In his 30-year career, Richard Taylor, an information technology architect with Lockheed Martin Mission Systems, has taken on some extremely complex jobs.
He has helped turn the FBI's fingerprint files into an electronic database, designed systems for airlines that make sure there is a gate free for every arriving flight, and developed an archive of high-quality digital images for the National Gallery of Art.
But nothing that Taylor has done approaches his current task: equipping computers to make sense of the scribbles on 1.5 billion pages from U.S. census forms, which were sent to more than 121 million households.
The 2000 census will be the first to use computer software rather than human eyes to decipher and record information. Taylor called it "the biggest data-capture project in history," the Super Bowl of handwriting recognition.
Because the Census Bureau must report its findings by the end of the year, Taylor's system has about 100 days to do its job, starting with the official Census Day, April 1.
When you consider that many people cannot even read their own handwriting, the assignment seems that much more daunting.
In the last two censuses, in 1980 and 1990, getting those words off paper and into computers started with automated cameras built by the Census Bureau.
Mechanical arms in the cameras opened the forms and smoothed the pages flat so they could be photographed for microfilm. Computers then scanned the microfilm to make note of which boxes had been checked on the forms. Seven thousand clerks, working around the clock at seven processing centers, looked at the forms and entered the remaining handwritten information into computers.
When the 1990 census ended, the Census Bureau was determined to have computers do more of the job themselves, said J. Gary Doyle, the bureau's systems integration manager.
"We were pretty sure it would work," Doyle said. "It was just a question of how well it would work. But even if we got, say, 50 percent with character recognition, that's 50 percent less keyers needed."
But the Census Bureau will not be satisfied with a 50 percent accuracy rate from Lockheed Martin Mission Systems, a unit of Lockheed Martin Corp., which won the contract in 1997. The bureau wanted 98 percent accuracy, about 3 percentage points higher than the best accuracy rate people can achieve when typing in the information.
