Dr. Rosalee Wolfe and her team are seeking to bridge this deaf-hearing gap through the American Sign Language Avatar Project, technology that acts as a sort of Google Translate for the Deaf: People speak into the program and an animated avatar signs the translation in American Sign Language.

The project, which has been in the works since 1998, has to combine high-level, hyper-precise animation (any incorrect movement could entirely change the meaning of a sign) with speech and language recognition technology, all areas that have seen rapid development and changes over the last decade. Wolfe recently presented the technology at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. More.

See: Chicago Inno

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