Week 6: July 22 - 26

   This was a hectic week as we wrapped up our publications for the SLTAT conference! I truly enjoyed collaborating with the other authors and helping with the brainstorming/writing/proofreading process. I am now the proud co-author of 2 papers, the first in my life :)

  • Toward Lifelike Animations of American Sign Language: Achieving Natural Motion from the Movement-Hold Model

  • Toward a Real-Time ASL Avatar Utilizing Linguistic Principles for Nonmanual Signals

   I hope those papers will be accepted for SLTAT, then I will figure out if I can come here to Chicago for the symposium. I know it will be a great experience for me to talk with acclaimed professors and authors worldwide on their work. As the AccessComputing project promotes more networking and greater understanding of my field, I think it is a perfect chance for me to learn the process of participating in a conference so I can be better prepared for future conferences. I was thrilled when DREU informed me that I am eligible to represent them in the Grace Hopper Celebration conference! I submitted my poster abstract and is waiting to hear back from them if I am accepted. That means I am now a prospective attendee of 2 conferences this fall, which is great news. Here's the title/abstract for my poster:

  • Title: Using Corpus Analysis to Improve Legibility of Generated ASL

  • Abstract: American Sign Language, the preferred language of the Deaf community in the USA is its own language; complete with a rich collection of grammatical features. The DePaul University team has been working on an automatic English/ASL translator implemented as a 3D avatar in order to facilitate better communication between hearing and deaf people. Animations suffered from various timing inconsistencies and was awkward to comprehend. This project attempts to address them by using corpus analysis to discern subtle features of ASL.

   With all the work done on the papers, I can now finally go back to coding. Next week will see me dive fully into the statistical phase of my internship and start to flex the mathematical part of my brain, ha! I know that time is running out, and fully expect to have some progress in this phase before summer is done. The work I've done up to this point has been a great help for the team, and deeper analysis is exactly what they need. I talked with my mentor a little this week on the math involved, and would need to investigate the EAF format more to see what kind of data structure it generates so I can fully visualize the traversal necessary to process the statistics.

 

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