IS&T Fellowship is awarded to a Regular Member for outstanding achievement in imaging science or engineering. Later this year Dr. Steven J. Simske will be bestowed the Fellowship for his leadership and innovation in the area of security printing and imaging.
Steve Simske is the director and chief technologist for the SPIEGEL (Security Printing and Imaging Engineering Geared toward Enterprise Lifecycle) program at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. He received his BS in biomedical engineering from Marquette University (1986); his MS in biomedical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1987); his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado (1990); and his Post-Doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado (1993). Dr. Simske was a research professor at the University of Colorado until 2007, where he designed and built the first autonomous system to support mice in space and performed research on 11 US Space Shuttle missions.
Dr. Simske joined HP in 1994 and developed HP's automatic document analysis software, which still ships in HP's scanner, all-in-one, and copier products. Dr. Simske joined HP Labs in 2000, where he led HP's book and document digitization efforts and created HP's meta-algorithmic program focused on the design patterns and mathematics for combining multiple intelligent systems for improved performance, accuracy, and robustness (since used in more than a dozen technology areas).
Dr. Simske helped create HP's product tracking and authentication program in 2004. This broad effort, which has evolved into the SPIEGEL program, supports HP's own brand protection and anti-counterfeiting efforts, which protect a $60B+/annum supply chain. SPIEGEL is supported by research in content understanding, intelligent analysis systems, biometric algorithms, track and trace, forensics, product authentication and dynamic biometrics. In 2008, HP began investigating counterfeits in its worldwide return centers using Dr. Simske's Image-Based Forensic Service. He also created a solution for the US-wide Tamper-Resistant Prescription Pad program within the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.
Dr. Simske currently holds more than 30 US patents and has published more than 200 journal and conference papers. He has also supported more than 30 graduate students in the past 15 years.
In the evening of Wednesday 28 January 1998, R.R. Donnelley's A. John Michaelis moderated a memorable panel discussion on electronic publishing at the EI Color Hardcopy Conference in the San Jose Hilton. Up to that heated discussion, the buzzwords were electronic printing and electronic publishing. After that day's visionary papers, Ralph Agazi of UC Davis led the charge in the panel discussion that we should stop talking about "electronic," because historically that term has been used when the steps in a mechanical workflow were changed to take advantage of the latest electronic technologies, but the workflow itself remained unchanged.
Inspired by the papers and the opening statements of the panel speakers, the audience demanded new buzzwords to characterize the paradigm shift from evolutionary process improvement to revolutionary new workflows. The label "digital" stuck.
In the past dozen years, a lot has been said and written about digital publishing, but less on digital printing. The reason is simple: the paradigm shift is taking much longer to complete in printing than in publishing. The print workflow has been perfected over centuries and is very efficient, with pipelining, buffering, and scheduling.
The camel's back was broken only when content creation tools evolved sufficiently that skilled workers were replaced by amateurs, because as Marshall McLuhan phrased it, instead of saving work, labor-saving devices permit everybody to do their own work. While FrameMaker died and InDesign+Illustrator got replaced by Word+PowerPoint, Web 2.0 brought the concept of a print service provider and the run length for a digital press job went from 500 to 1.
While to a print job a print plant looks like a pipeline, to a print plant a stream of print jobs is a collection of processing steps that must be performed in parallel while avoiding idle times on resources, requiring new scheduling paradigms.
In such a complex heterogeneous system, the challenge is to find emergent model behavior, i.e., behavior caused by the interaction between characteristics of different models and not intended or foreseen by the model. The classical example is priority inversion between threads in an operating system, which causes deadlock.
Emergent behavior is discovered through simulation — the execution of models. HP's research in this area was presented at the recent 31th International Congress on Imaging Science in Beijing. The paper, Operations Modeling and Analysis of Commercial Print Services by Jun Zeng, I-Jong Lin, and Tzipi Netz, has received the Outstanding Paper Award. The paper is not online, but copies can be requested from Jun Zeng.
Back in the Seventies and Eighties, when "Internet" was the name of the Xerox internetwork of Ethernets and what we today call the "Internet" was called "ARPAnet," news where spread through a mechanism called "distribution lists" (DL). Some popular non-technical DLs where YumYum↑.pa@xerox.com, WineLovers↑.pa@xerox.com, ChocolateLovers↑.pa@xerox.com, etc. Some where replicated on the DECnet NetNews, an informal network with datagram addressing (bang addresses).
InvenSense in Sunnyvale has been around since 2003 and the 2007 video tutorial below is old, but it is a nice explanation of why gyroscopes are better than just accelerometers for gesture user interfaces.
The color name on the paint can is "Hot Lips" but that is hardly appropriate. Can you tell me if this is Magenta or Fuchsia?
Here is how you can answer this kind of questions:
To give a "scientific" answer, you would have to measure your daughter's wall with a spectroradiometer and compare it to a measurement of the fuchsine colorant. If the two spectral curves are within a tolerance, you can say the color terms are synonyms. Unfortunately, this is not practical.
Since I happen to have a little FileMaker script on my PC, I can give you an "engineering" answer based on crowd-sourcing. Your photograph is not uniformly illuminated and you probably did not calibrate your camera and turn off the white balancing, so I just average a few pixels in the center of your picture. For the reference colors, I use Nathan's color thesaurus tool and query fuchsia and magenta, and just for the sake of it, I also query hotlips. Hotlips is not in the thesaurus, but it suggests lips, so let us take that. This gives me the following CIELAB values:
CIELAB values
L*
a*
b*
hot lips (wall picture)
50
56
11
lips (thesaurus)
50
56
20
magenta (thesaurus)
56
46
-21
fuchsia (thesaurus)
60
45
-24
The FileMaker script yields the following CIE94 ∆E matrix:
CIE94 ∆E
hot lips
lips
magenta
fuchsia
hot lips
0
4.72
18.8
21.98
lips
4.72
0
22.74
25.69
magenta
18.8
22.74
0
4.38
fuchsia
21.98
25.69
4.38
0
From the last post we know that fuchsia and magenta are synonyms. Therefore, the tolerance for crowd sourcing is a little over 4 for these colors. From a crowd-sourcing perspective, you could not call the wall color in your daughter's room fuchsia nor magenta, but people have a pretty good idea the walls are lips colored even if you do not tell them.
So far we have discussed the "scientific" answer and the "engineering" answer, but actually you want a practical answer, i.e., a color name that you think would be more appropriate for your daughter's room walls. It turns out, that this is a very easy problem.
The solution is to turn to Nathan's color thesaurus, which contains the wisdom of crowds: http://www.mostlycolor.ch/2007/10/on-line-color-thesaurus.html. Just enter hotlips and click submit: this will give you four synonyms for lips and you just pick the color term you believe is most appropriate for your daughter.
So, people will know what you mean if you say coral red, carmine, scarlet, or punch.
At this point your daughter might insist to call her wall color as it is labeled on the paint can. If you are willing to spend a few dollars more, you can actually make everybody happy with the "marketing" answer. Many paint manufacturers also have an upscale brand in the name of a famous designer. The can will have the same paint, but the label on the paint can will be some fashionable fancy name evoking something exclusive. This would give you a posh name and your daughter the color she wants.
I can imagine many parent having this kind of problem, so we would be very interested in learning how you ended up solving your problem. Please leave us a comment below!
Of course, Shah refers to the title of Iranian kings including the Achaemenid dynasty which unified Persia and created a vast intercontinental empire. What does this have to do with color?
Some color names have been beaten up during history, like purple and glaucus. Presently, the most tormented color name refers to this color:
This is a device color. If you print his page, the rectangle is reproduced with 100% magenta ink and nothing else. On your display it is rendered with 100% red and 100% blue. What you perceive depends on your display device and its calibration or miscalibration state.
Legend has it the name comes from the City of Magenta, where 151 years ago a battle took place that left the fields in the above color from the soldier's blood. But the above color is not the color of Magenta, because in Italian by color of a city we mean the colors in its crest. Therefore, the colors of Magenta are yellow and black:
The little village of Magenta near Epernay, smack in the middle of Champagne, got its name from the Italian Magenta 151 years ago, to celebrate the French victory over the Austrians in the battle of Magenta. Unlike the yellow and black original Magenta, the French Magenta is all magenta, starting with its crest:
Their magenta Web site explains that in 1859 a new red colorant with a pink slant was discovered, and to commemorate the French blood spilled in the battle of Magenta, it was called magenta (and not because of the fields of Magenta being red from blood). In 1860 this color became fashionable in London as red magenta.
London notwithstanding, "magenta" is more a technical term from the printing industry than an everyday color name. According to the Wikipedia, magenta was originally called fuchsine, and it mentions fuchsia as the non-technical color name for the perception of the colored rectangle at the top of this page.
Indeed, we can confirm this from Nathan's color naming experiment, where the color name fuchsia is very frequent.
And here we come to the Persian kings. People generally know that this color is pronounced few Shah in English, but they have no idea on how to spell it, making it the most tormented color name in Nathan's English color name thesaurus.
The trick to remember how to spell few Shah, is to think at a German fox. The name comes from a flowering plant that in the western culture was identified in the late 17th century by Charles Plumier, who in 1703 named it after the German botanist Leonhart Fuchs (1501–1566).
Although I have driven through both the Italian and the French Magenta, I did not take pictures in either of them, also because in both green is a preponderant color as you scan the landscape. Since I started by showing you magenta, let me conclude with a few fuchsias from Mrs. Nonaka's garden (some have portions of a table as a background, and that table's paint color is named botticelli):
Imaging is pervasive in the human experience, be it through photographs that we take in our everyday lives to those that are used in space exploration, medical imaging, entertainment, science, or security. Electronic Imaging 2011 is the one international conference where papers on all aspects of electronic imaging are presented, and where you can develop both your career and business by networking with leading researchers and entrepreneurs in the field.
New for EI 2011 is the conference on Parallel Processing for Imaging Applications, chaired by John D. Owens, Univ. of California, Davis; I-Jong Lin, Hewlett-Packard Labs.; Yu-Jin Zhang, Tsinghua Univ. (China).
Dr. I-Jong Lin explains, "with all the changes in computer architecture and networked systems, I think this conference has a tremendous and timely opportunity to give serious insight how optimization of computer architecture can lead a greater understanding of how we represent and perceive the world."
Prof. John Owens of UC Davis adds, "we would be delighted to have a wide range of submissions for a high-quality program and hope you will help us with this goal."
Due Dates: Abstract (500 words) and Summary (200 words): 28 June 2010
Manuscript for On-site Proceedings: 15 November 2010
At the last EI conference John Ludd Recker gave a very successful lecture on GPU-based ripping. His paper's introduction started with a brief account of the origins of digital printing. One of the three pioneers of digital printing is Xerox Senior Research Fellow Dr. Peter Crean of the Xerox Research Center in Webster, N.Y. Dr. Crean has kindly provided the historical details before 1971, which we reproduce verbatim:
My view of digital print has a little larger view since I was involved in it before PARC even started. I fact, John Urbach, Gary's boss, asked me to join him in 1971. John and Gary came from Xerox Webster as part of the first settlers in Xerox Palo Alto.
Your paper deals with digital raster printing, specifically on Xerographic devices. I have Xerox internal reports from the 50s identifying computer/digital printing as a key application for our "new technology." We built the Henrietta facility in 1968 as the center of a "communications systems division" where many electronic printing systems using Xerography started. Our first product preceded that, the LDX was originally built as a long distance high speed fax for the Southern Railway. Its raster source was a line CRT for scanning and writing at resolutions up to about 256 dpi. It was a modified 813/660 copier with a roll feed/cutter plus the ability to slow down its 11 ppm to match the line speed. It was interfaced to several computers and sold as the Xerox Graphics Printer (XGP) to many research labs and universities. I believe Don Knuth used one in developing the TEX fonts — the only good digital font program until Adobe came out with Postscript in 1984.
801 also introduced a mobile printer (12 volts) that put a small Xerographic marker onto a typewriter carriage and was sold to police forces to put in cars and record ASCII messages. There was also a laser fax up to 2 ppm limited by line speed that was launched in 1974 or so.
Our 60 ppm duplicator (Xerox 3600) was fitted with an optical emulation of a drum line printer with 132 alphabets on a negative film "font wheel" wrapped around a drum spinning at 5000 rpm and exposed by individual flash lamps fired when the correct character was in position to project onto the drum. The printer exactly emulated a drum printer printing 132 characters by 66 lines onto an 8.5x11 page at 60 pages per minute (3960 lines per minute), ten times the mechanical printer.
Most interesting was a digital printer based on the 120 ppm duplicator still in development in 1970 when I arrived. This was to be a computer printer, writing shaped characters on a 12x2 inch high speed, high current CRT.
These were all running when I arrived in May of 1970. Pierre Lavallee and Gary Starkweather had just had the idea to put a laser scanner onto the newly developed X3600 III which had a red sensitive photoreceptor that we could easily write with a small, cheap and reliable HeNe laser. I came in from Princeton with my fresh PhD in nuclear physics and became project leader, designing the electronics and putting the system together (see photograph below). We pitched it as a graphics printer — since formed character text was already being done. For our "design guide" we used a technical report from Bell Labs who, about 6 years earlier, had built a similar system to write the 10X photo masks for integrated circuits this way. Remember Bell with local engineering firms in New Jersey was building the first IC factory, trying out a lot of things. Scanned laser system were not the winner for them, but they sure worked for us.
Finora abbiamo visto come organizzare i colori, come misurarli, e come riprodurli. Abbiamo visto come possiamo trasmettere l'apparenza di un certo marrone specifico semplicemente communicando i tre numeri (A, T, V) = (20, 25, 60).
Il colore è un attributo usato troppo di spesso per richiedere che tutti ci portiamo dietro un atlante del colore per potere parlare delle cose.
Il linguaggio è una serie di convenzioni che ci permette di communicare. Dato che il colore è astratto, non c'è un aiuto da parte della fisica per trovare una formulare per derivare nomi di colori e quindi lo studio dei nomi dei colori è una scienza complessa che è ancora agli inizi.
Prima di tutto, i linguisti non dicono "nomi dei colori", bensì "termini del colore". La tecnica di base è di usare una tabella come lo si fa per la riproduzione del colore. Gli esperti del ramo si sono messi d'accordo su questa tabella:
I scienziati che studiano i termini del colore prendono questo reticolo e contattano i membri di una communità, come per esempio i Valtellinesi, i designer di moda di Parigi, ecc. Ad ogni membro chiedono di dare un termine ad ogni colore nel reticolo, poi fanno la media su tutti i partecipanti.
Questo studio è stato fatto per la prima volta da Berlin e Kay, ma poi è stato continuato da centinaia se non migliaia di linguisti in tutto il mondo, sotto il nome di World Color Survey, o WCS.
Il risultato è l'ontogenesi dei termini del colore, ovverosia come i termini del colore si sono evoluti con l'evolvere di una civiltà, cultura o sottocultura. Di solito l'ontogenesi viene rappresentata con questo diagramma:
L'interpretazione è che si sono solo undici termini universali per il colore. Questi termini sono ragruppati in sette stadi, e più una sottocultura è evoluta, più stadi usa.
Per l'italiano c'è un po' un pasticcio, perché è stato notato da parecchio tempo che in italano abbiamo due termini distinti per il blu. Però c'è stato un errore che è perpetuato in tutti gli studi seguenti: il secondo temine bluastro è chiamato azzurro, però descritto con la zona attorno al 25B, che noi veramente chiamiamo celeste e non azzurro.
Un'altro grosso problema è che i colori del reticolo WCS sono stati scelti sulla periferia della gamma dell'atlante Munsell, per cui mancano tutti i colori non vividi. Boynton e Olson hanno fatto uno studio di laboratorio molto preciso usando i campioni dell'atlante OSA, ed hanno ottenuto questa mappa dei colori universali:
Ricordati il diagramma dei colori opponenti di Leonardo nella prima puntata. Nello spazio OSA qui sopra l'ascissa j è la quantità di giallo, e l'ordinata g è la quantità di verde. Sappiamo da come è stato costruito, che l'atlante OSA è quello più uniforme.
Ciononostante, nota la diversa area occupata dai vari termini di colore: piccolissima per il grigio ed il rosso, grande per il verde. Nota anche che la maggior area della mappa è bianca: non ci sono termini universali per questi colori!
Ci sono stati parecchi tentativi di creare un dizionario dei colori completo, vale a dire senza spazi vuoti. Per esempio, Nemcsics ha dato nomi per tutti i colori dello spazio Coloroid. Ecco la famosa pagina per la tinta 20:
A parte che non ho la versione in italiano, ti puoi visualizzare cosa sia il giallo di Pompei? Ovviamente un architetto che lavora nel restauro di Budapest sa esattamente che colore è, ma per il resto di noi questo termine di colore è un mistero. D'altra parte, non ci vuole niente per un milanese o un bergamasco per imaginare cosa sia il polenta. Nota che un valtellinese penserebbe alla polenta nera fatto con la farina di saraceno, mentre in parigino non avrebbe la più pallida idea di cosa stia parlando.
La lezione che si impara è che quando si usa un termine non universale di colore, bisogna riflettere bene a chi si parla. Se l'interlocutore è nella stessa sottocultura ed è famigliare con il termine, lo si può usare senz'altro. Altrimenti è importante fare vedere un campione, cosa facile ora che tutti ci protiamo dietro vari aggeggi digitali.
Ovviamente quest'ultimo caso non è sempre realizzabile. Per esempio, compilando un vocabolario dei termini del colore non si può realizzare un campione per ogni voce. Occorre quindi descrivere ogni termine in parole.
Ciononostante, con il Web, si comincia ad essere in grado di compilare grossi dizionari del colore basato su centinaia di colori usando il crowd-sourcing. Il mio collega Nathan Moroney ha allestito un sito dove si possono contribuire i termini per dei colori: http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Nathan_Moroney/color-name-italian.html.
Per esempio, se scrivi senape, ricevi questa risposta:
Vedi un campione del colore, le coordinate RGB ed esadecimale per HTML, come pure dei colori simili e dei colori opposti. Ora che hai visto come funziona, provalo! [il testo segue in basso]
In conclusione, abbiamo percorso un lungo viaggio per organizzare i colori, scoprendo che il tentativo di sviluppare un semplice modello additivo e sottrattivo con un po' di algebra non funziona. Il metodo giusto è di esaminare tutte le combinazioni possibili, caratterizarle in termin i di percezzione, ed invertire la tabella per ottenere la formulazione di coloranti che crei un dato colore. Per i termini del colore, è molto difficile creare un vocabolario che vada oltre una dozzina di termini; per il resto bisogna tenere conto delle sottoculture.
Steve Simske is the director and chief technologist for the SPIEGEL (Security Printing and Imaging Engineering Geared toward Enterprise Lifecycle) program at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. He received his BS in biomedical engineering from Marquette University (1986); his MS in biomedical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1987); his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado (1990); and his Post-Doctorate in aerospace engineering from the University of Colorado (1993). Dr. Simske was a research professor at the University of Colorado until 2007, where he designed and built the first autonomous system to support mice in space and performed research on 11 US Space Shuttle missions.
