Duke Hutchings, assistant professor of computing sciences, has been awarded patent #7,624,354 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The patent application titled “Efficient Workspace Management Using Content Groups” was a collaborative effort between Hutchings and researchers Mary Czerwinski, George Robertson, Daniel Robbins, Brian Meyers and Greg Smith of Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash.
The invention, named TaskZones, is a method of grouping and manipulating desktop windows on multiple-display computer systems using keyboard or mouse-like input devices.
Hutchings has previously presented the work at the Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.
Readers interested in learning more details about the work can scroll to the Posters section on Hutchings’s Web site at http://facstaff.elon.edu/dhutchings/research.shtml or inspect the patent application by searching by patent number on the USPTO Web site at http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm.