Fw: report form the Lisbon workshop

[Antonio Carlos da Rocha Costa]

The problem with mentioning people by names is that one always forget
somebody...

I forgot to mention Daniel Noelpp. Of course, it was also great to meet him
personally!

All the best,

Ant ­? io Carlos

----- Original Message -----
From: "Antonio Carlos da Rocha Costa" <rocha at atlas.ucpel.tche.br>
To: "SignWriting List" <SW-L at ADMIN.HUMBERC.ON.CA>
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2004 4:16 PM
Subject: report form the Lisbon workshop


> Dear Valerie and all,
>
>     Finally I'm at home, again. Sorry for writing to the list on the
Lisbon
> workshop only now.
>
>     The galleries of pictures of the workshop are all great! It was
> wonderful to meet everybody there personally: Richard Gleaves, Ingvild
> Roald, Steve Parkhurst, Steven and Bart, Nikos Gramalidis, Guylhem Aznar,
> Thomas Hanke, and many others that I haven't contacted before, not to
> mention Oliver Streiter and Chiara Vettori, the organizers of the workshop
> and editors of the proceedings.
>
>     The workshop was a wonderful meeting. The various approaches to sign
> language processing were all presented, specially the two main ones
> SignWriting and HamNoSys.
>
>     The invited talks were excelent. Richard gave a perfect historical
talk
> on SignWriter. Thomas Hanke gave a short tutorial of HamNoSys, and Carol
> Neidl and  Robert Lee explained their very important SignStream annotation
> system, an important tool for sign language researchers.
>
>     The work going on on sign language synthesis in the Nikos' group
(based
> on SignWriting) and in the ViSiCast Project (based on HamNoSys) look very
> promissing. The ViSiCast project seems to emphasize the realistic
production
> of signs (so they make heavy use of motion capture), while Nikos' work
> emphasizes interactivity, and is great on it.
>
>     Patrice Dalle (Guylhem's advisor) is a well known French researcher in
> vision systems. He demonstrated the software he is developing for sign
> language recognition from images captured by video cameras. Really
> impressive! He is well on the way to produce automatic annotations for
> visual aspects of signs and sign phrases.
>
>     The issue of SWML and Unicode for SignWriting arouse in many occasions
> in oral presentations and poster sessions. My personal feeling, from all
the
> discussions (and also from the track that appeared here in the last few
> days) is that one should further the Unicode for SignWriting issue, to get
a
> clearer idea of its potential. SWML and Unicode are not alternatives, they
> are complementary, and it is important to understand clearly how we can
> profit the best from both.
>
>     Guylhem Aznar will be visting me next week (he is at the moment in
Porto
> Alegre, with Marianne Stumpf). I hope to talk a little bit more with him
> abouth the Unicode stuff.
>
>     Also, it is important to understand that SignWriting and HamNoSys are
> not alternatives for the same purpose. They are complementary, useful for
> different purposes, and to get a clear picture of such complementarity is
> also important, for the best profit of the development of sign language
> processing systems.
>
>     In summary, everybody enjoyed the workshop. Looks it will be useful to
> organize another one next year. Oliver and I are already talking about
that.
>
>     All the best,
>
>     Ant ­? io Carlos
>