In November 2011, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) challenged civilians to come up with novel ways to reconstruct shredded documents. This talk will examine the strategy our team of two physicists developed, enabling us to place second out of about 9,000 teams. Our approach involved signal/noise analysis, computational linguistics, and innovative user interface design. DARPA has open competitions regularly and future competitions may be of interest to UMBC students, faculty, and staff.

Location: Physics Bldg., Room 401