Evaluating American Sign Language Generation Through the Participation of Native ASL Signers

We discuss important factors in the design of evaluation studies for systems that generate animations of American Sign Language (ASL) sentences. In particular, we outline how some cultural and linguistic characteristics of members of the American Deaf community must be taken into account so as to ensure the accuracy of evaluations involving these users. Finally, we describe our implementation and user-based evaluation (by native ASL signers) of a prototype ASL generator to produce sentences containing classifier predicates, frequent and complex spatial phenomena that previous ASL generators have not produced

Mobile Technology Applications for Manufacturing, Reduction of Muda (Waste) and the Effect on Manufacturing Economy and Efficiency

Mobile devices in the manufacturing setting offer mobility and information whenever and wherever it is needed; these advantages allow for a more efficient workflow and allow the user to make more informed decisions. Due to these advantages, companies are reducing muda (waste) by using mobile devices (implementing Lean Manufacturing) and therefore saving money. Some of the mobile applications discussed in this paper are the following: Augmented Reality for assembly training, pruefcubing, remotely-monitored shop floors, statistical process control (SPC), and change requests for construction, and the two types of muda (waste) reduced by these mobile applications are “unnecessary / excess motion and defects.

KrishiPustak

With the wide penetration of mobile internet, social networking (SN) systems are becoming increasingly popular in the developing world. However, most SN sites are text heavy, and are therefore unusable by low-literate populations. Here we ask what would an SN application for low-literate users look like and how would it be used? We designed and deployed KrishiPustak, an audio-visual SN mobile application for low-literate farming populations in rural India. Over a four month deployment, 306 farmers registered through the phones of eight agricultural mediators making 514 posts and 180 replies. We conducted interviews with farmers and mediators and analyzed the content to understand system usage and to drive iterative design. The context of mediated use and agricultural framing had a powerful impact on system understanding (what it was for) and usage. Overall, KrishiPustak was useful and usable, but none-The-less we identify a number of design recommendations for similar SN systems.</p