01-06-2019
For the inaugural NOVA LINCS Influential Seminar Series we had the honor to receive Chieko Asakawa, for the talk “AI for Accessibility”, that took place at FCT NOVA on 29 May.
Chieko Asakawa is a blind Japanese computer scientist, known for her work at IBM Research – Tokyo in accessibility. A Netscape browser plug-in which she developed, the IBM Home Page Reader, became the most widely used web-to-speech system available. She is the recipient of numerous industry and government awards.
In her talk Chieko Asakawa analyzed how technologies have helped create independence and opportunities for people with disabilities to actively participate in society, not only on the perspective of a researcher but also as a technology user.
For example, voice-based Web access allowed the blind to obtain virtually unlimited amount of information by themselves and smartphones have defined completely new ways of engaging with day-to-day activities.
Throughout the talk, she highlighted how AI can help improve the quality of lives for people with visual impairments, showing some videos of her most recent research work on advancing cognitive assistant based on AI techniques.
The NOVA LINCS Influential Seminar Series aims to bring to FCT NOVA community some of the most influential researchers in the area of Computer Science.