Rosalee Wolfe (front row, second from left) and her peers at the University of Hamburg, Germany, get ready to cheer on the Hamburg soccer team -- FC St. Pauli. This academic year, Wolfe will conduct research in Hamburg thanks to a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award. (Image courtesy of Rosalee Wolfe)
The Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board selected Rosalee Wolfe, a professor in the College of Computing and Digital Media, for a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program award. With this award, Wolfe will conduct research in computer science at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and the Institute for Speech and Language Processing in Athens, Greece, to improve communication between deaf and hearing people through a multilingual avatar.
"Understanding the priorities of the people who will use a technology results in creating a better, more effective technology," Wolfe says. "Learning the priorities of deaf communities is my topmost goal."
While abroad for the 2019-20 academic year, Wolfe will continue the
American Sign Language Avatar Project at DePaul. The project seeks to bridge the language barrier between speakers of ASL and English by use of an avatar that translates in real-time. The purpose of the project is not only to bridge a language barrier gap, but also to make everyday tasks from going to the grocery store to going through airport security more accessible for those who speak ASL as a first language.
Read more about the project in Newsline.
The Fulbright Program is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program and is designed to build lasting connections between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.