In our video serie “The SignON Forum” we invite everyone to share their questions, concerns, comments, or ideas with us. Now it’s Liesl Deforche’s turn! We encourage all of you to join our discussion in your preferred language. Feel free to share your video to signon-comms@adaptcentre.ie

The Irish co-creation workshop was held over two days, the first event was held in person in Deaf Village Ireland on the 12th of November and the second was held on the 25th of November over Zoom. Working with the Education and Public Engagement team in the ADAPT Centre and drawing on their expertise in running Citizen Think-Ins, our workshop focussed on a discussion around Sign Language Machine Translation and circumstances where an app such as SignON would be useful.

On the 7th of November we organised another internal seminar. Ruth Holmes (University College Dublin) took us through the UCD research on Signer Independent Sign Language Recognition. Sign language recognition comes with a number of significant challenges, including potential influences on real world recap and a lack of signer variety in the dataset. That is why the research was based on a specific dataset of ISL hand gestures signed by 6 individuals and with variety in input representation. Each hand gesture was described by 21 keypoints and trained on a variety of individuals. Different finetuning strategies led to different effects on generalisation in sign language recognition. Often there was bias and misclassification of signs. We remember that sign language recognition is still very much a work in progress and are glad to have some suggestions on how to move the research forward. Thanks, Ruth, for sharing this with us.

For Science Week in Ireland, on the 16th of November, SignON researchers led by Shaun O'Boyle staged a Shakespeare event, All The World’s A Screen - a Shakespeare performance - in Irish Sign Language for people and machines. Featuring the acting talents of Lianne Quigley and Alvean Jones, an enjoyable evening was had by all!