CIS100 Emerging Technologies and Data Analysis in Workplace

Lecture 4: Information Concepts (Part 2)

Dr. Tina LIU

School of Computing and Information Sciences

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Recap
• Information & digital information
• How to store digital information?
• Storage units
• Bit patterns
• Storing text, image, graphics, video, audio

• To be discussed in this lecture

• How to acquire digital information?
• How to present digital information?
• How to process digital information?
• How to transmit digital information?

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How to acquire digital information?
Acquiring Digital Information
• Commonly used digital information:
• Text
• Image
• Graphics
• Video
• Audio
• To acquire the above digital information, various input devices
and software are needed.
• Two approaches of acquiring digital information
• Manually created
• Acquiring from environment
Manually Created Text
• Text: Input using keyboards or virtual keyboards (together with
mouse, touchscreen, or other input devices).
Manually Created Images & Graphics
• Images & Graphics: created in image & graphics editing software
using input devices
• Image editing software: Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Paint, GIMP, etc.
• Graphics editing software: Adobe Illustrator, CorelDRAW, Inkscape, etc.
• Input device: Keyboard, mouse, drawing tablet, touchscreen, etc.

Microsoft Paint Adobe Illustrator

Manually Created Animations
• Digital animations can be created using 2D or 3D software
• 2D animation software: Moho Pro, ToonBoom, etc.
• 3D animation software: Blender, Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, etc.

ToonBoom Maya
Manually Created Audio
• Digital audio can be created with a digital audio workstation
(DAW) and a MIDI controller
• Digital audio workstations: GarageBand, Ableton Live, etc.
• MIDI (Music Instrument Digital Interface)
• A technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface,
and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical
instruments, computers, and related music and audio devices.
Manually Created Speech
• Speech can be generated from text using a text-to-speech (TTS)
service

• There exist a lot of free online text-to-speech websites

• E.g., TTSReader
Acquiring Image from Environment
• Recall that when we “see objects”, we are not seeing the objects,
we are seeing the light reflected by the objects
• A digital camera captures the intensities of the light and form a
digital image based on the captured intensities
Digital cameras

Light Digital image

Light

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Image Sensor
• The component that captures the intensities of the light in a
digital camera is called an image sensor
• Two types of image sensors
• Semiconductor charge-coupled devices (CCD)
• Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS)

CCD CMOS
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Acquiring Image from Paper
• A scanner captures a picture (which may be a picture of text) and
converts it to a digital image file

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Types of Scanners
• Traditional Scanners • Barcode/QR Code Scanners

Flatbed

Pen or Handheld

• Camera
Sheet-fed

Drum

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Acquiring Digital Text from Images
• An optical character recognition (OCR) program analyzes a text
image in order to identify each alphabetic letter, numeric digit, or
punctuation mark as text.
This may well be the first handwritten ref
desk post. According to the pseudo-
science about how your handwriting
reflects your personality, I am highly
organized, conservative, and somewhat
OCR rigid in my thinking. I am in fact the same
easy-going, broad-minded and totally
scatter-brained person as I was before, at
the age of fifteen, I came across a book
called “Improve Your Handwriting” and
bought a calligraphy pen. Except with
handwriting that was legible.

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Acquiring Digital Text from Images
• A magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) device converts
text printed with magnetized ink into the digital form.
• Bank industry uses MICR for check processing.

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Acquiring Audio from Environment
• A microphone converts sound waves to digital audios

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Types of Microphones
Dynamic Microphone Condenser Microphone

Better for capturing loud, strong Better for capturing more delicate
sounds (drums or loud vocals) , sounds and higher frequencies (studio
particularly in a live setting vocals for example), particularly in a
studio setting.
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How to show digital information?

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Displaying Visual Digital Information
• Various types of output devices exist for displaying visual digital
information, such as text, images, graphics, and videos
• Digital displays
• 2D displays
• 3D displays
• Projectors
• 2D projectors
• 3D projectors
• Printers
• Refreshable braille displays

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2D Display

CRT display Plasma display LCD display LED display

(Cathode-Ray Tube) (Liquid-Crystal Display) (Light-Emitting Diode)

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2D Display
• OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode)

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3D Display
• Preserve the depth of the scene by presenting two images/videos
with disparity to two eyes separately.
• The left eye sees the left channel and the right eye sees the right one.

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3D Display
• Stereo monitors, stereo glasses, etc.
• Major types:
• VR headset
• Anaglyph
• Active
• Passive
• Naked-eye

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3D Display – VR Headset
• Presenting left and right images to left and right eyes with two
separate panels

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3D Display – Anaglyph
• Encoding each eye's image using filters of different colors,
typically red and cyan.

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3D Display – Active 3D System
• Presenting the image intended for one eye while blocking the
other eye's view

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3D Display – Passive 3D System
• Also called polarized 3D system
• Use polarization glasses to restricting the light that reaches each
eye

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3D Display – Naked-eye

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2D Projector
• A projector is a device that takes the text & images displaying on
a computer screen and projects them on a larger screen.
• E.g., digital light processing (DLP) projector

You’re now
viewing a
projector
screen!

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3D Projector (Holographic Projector)

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2D Printer
• A printer produces text and graphics on a physical medium.
• Printed information is called hard copy, which digital information is
called soft copy
• Classified into two types
• Impact printers
• Non-impact printers

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2D Printer – Impact Printers
• Impact printers form characters and graphics on a piece of paper
by striking a mechanism against an inked ribbon that physically
contacts the paper.
• Dot-matrix printer: can print multiple copies at a time
• Line printer: prints an entire line at a time

Dot-matrix printer Line printer 32

2D Printer – Non-Impact Printers
• A non-impact printer forms characters and graphics on a piece of
paper without actually striking the paper.
• Ink-jet printers
• Toner-based printers
• Laser printers
• LED printers
• Thermal printers
• Label printers

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Ink-Jet Printers
• The cartridges in an ink-jet printers are usually Cyan, Magenta,
Yellow, and blacK (CMYK)
• The CMYK color model is a subtractive color model generally used
in color printing
• From RGB to CMYK
• C=1–R–K
• M=1–G–K
• Y=1–B–K
• K = 1 – max(R, G, B)

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Toner-based Printers

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Thermal Printers
• A thermal printer generates images by pushing electrically heated pins
against the heat-sensitive paper

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3D Printers
• A 3D printer prints a 3D object by forming successive layers under
computer control.

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Refreshable Braille Displays
• A refreshable braille display, or braille terminal, is an electro-
mechanical device for displaying braille characters, usually by
means of round-tipped pins raised through holes in a flat surface.

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Playing Acoustic Digital Information
• Sound is presented via audio output devices:
• Speaker, headphone, earphone, etc.

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Speaker
• Voice coil drives the cone to push the air to generate vibrations

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Multichannel Speaker (Surround Sound)
• Increase audio channels to increase
quality
• 2.1 system
• Front (L + R) + Subwoofer
• 5.1 system
• 2.1 + Front (C) + Back (L + R)
• 7.1 system
• 5.1 + Center (L + R)

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3D Sound (Spatial Sound)
• Spatialized binaural audio
• Emulate sound effects in virtual
environment
• Head tracking is needed
• Generally used in VR devices
• Different with stereo/surround
• Source do not move with head
• Virtual acoustics
• E.g., reflection, echo, etc.

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How is digital information processed?

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Processing Digital Information
• Information is processed in the system unit of a computer
• System unit
• Motherboard
• Buses
• Processor (CPU)
• Memory
• Power supply
• Drive bay(s)
• Ports and connectors
• Sound card
• Video card

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Processor
• The processor, also called the central processing unit (CPU),
interprets and carries out the basic instructions that operate a
computer.
• It contains a control unit (CU), an arithmetic logic unit (ALU),
cache, etc.
• Speed of CPU (Hz): number of operations
that can be operated in one second
• E.g., 3.40GHz = the computer can run
3.4 billions of operations in one second

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Memory
• A device that is used to store information for immediate use in a
computer or related computer hardware device
• Size of memory is similarly measured as storage devices

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Memory
• Programs are kept on
a storage device and copied
into the
computer's memory before
they are executed.
• Limited memory affects the
execution of a program (e.g.,
a game) which has a large
file size

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32-bit Processor vs. 64-bit Processor
• 32-bit processor
• The processor can support at most 232 bytes = 4 GB memory
• 64-bit processor
• The processor can support at most 264 bytes = 234 GB memory

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How is digital information transferred?

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Computer Networks
• Information can be transferred via computer networks (Internet).
• Will be discussed in detail in the next module

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 Q&A

In-Class Exercise (Moodle)

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