Duke Hutchings, assistant professor of computing sciences, has been awarded patent #8,225,224 for large display window management.
The patent granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office titled “Computer Desktop Use via Scaling of Displayed Objects with Shifts to the Periphery” was a collaborative effort between Hutchings and researchers George Robertson, Brian Meyers and Greg Smith of Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash.
The invention, named Scalable Fabric, is a method of grouping and manipulating desktop windows on large-display computer systems. Hutchings specifically contributed to alternative input methods for controlling window management, including keyboard navigation.
Hutchings has previously presented the work at the Association for Computing Machinery Advanced Visual Interfaces Conference. Readers interested in learning more about Hutchings’ research can visit his research Website at http://facstaff.elon.edu/dhutchings/research.shtml or inspect the patent application by searching by patent number on the USPTO Website at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm.
In 2010, Hutchings and a group of researchers from Microsoft Research received a patent for TaskZones, a method of grouping and manipulating desktop windows on multiple-display computer systems using keyboard or mouse-like input devices.