One of the research themes of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is contrarian: rather than trying to eliminate paper from the office, we are studying ways to make paper coexist with the electronic world.

I will discuss three problems that have some connection with paper. The first concerns moving paper with airjets, in particular algorithms for sensing paper position. The second is about superresolution of scanned text images. An example would be improving the image quality of a faxed document. The third problem is to find ways to notarize paper documents that achieve the security of digital cryptography but use only the paper itself, so that authentication does not require referring to an archived copy of the document.

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2000-2001 Program: Mathematics in Multimedia