SignON Final Phase
SignON is not only about technology. It is about building communication bridges between deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing people, establishing a continuous knowledge transfer between researchers, developers and (potential) users, and facilitating an expanding mutual understanding.
The SignON project (www.signon-project.eu) is now in its final phase. Applications for machine translation and data collection are developed and now being tested. Moreover, SignOn is running a data collection campaign aiming to collect user-generated content for fine-tuning sign language recognition and speech recognition models. If you are interested, you can find more information and instructions here: https://signon-project.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=cc9c80ee65ef896e1db703f05&id=c85f13c4ef&e=00d89b265b
But SignON is not only about technology. It is about building communication bridges between deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing people, establishing a continuous knowledge transfer between researchers, developers and (potential) users, and facilitating an expanding mutual understanding.
With regards to the latter, in August 2023 there were three major events that SignON organised and/or participated in. Most notably this was the SignON Workshop on the World Deaf Day in Bruges. Saturday 23rd September 2023 was International Deaf Day. As every year, many events are organised all over the world to celebrate it. In Belgium this year, SignON took a special place in the World Deaf Day forum, organised by 'Doof Vlaanderen' (the Belgian national deaf association). With a morning presentation about the SignON project and its challenges and two workshops in the afternoon, the numerous attendees had the opportunity to see the progress achieved in the last two and a half years and engage in a conversation with SignON consortium members. The SignON workshop on World Deaf Day was featured on VRT NWS, the national television broadcast in Flanders (Belgium). Watch the video here: https://signon-project.us6.list-manage.com/track/click?u=cc9c80ee65ef896e1db703f05&id=851e99b004&e=00d89b265b
Two other events that took place at the end of September were the Sign Language In the Netherlands (SLIN) 2023 meeting and the Computational Linguistics In the Netherlands (CLIN) 2023 conference. SLIN2023, organised by Amit Moryossef, took place in KU Leuven in Antwerp. The meeting aimed to bring together researchers and practitioners in sign language technology and to promote knowledge sharing and collaborations. In this meeting a keynote presentation was given by Dr. Dimitar Shterionov. The SignON project was featured in presentations by Lien Soetemans and Dr. Prof. Myriam Vermeerbergen (KU Leuven), Hannes de Durpel and Caro Brosens (Vlaamse GebarenTaal Centrum) and Mathieu de Coster (Ghent University). At CLIN 2023, also held in Antwerp, Belgium. The SignON consortium was represented by Bram Vanroy (KU Leuven) and Ineke Schuurman (KU Leuven) and Caro Brosens (VGTC).
