Welcome to our October 2022 monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, get the low-down on recent events, and much more. This month, we learn about a Nigerian sign language dataset, hear from researchers working on different robotic control projects, and dig into the latest governmental AI policies. Steven Kolawole created a pioneering dataset for Nigerian sign language, in collaboration with a TV sign language broadcaster and two schools in Nigeria. He used this dataset of over 8000 images to create a model to convert sign language to text or speech. In this interview, Steven told us about the goals of this research, his methodology, and how the work has inspired research in other languages.

We hear from Steven Kolawole about his paper on sign-to-speech models for Nigerian sign language. Steven told us about the goals of this research, his methodology, and how the work has inspired research in other languages. The biggest goal of the research was to reduce the communication barrier between the hearing-impaired community and the general populace, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the regions with the highest number of cases of hearing disabilities and, additionally, the region with the lowest number of solutions targeted towards solving this problem. And investigating why this is the status quo was very interesting.