We live in a world increasingly dependent on the Internet for information retrieval, social interaction and general leisure. A growing number of Internet users with cognitive or visual impairments need assistive technology to make information accessible to them, but visually complex web pages can be difficult to navigate for assistive technology.
It’s novel insight into this problem that earned Michael Cormier, a PhD student in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, the 2018 Murray Martin Prize for Best Research Paper by a Math Grad Student. His winning paper "Purely vision-based segmentation of web pages for assistive technology," co-authored with supervisor Dr. Robin Cohen, is published in a special issue on assistive computer vision and robotics in the journal Computer Vision an Image Understanding.