The Welshman - Dr Gareth Loudon (now Prof)

My current work information is:

Professor Gareth Loudon Head of Programmes (Global Innovation Design and Innovation Design Engineering) School of Design Royal College of Art London, UK. gareth.loudon@rca.ac.uk My RCA profile is here: https://www.rca.ac.uk/more/staff/gareth-loudon/ My contribution to Apple-ISS: I joined Apple-ISS in May 1993. I was initially part of the speech recognition research team where I was responsible for the front-end signal processing aspects, in particular, how to capture and represent the tonal nature of Chinese speech. While in the speech research group I spent my spare time (we were allowed/encouraged to spend 20% of our time working on other research ideas) working on using some of the underlying speech recognition techniques (particularly Hidden Markov Models) to tackle the problem of cursive Chinese Handwriting Recognition. In early 1995 I had a breakthrough using Hidden Markov Models to recognise cursive Chinese handwriting. As a consequence I joined the already existing handwriting recognition (HWR) research team and from July 1995 led the team. The same technique was also successfully applied to recognise cursive Japanese handwriting. This work was transferred to the development team for commercialization and Apple launched the Chinese handwriting recognition system as part of the Apple Advanced Chinese Input Suite (AACIS) Product in September 1996. We also had a compact version of the Chinese and Japanese HWR software running successfully on the Apple Newton, although these never made it to market. In 1996 we developed the software further to recognise not just individual characters but continuously written sentences. Two US patents were filed by Apple for the individual and sentence based character recognition solutions. Subsequently, the handwriting recognition technology was licensed to several companies including Star+Globe and AsiaWorks. AsiaWorks was a new company formed by key members of the team at Apple-ISS. Personal Reflections I have very fond memories of my time at Apple-ISS and have made long lasting friendships.The loud bellowing call at lunchtime of ‘FOOD’ by my colleague Jay will never leave me. I hadn’t worked on speech or handwriting recognition before joining Apple-ISS so it was a steep learning curve, and I will be forever grateful to George White for putting his faith in me (and giving me the support I needed). I remember going to California and meeting Peter de Souza from the Advanced Technology Group at Apple and being blown away by the brilliance of his thinking and work. That was a moment I will never forget - quite humbling - but also a wonderful learning experience for me to see how he let the data express itself fully without over intervention. I then tried to follow that approach in my work on handwriting recognition. After various ups and downs of getting the handwriting recognition software to work properly, I clearly remember the day that my colleague, Tai Hou, got the first interactive prototype of the software working on a Mac and it recognised almost all the characters he wrote, no matter how cursively. That was a joyous moment and also a relief as there was quite a lot of pressure on us to make a breakthrough. After two years at Apple-ISS I had another humbling experience when Heiko Sacher joined the team, with him asking all these awkward questions that nobody else had ever asked, and introducing me to the importance and power of design. My career since that time has been heavily influenced by my interactions with Heiko and all that I learnt from him. Unfortunately, my Chinese language skills didn’t improve very much during my time at Apple-ISS (I did try) but I think my Singlish did improve. I do miss those days of lying in bed at night thinking about how to improve the algorithms and then spending the next day trying out all the ideas. Happy days - it was quite a simple and rewarding life. Made even better by all my great team mates.