NIST is publishing its OCR recognition/evaluation system on an ISO-9660-format CD ROM, together with NIST Special Databases 1 and 3 of 168,365 segmented and labeled handwritten digits and letters from 1,000 writers. The C source code includes 440 subroutines in 11 libraries, for form registration, form removal, field isolation, field segmentation, character normalization, feature extraction, character classification, and dictionary-based post-processing. Also data structures and low-level utilities, including CCITT Group 4 decompression, spatial histograms, least-squares fitting, spatial zooming, connected components, eigenvector computation, Karhunen-Loeve feature extraction, optimized Probabilistic Neural Network classification, multiple- key sorting, and Levenstein-distance dynamic string alignment. All this for free! Send a request on letterhead (preferably) to Michael D. Garris (mdg@magi.ncsl.nist.gov), (301) 975-2928, (301) 840-1357 Fax. [connectionists, 8/16/94.]

The Signal Processing Information Base (SPIB) is a repository of data, papers, software, newsgroups, bibliographies, and addresses sponsored by the Signal Processing Society and NSF. http://spib.rice.edu/spib.html. [Scout Report, 7/15/94.] (NSF has loosened up about supporting databases as well as research per se.)

Speech researchers from Sheffield University and ATR will be recording a new "noisy" database to test their techniques for separating sound sources within groups of five people. Contact Malcolm Crawford (mmalc@hip.atr.co.jp) to suggest annotations or to offer collaboration and new analyses. ATR, +81-7749-5-1089, +81-7749-5-1008 Fax. [LINGUIST, 7/28/94.]

Hughes Applied Information Systems wishes to hear from educational institutions interested in AI, neural networks, or fuzzy logic pattern recognition for distributed systems management in the Earth Sciences. Respond by 8/5/94 (!) to D. A. Laird (dlaird@eos.hitc.com) or Gary Forman (gforman@eos.hitc.com), 301-925-0523. [Christopher Kingsbury (ckingsbu@eos.hitc.com), comp.ai, 8/19/94. David Joslin.]