Ph.D. student Craig Tashman took first prize in Georgia Tech’s 2011 Research & Innovation Conference (GTRIC), held Feb. 8 in the Student Center.

Tashman’s project, “LiquidText: Active Reading through Multitouch Document Manipulation,” (website temporarily under construction) presents an innovative way to read and annotate documents, taking full advantage of tablet PCs and other, larger touch-screen interfaces to significantly enhance reader experiences with text documents. Tashman took home a $15,000 prize as GTRIC’s first-place winner.

“We are creating a different way to interact with text, where the document is no longer a fixed, monolithic unit, but rather a flexible, fluid representation controlled by the reader through multi-finger touch and gesture input,” said Tashman, a doctoral student in computer science. “Early studies have already shown broad interest in our technology from people in many areas of knowledge work. Consequently, we are currently refining our designs and are working to commercialize the technology.”

Overall, the College of Computing did very well at GTRIC 2011. Svetlana Yarosh and Kimberly Weaver, both Ph.D. students in human-centered computing, took home $5,000 fellowship awards, while Ph.D. student Yogesh Mundada (computer science) and master’s student Justin Ratcliffe (human-computer interaction) and Yogesh Mundada received $1,500 travel awards.

Organized and hosted by the GT Student Government Association, GTRIC featured two poster sessions that included approximately 400 graduate research projects and awarded some $85,000 in total prizes and grants.