COPAN Releases Unusual PhenoMATRIXⓇ TAG UR-IT Algorithm to Help Kids Find Waldo

COPAN announces its latest innovation in Artificial Intelligence as the company makes a bold new move into the children’s literary market this April! The new suite of algorithms, called PhenoMATRIX® TAG UR-IT uses an advanced selection of highly sophisticated algorithms giving children the power to automatically pre-assess and pre-sort pages of the beloved Where’s Waldo books.

Kids are growing up fast these days and lose interest in children’s books and move on to young adult (YA) novels at an alarming rate. With the constant stimulation from modern technology, kids are also losing their attention span to the point that many simply give up the search for Waldo. Research shows that the window of time for kids to find Waldo is narrowing, and many will eventually leave most of their Waldo books unread.

“It’s a real crisis in the literary world,” said famous Children’s book expert Dr. Shirley U. Jest, “[k]ids still want to find Waldo; they just need the tools to help them find him more efficiently and accurately.”

In another first-to-market solution from COPAN, the company recently unveiled PhenoMATRIX® TAG UR-IT, a product that can end this Dewy Decimal disaster. Harnessing the unparalleled accuracy, precision, and power of the PhenoMATRIX® algorithms, the new PhenoMATRIX® TAG UR-IT searches images for the target Waldo organisms and can spot them in even the most candy cane of environments. 

“COPAN is always looking for innovative applications for our technologies,” said Norman Sharples, CEO of COPAN Diagnostics. “It was simple really to set the original PhenoMATRIX®’s Expert Rules to find Wally (English version of Waldo). The detection of color, patterns, and position of objects in images are well-refined features of the existing software. This technology is set to take the ‘eye-spy’ style reading into the modern age!”

By grouping negative Waldo images and presumptive Waldo-positives, which are the majority of the pages children screen, kids can quickly review up to 40 pages per computer screen, finding every instance of Waldo in an entire book— eliminating the need to review each page manually and saving children valuable time to do more high-level tasks like coloring and pretending the floor is lava.  

PhenoMATRIX® TAG UR-IT is already deployed in several pioneering children’s libraries across North America and made a huge splash at the American Parenting Research and Innovative Learning conference in Fools City, IL last month. 

This April’s Fool’s Day, one thing is certain, COPAN Diagnostics has kept up with the evolution of the current digital age and the challenges it brings to children’s attention span and literacy.