Tamir Hassan
Room HA 04 07 (4th floor)
Pattern Recognition and Image Processing Group 186/3
Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms
Technische Universität Wien
Favoritenstraße 9-11
1040 Wien
Austria
+43 1 58801 18674
tam (at) prip.tuwien.ac.at
Background
I am interested in several topics related to document engineering, such as document analysis, information extraction, document authoring and digital typography. In Spring 2010, I worked for three months with Prof. Roger D. Hersch at the EPFL, Lausanne, on parametric representations of fonts.
I wrote my doctoral thesis at the Database and Artificial Intelligence Group at TU Wien under the supervision of Prof. Georg Gottlob. I have worked on methods for wrapping, or supervised semi-automatic data extraction, from PDF files. Because PDF documents are not structured in the same way as HTML, my work involves using a number of techniques from the document analysis and understanding field, and I have recently worked on page segmentation, converting PDF to HTML (as an input filter to the Lixto Visual Wrapper) and table recognition in PDF files.
More recently, I have worked on a novel approach for wrapping unstructured documents, which represents the document in an attributed relational graph and uses error-tolerant graph matching techniques to locate the desired wrapping instances. A prototype of this system was presented at CeBIT at the stand of the Austrian Computer Society, a trial version of which is now available for download. For more information, please see the page on GraphWrap.
My first degree is a M.Eng. (Hons) in computer science, obtained from the University of Warwick in 2004.
Publications
Here is a selection of recent publications which I have authored or co-authored:
- Göbel, M., Hassan, T., Oro, E., Orsi, G.: A Methodology for Evaluating Algorithms for Table Understanding in PDF Documents, DocEng 2012 (to be published), Paris.
- Gabdulkhakova, A., Hassan, T.: Document Understanding of Graphical Content in Natively Digital PDF Documents, DocEng 2012 (to be published), Paris.
- Hassan, T., Hu, C. and Hersch, R.D.: Next Generation Typeface Representations: Revisiting Parametric Fonts, DocEng 2010, Manchester.
- Hassan, T.: Towards a Common Evaluation Strategy for Table Structure Recognition Algorithms, DocEng 2010, Manchester.
- Hassan, T.: Object-Level Document Analysis of PDF Files, DocEng 2009, Munich.
- Hassan, T.: User-Guided Wrapping of PDF Documents using Graph Matching Techniques, ICDAR 2009, Barcelona.
- Hassan, T., Baumgartner, R: Table Recognition and Understanding from PDF Files, ICDAR 2007, Curitiba, Brazil.
- Carme, J., Ceresna, M., Frölich, O., Gottlob, G., Hassan, T., Herzog, M., Holzinger, W., Krüpl, B.: The Lixto Project: Exploring New Frontiers of Web Data Extraction, BNCOD 2006, Belfast.
- Hassan, T., Baumgartner, R: Using Graph Matching Techniques to Wrap Data from PDF Documents, WWW 2006 (Poster track), Edinburgh. You can find the poster here (PDF).
- Hassan, T., Baumgartner, R: Intelligent Text Extraction from PDF Documents, IAWTIC 2005, Vienna.
- Hassan, T., Baumgartner, R: Intelligent Text Extraction from PDF, IADIS WWW/Internet 2005 (Poster/demo track), Lisbon.
- Hassan, T., Baumgartner, R: Intelligent Wrapping from PDF Documents with Lixto, RAWS 2005 workshop, Prague.
More about me
In addition to my current field or research, I am also interested in a number of other areas in applied computer science. I have written about two of these areas below:
I have long had a love for typography and am particularly fascinated by the multi-disciplinary aspect of computer science, particularly its application to the arts, as well as human-oriented issues such as HCI. More generally, I love work which requires great attention to detail.
In my free time, I enjoy photography (in particular architecture) and sing in a choir.
Previous work
My PDF-to-HTML converter, created as part of my study at the University of Warwick, can be found here.