Greek team excels in Microsoft challenge
READING, England – Arriving at the Microsoft Technology Center in Reading, I feel as if I have traveled into the future. The striking glass-sheathed building is home to some of the finest computer minds in Europe. The reason for my visit is the two-week Innovation Accelerator seminar organized jointly by Microsoft, British Telecom and Ubiquity Software. The aim was to bring together six of the leading software design teams from last year’s Imagine Cup in Yokohama, Japan (an international competition for students organized by Microsoft) and to give their creativity a fresh boost. Among the participants were the Greek team, who had won second place. It was the second time Greeks had taken part in the technology competition, in which 17,000 students from 90 countries participated in 2005. Like their predecessors, who had also distinguished themselves by winning third place in the software category, these were students of Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, led by assistant professor Leontios Hadzileontiadis. Not all the Greek team was present. Katerina Dikaiou was absent, due to exams, and the team was worried. «Whenever we have to talk to journalists, she does it,» said Fani Tzima, a graduate of electrical and computer engineering who is now doing doctoral studies and one of the group’s three female members. Despite Diakou’s absence, the team spend their time productively. «We’re concentrating on our business plan,» said Viki Cosmidou, a fellow graduate of Fani’s who has also begun her doctorate. «We’ve had a chance to see people we would never meet in Greece» – people who could help with the commercial promotion of the team’s award-winning program Sign2Talk. The team offered a detailed technical and business presentation of their idea. Among those present were Guido Gybles, director of new technologies at the Royal National Institute for the Deaf (RNID), the largest non-profit organization of its type in Britain, which employs 1,200 staff. Gybles told me later that he was «particularly impressed» and that he would try to find a way of promoting their work. But what is the marvelous invention? Sign2Talk translates sign language into speech and vice versa, helping people with hearing disabilities communicate with others. Gybels said so far such attempts had focused on the use of cameras. «Attempting to capture the three-dimensional features of sign language in two-dimensional media comes up against serious difficulties,» he said. The Greek team’s innovation was to use the technique of the myograph, a device used to measure the force generated by a contracting muscle. The signals from the muscles are then used to decode sign language. «If you move our hand, some muscles move, creating a change of pressure and current. We take that signal and look at its frequency, its breadth, how it fluctuates, so we can recognize the movements,» Cosmidou said. For the signal to differentiate between all the movements of the fingers, it needs an accelerator meter. «The speed meter,» said Tassos Valsamidis, the only man in the group, «measures the speed of the hand,» making the translation system function with more subtlety. To get Sign2Talk into the final, the Greek team first entered the highly competitive preliminary finals for Central and Eastern Europe, from which three teams were chosen. The Greeks won largely become they had offered something innovative. But it also helped that the Greek team had a strong female contingent (a progressive edge for a country like Greece, which is not known for its feminism) and an attention to integrating people with special needs (another thing for which Greece is not noted.) Let us hope that the creators of Sign2Talk are not merely an exception to the rule but signs of a new outlook. (1) This article first appeared in Kathimerini’s color supplement K, on April 2, 2006.
