Today, Thursday 17 March 2022, the event of the project "IPOACUSIA: Innovating, Informing, Participating - New methodologies for the communication of people with hearing loss" took place at Manifattura Tabacchi in Cagliari.
The project is the result of a collaboration between the Autonomous Region of Sardinia, Sardegna Ricerche and CRS4, and ranked first in the national ranking of regional projects for the social inclusion of people with hearing loss.
The aim of the project is to reduce communication barriers in the interaction with the hearing community employed in the Public Administration.
The approach chosen by CRS4 to address this challenge is based on the use of deep learning models characterised by complex artificial neural network architectures.
The first step is the construction of a video dataset as exhaustive as possible: elaborated with the support of a team of Italian Sign Language experts and a control community composed of deaf people.
The dataset includes the signs of about 120 words of the Italian language, chosen from those most used by deaf people when interacting with the public administration.
These data, appropriately processed, are the input for the second step: the training of the artificial neural network, which is able to recognise signs produced in front of a webcam, translating them into text or voice form, to facilitate the interlocution between hearing and deaf people.
CRS4's Sole Administrator Giacomo Cao, researcher Erminia Leonardi and Maria Paola Casula, LIS interpreter and project consultant with Alessandra Mura, an expert in deaf language and culture, spoke at the event.
A video presentation of the project, produced by CRS4 and ideated and edited by Marco Spanu, was displayed during the event.