Milestones on the road to independence for the blind.

Ken will talk about his experiences as an end user of technology. Even moderate technological progress in the field of pattern recognition and artificial intelligence can be, often suprisingly, of great help to the Blind. An example is the providing of portable bar code scanners so that a blind person knows what he is buying and what color it is. In this age of microprocessors controlling everything, how can a blind person find out what his VCR is doing? Is there some technique that will allow a blind musician to convert print music into midi files to drive a synthesizer? Can computer vision help the blind cross a road including predictions of where oncoming traffic will be located? Can computer vision technology provide spoken description of scenes so a blind person can figure out where doors and entrances are located, and what the signage on the building says? He asks ''can computer vision help me flip a pancake?'' His challenge to those in the computer vision field is ''where can we go from here?''