Spektra - Tunisian Sign Language Transcription CBL

  What is Challenge Based Learning? Challenge Based Learning or in short CBL is a teaching framework used in different educational and academic programs in order to tackle real-world problems. It is a collaborative approach engaging the different members of the process (students, teachers, impacted community...) in identifying and solving the issue at hand. CBL is essentially built on the foundation of experiential learning relying mainly on the process of learning by doing. Through this process, we, the students, find ourselves engaged in hands-on experiences connecting theories and knowledge learned in class with real life situations. This grants us the opportunity to collaborate with diverse organizations and people gaining the gratification of assisting communities in need while learning positive professional practices and skillsets. CBL Framework CBL is divided into three interconnected phases: Engage, Investigate and Act.  Each phase includes activities that prepare...

  Assembling the Dictionary As we were working on medical terms primarily, we decided to contact a medical expert, also a friend of one of us, in order to help us identify which medical terms are most common among patients. Thus, we managed to collect quite a considerable number of sentences that are relevant to our topic. Now comes the second part, figuring out the sign language interpretations for these medical terms and sentences, so we decided to pay a visit to our partner ATILS to find the translation for which word in order for us to start collecting the sign language data for our model. We can confidently say that we hit the jackpot with this one as one of the interpreters gave us a whole medical sign language interpretation book. Now we have our first data source, the next steps are to collect real-life data then train the model on it. Here are some pictures of the medical sign language terms from the book:  Collecting Video Data This part was rather tedious, but it is...

  The Search As we started our investigation phase and after choosing the problematic we would be working on, which is, as mentioned in our previous article, the communication difficulties that deaf people encounter in Tunisian society, we figured that it is extremely necessary that we find an expert in the domain not just to consult but also to partner up with in order to let the project grow bigger and find its true purpose. As we went through different associations and experts' searches, one managed to stand out as it were specifically the exact domain we were looking for; Tunisian Sign Language Interpreters Association, going by the name of ATILS. Establishing the First Contact After identifying our potential partner, we immediately contacted ATILS president, Mr. Houssem Aloui, fortunately he replied to our request pretty fast and agreed to set a meet with us.  During our online encounter with Mr. Aloui, the president of the ATILS association, we managed to get an in-depth...

Giving Voice to The Voiceless: our journey of creating an AI for Tunisian Sign Language Transcription  Our Challenge Deafness is widespread around the world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are currently more than 430 million people living with disabling hearing loss. It is also expected that by 2050, this number could be over 700 million. In Tunisia, there are over 60,000 deaf people according to the African Sign Languages Resource Center. The impacts of deafness are broad and can be profound. The main issue we are dealing with is essentially the lack of communication tools and the inability to deliver information to deaf people in Tunisia. This inconvenience has proven to be disastrous as it severely impacted the education rate for them. Nearly 95% of deaf people are uneducated or quit school at the elementary level. Besides, they often find themselves discriminated against simply for their difference. The majority of people barely recognize sign language ...