FRIDAY, September 17, 1999

By DAVID KINNEY

The Associated Press

STATE COLLEGE - A student stands before a 60-inch television screen showing a map of Penn State's campus. He points a finger at the TV and a red hand appears like a cursor. With a wave, he moves the dig-ital hand over a building, points a-gain and the building name appears.

"What departments are here?" asks Sanshzar Kettebekov, the 27-year-old doctoral student.

"Industrial engineering," the computer answers.

In today's high-tech world, a talking digital map might be neat, but not dazzling. What is impressive is the technology making this computerized map work. Researchers at Penn State have designed a computer that, with its video-camera eye, can decipher gestures, match them with the words it hears and come up with an intelligent answer.

Rajeev Sharma, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, and a group of graduate students have worked for more than three years on the computerized map. Sharma isn't one for fancy names, but he came up with two candidates for this project: iMap, for intelligent map, or even more clever, eyeMap.

Currently, it is just a prototype in a Penn State lab. The television screen is hooked up to two PCs, a clip-on microphone and a video camera. Much of the technology is right out of the box, including an inexpensive voice-recognition software.

The new piece is the gesture re-cognition system. While research-ers in the 1960s designed computers that recognized a few sign language signals, Sharma is trying to go beyond that. The goal is to allow a person to communicate with the computer with regular conversation and gestures, not with a mouse and a keyboard.

"Basically, what we're interested in is novel human-computer interaction," Sharma explained. "We want the computer to be more and more intelligent, so I can converse with it in a natural way. The person coming up to a kiosk like this shouldn't realize there's a computer behind it."