunger to trigger the membrane circuit causing it to produce an electric signal to the computer. Some key switches use springs. Some other keyboards use rubber domes or a dome sheet, which do the function of springs. When the user depresses the key button the spring or domes collapse. The key switch depresses the key stem, which actuates the button on the membrane circuit. When the user releases the …

10 Inventions On Laptop Keyboards, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

A desktop keyboard has several sections like character key section, navigation key section, numeric key section, and function key section etc. each consisting of several number of keys. However, a laptop computer does not have so much of space to accommodate all these keys into the keyboard. There are several considerations while designing a laptop keyboard.

This article illustrates 10 inventions on keyboards for laptop and portable computers. The inventions are selected from US patent database. The inventions try to improve various aspects of a laptop keyboard, such as reducing size, folding and concealing, ergonomic features, improving quality and reducing …

10 Inventions On Special Type Of Keyboards, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

A keyboard is the most important input device for a computer. It is used with various types and sizes of computer. But the same standard keyboard will not work efficiently with different types of computers at different environments. There is a need to develop special keyboards to meet special requirements.

This article illustrates 10 inventions on special types of keyboards. The special keyboard are used in special computers or computers used for special purposes. A special keyboard is to be understood as a keyboard having features beyond a normal keyboard. The example of special keyboards are, a children’s keyboard which …

Keyboards For Inputting Chinese Language: A Study Based On Us Patents, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

As the structure of Chinese characters are very different, it is very difficult to input Chinese characters into computer quickly and conveniently. The conventional keyboard does not support the pictorial characters in Chinese language. There are 3000 to 6000 commonly used pictorial Chinese characters (Hanzi).

There are a few existing systems which include "PinYin" (phonetic) system, a combination of the PinYin system and character form techniques, whole character encoding, stroke input encoding, and stoke form encoding. Each of the methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. This article describes two inventions on inputting Chinese language through a standard keyboard.

Avoiding Repetitive Stress Injuries By Using Ergonomically Improved Keyboards, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

Most conventional keyboards are designed keeping their technical efficiency in mind and not human comfort or ergonomic aspects. This leads to various physical problems by keyboard users and more seriousness to the prolonged users.

The major physical problems caused by prolonged keyboard usage can be categorized as neck pain and stiffness, low back pain and stiffness, and strain of the wrists. These problems are caused by chairs, computer desks, and keyboard support stands that are unsuitable for the particular computer user.

Carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) is a debilitating injury to the wrist joint which has been frequently attributed to long …

10 Inventions On Collapsible Keyboards, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

Although a bigger keyboard is often comfortable to work with, they cannot be fit into laptop and small size computer boxes. The portable and handheld computers need small size keyboards. So there is a need to reduce the size of the keyboard to fit into the laptop box. There are various mechanisms to reduce the size of the keyboard; collapsible keyboard is one of them.

Although different inventions intend to achieve the same objective of reducing the keyboard size, they all differ in their mechanism. For example, some invention uses a compression mechanism, some invention uses a folding mechanism, and …

10 Inventions On Modular Keyboards, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

As a standard keyboard is quite spacious many inventions try to use the space of keyboard to use for various activities. A modular keyboard is designed in such a way that the components of the keyboard can be attached and detached as per the need. This article illustrates 10 inventions on modular keyboard from US patent database. The objective of these inventions is to make a keyboard modular, so that the same keyboard can be made smaller by detaching some of its components and larger by attaching additional attachments. Some modular keyboards provide slots for external attachments like mouse, telephone, …

Inventions On Reducing Number Of Keys On A Computer Keyboard, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

A computer keyboard consists of several sections and each section consists of several numbers of keys. The text entry section contains the standard character keys, navigation section contains cursor movement and page control keys, numeric keypad contains numeric keys and function keys section contain function keys and special keys. Although the increased number of keys helps smooth interaction with a computer there are situations where it is necessary to reduce the number of keys. The need for reducing number of keys in a keyboard creates a technical contradiction. Generally more number of keys can support more number of functions and …

Inventions On Soft Keyboards, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

The soft keyboards are onscreen representation of physical keyboard having alphanumeric characters and other controls. The user operates the soft keyboard with the mouse, a stylus or other pointing device. The soft keys don’t have any mechanical component. The soft keyboards are used in many public places for informational purpose, educational systems and financial transactional systems. A soft keyboard is convenient in some cases where a hard keyboard is difficult to manage. The soft keyboard is a substitute of a physical keyboard and is displayed on the screen. It displays the same type of alphanumeric and control keys like the …

Inventions On Keyboard Illumination: A Triz Based Analysis, Umakant Mishra

Umakant Mishra

The conventional computers are not usable in dark, as the user cannot see the keyboard to operate properly. But there are many situations where the user may like to work on his computer under low light conditions, such as, during nights, while traveling in flights/ trains having low lights, working in the garden during evening etc. So it is necessary to provide some light to the laptop to operate the keyboard under low light situations.

Luminescence of the keyboard is a desirable feature for portable computers. There may be several methods to illuminate the keyboard, the most crude may be …

Cross-Language Retrieval For Arabic Texts: The Creation Of An English-Arabic Cross-Language Information Retrieval Environment, Robert N. Oddy, Anne R. Diekema, Jean Hannouche, Grant Ingersoll, Elizabeth D. Liddy

Robert Oddy

An English-Arabic Cross-Language Information Retrieval Environment was created in which the user can query an Arabic database in English and retrieve a set of relevant Arabic documents. The retrieved Arabic documents will be automatically translated into English to facilitate readability by the English language user. Proper names of people, places, and organizations are extracted from the retrieved documents and transliterated from Arabic into English. They are presented to the user and serve to provide a brief summarization of the retrieved document. Another feature of the AIR design is the user’s ability to group searches and search results into what we …

Analyst-Focused Arabic Information Retrieval, Robert N. Oddy, Ann R. Diekema, Jean Hannouche, Elizabeth Liddy, Grant Ingersoll

Robert Oddy

An English-Arabic Cross-Language Information Retrieval Environment was created in which the analyst can query an Arabic database in English and retrieve a set of relevant Arabic documents. The retrieved Arabic documents are automatically translated into English to facilitate readability by the English-only analyst. Proper names of people, places, and organizations are extracted from the retrieved documents and transliterated from Arabic into English. They are presented to the analyst and serve to provide a brief summarization of the retrieved document search query in English. Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR), itself a desideratum in the ARDA workshop, is a special case of Information …

E-Commerce Technology Forsafe Money Transaction Over The Net, Noor Jahan Haque, Raman Attri

Raman K. Attri

The Buzz word E-commerce has revolutionized the way the business and money transactions used to work in the past. It is the latest impact of software arena in the field of banking, business and purchasing. The term also refers to online stock and bond transactions and buying and downloading software without ever going near a store. In addition, e-commerce includes business-to-business connections that make purchasing easier for big corporations. This paper mainly concentrates on technology revolution behind the transaction of money over the net. There are still doubts and questions from business and corporate users on the safety aspects of …

An Application Of Plausible Reasoning To Information Retrieval, Farhad Oroumchian, Robert N. Oddy

Robert Oddy

This work explores the use of plausible inferences as a means of retrieving relevant documents. Collins and Michalski’s theory of plausible reasoning has been modified to accommodate information retrieval. Methods are proposed to represent document contents by logical terms and statements, and queries by incomplete logical statements. Extensions to plausible inferences are discussed. Two versions of the extended plausible reasoning system were implemented, one using dominance weights (described in the paper) and the other using tf. Idf (Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency) weights. Experiments were conducted using the titles and abstracts of the CACM collection and it was found that …

Book Review: Reasoning Agents In A Dynamic World: The Frame Problem. Kenneth M. Ford And Patrick J. Hayes, Eds.,, Jozsef A. Toth

Jozsef A Toth Ph.D.

No abstract provided.

Discourse-Level Analysis Of Abstracts For Information Retrieval: A Probabilistic Approach, Robert N. Oddy

Robert Oddy

The objective of this research is to contribute to our knowledge of how people seek information, and how computer systems can be designed to help in this process. Most information retrieval research since the field emerged in the 1950's has reduced these questions to that of trying to determine how documents relevant to a user's query might be selected from a large collection of texts---a question that has proved remarkably difficult to answer. The present work takes the stance that this particular reduction increasingly limits progress towards the objective stated above. It is directed instead towards the development of a …

Towards The Use Of Situational Information In Information Retrieval, Robert N. Oddy, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Ann Bishop, Eileen Martin, Joseph Elewononi, Bhaskaran Balakrishnan

Robert Oddy

This paper is an exploratory study of one approach to incorporating situational information into information retrieval systems, drawing on principles and methods of discourse linguistics. A tenet of discourse linguistics is that texts of a specific type possess a structure above the syntactic level, which follows conventions known to the people using such texts to communicate. In some cases, such as literature describing work done, the structure is closely related to situations, and may therefore be a useful representational vehicle for the present purpose. Abstracts of empirical research papers exhibit a well-defined discourse- level structure, which is revealed by lexical …

Pthomas: An Adaptive Information Retrieval System On The Connection Machine., Robert Oddy, Bhaskaran Balakrishnan

Robert Oddy

This paper reports the state of development of PThomas, a network based document retrieval system implemented on a massively parallel fine-grained computer, the Connection Machine. The program is written in C*, an enhancement of the C programming language which exploits the parallelism of the Connection Machine. The system is based on Oddy’s original Thomas program, which was highly parallel in concept, and makes use of the Connection Machine’s single instruction multiple data (SIMD) processing capabilities. After an introduction to systems like Thomas, and their relationship to spreading activation and neural network models, the current state of PThomas is described, including …

Ask For Information Retrieval: Part Ii. Results Of A Design Study, Robert N. Oddy, N J. Belkin, H M. Brooks

Robert Oddy

In 'ASK for Information Retrieval: Part P1, we discussed the theory and background to a design study for an information retrieval (IR) system based on the attempt to represent the anomalous states of knowledge (ASKs) underlying information needs. In Part 11, we report the methods and results of the design study, and our conclusions.

Ask For Information Retrieval: Part I. Background And Theory, Robert N. Oddy, N J. Belkin, H M. Brooks

Robert Oddy

We report the results of a British Library Research and Development Department funded design study for an interactive information retrieval system which will determine structural representations of the anomalous states of knowledge (ASKs) underlying information needs, and attempt to resolve the anomalies through a variety of retrieval strategies performed on a database of documents represented in compatible structural formats. Part I discusses the background to the project and the theory underlying it, Part II (next issue) presents our methods, results and conclusions. Basic premises of the project were: that information needs are not in principle precisely specifiable; that it is …

Information Retrieval Through Man-Machine Dialogue., Robert N. Oddy

Robert Oddy

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new method of information retrieval by man-machine interaction. The dialogue supported has more symmetry than most interactive computer systems in that the machine forms an image (rather as a man does) of the view of the human enquirer, without requiring him to ask a precise question, and responds with references according to its image. Initial tests with a prototype program indicate that a performance equal to that obtainable from a more conventional on-line retrieval system is possible without obliging the user to formulate his query.

Reference Retrieval Based On User Induced Dynamic Clustering., Robert N. Oddy

Robert Oddy

The problem of mechanically retrieving references to documents, as a first step to fulfilling the information need of a researcher, is tackled through the design of an interactive computer program. A view of reference retrieval is presented which embraces the browsing activity. In fact, browsing is considered important and regarded as ubiquitous. Thus, for successful retrieval (in many circumstances), a device which permits conversation is needed. Approaches to automatic (delegated) retrieval are surveyed, as are on-line systems which support interaction. This type of interaction usually consists of iteration, under the user's control, in the query formulation process. A program has …