About Me

Hola! As you can see in the big black words on top of this page - my name is Emelia Beldon. I am currently a third-year at Gallaudet University pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Informational Technology and a minor in Mathematics. I have been a student of ccomputing ever since I could remember and hopefully with this experience and opportunity, I will be able to expand my horizons and dive even further into computer science.

About My Mentor

Raja Kushalnagar, who is deaf, is the co-lead investigator and scientific lead. He is an associate professor and Director of the Information Technology Program within the Department of Science, Technology and Mathematics at Gallaudet University. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Houston, and his J.D. at Texas Southern University. He has conducted numerous qualitative and quantitative accessibility studies, especially related to captioning. Dr. Kushalnagar also has extensive experience managing undergraduate research through directing a Research Experience for Undergraduates Site program on Accessible Multimodal Interfaces. He has served on the FCC’s Consumer Advisory Committee on matters related to disability access. Three of his students have gone on to PhD programs and received the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

About My Project

Captioning for teleconferencing is essential for the 36 million Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing. Access to teleconference captions has a direct impact on participation in society, especially for those working or studying from home during the covid-19 pandemic era. We are in the middle of a disruptive transition to computer-generated captions that can be viewed anywhere, anytime, including through teleconferencing These new technologies create different types of caption errors, compared with human-generated captioning techniques that have evolved over 40 years. As a result, there has been much consumer frustration. With these new technologies, it is critical to understand how caption errors impact consumers who rely on human and computer generated captions. With this project, we aim to improve usability and quality of captioning by finding the best possible choice of Automatic Speech Recognition and interface.

My Final Report

My Blog

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My Blog