Cairo Microsoft Innovation Center hosted the Tablet PC in Higher Education Workshop. The workshop consisted of two sessions ; the first was held at CMIC, and the second was held at Microsoft Natural Language Processing Lab at Cairo University with Engineering Department students. The presentations demonstrated how the Tablet PC significantly changes the way students and teachers interact.

And how this new technology has the potential to dramatically alter the educational process. The ability to write, sketch, draw, or annotate using electronic ink and drawing tools, to share results instantaneously, or to collaborate in real time, adds new dimensions to classroom interaction.

Jane Prey is a Senior Research Program Manager at Microsoft Research. She spent 11 years as a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia. In addition, Jane spent 2 years as a Program Director in the Division of Undergraduate Education at the National Science Foundation. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Jane is an IEEE CS representative to the FIE Steering Committee, a member of the ACM Education Board, a former member of the ACM SIGCSE board as well as numerous university advisory boards.

On her own words Jane said: "I was initially interested in tablet technology as I felt it will have a national impact on education, it will change the way I as a professor teach and definitely will change the way students learn”.

Joseph G. Tront is a professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. He has had a leadership role in the NSF sponsored engineering education coalition called SUCCEED where he was the director of the center for computing and communications for the nine university coalition. In his work in education digital libraries, he is the editor for NEEDS and is co-editor for the engineering collection of MERLOT. Tront also serves as editor for the Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education – an international award competition aimed at recognizing outstanding non-commercial courseware for use in engineering education.

Joe showed a demo on "Classroom Presenter” ;a tool created at Virginia Tech and is used by professors in classrooms. Using this tool professors allow students to participate during lectures in a more effective manner, as well as taking and sending notes to the teacher and saving all this on his/her laptop for future reference. Joe had hands-on session on tablet technology with Cairo University students who showed great interest in the tool and the innovative research ideas.

Jay Pittman PhD in Industrial Engineering. Worked in neural-network-based recognition since the late 1980's, with almost all of his actual experience in the area of handwriting recognition. He worked for 9 years at MCC, a research consortium in Austin, Texas.

Then did 2 years in Singapore, at the National University of Singapore, working on recognizing cursive Chinese handwriting. And 2 more years at the Oregon Graduate Institute, working on integrating handwriting with speech recognition and natural language understanding, to create training environments for the U.S. military. Finally joined Microsoft in September of 1997, and have been working on cursive handwriting recognition ever since. His current assignment is to make it much cheaper to expand to new languages.