Week 0: Introduction

Hello everyone! Welcome to my senior project. I am Elysse Ahmad Yusri, and my project will be oriented towards making an application to translate Malay Sign Language (Bahasa Isyarat Malaysia, or BIM) via camera to Malay and English. While machine-learning oriented programs exist to help translate other languages, such as American Sign Language, to English, there is less technology in general to aid those learning or communicate through other forms of sign language. Not only do I seek to learn and apply my knowledge in machine learning through this project, but I also seek to learn more about communities centered around disability in my home country. 

The first one or two weeks of this project will be oriented around clarifying the scope of my project. A primary concern of mine is to find more suitable datasets to train and test my model with since there are less resources available on BIM. I also plan to reference the official BIM Sign Bank, which contains resources and signals that have been supported by the Malaysian government and various other agencies. I hope to find more official resources like these in this time.

Lastly, I wouldn’t be able to do this project without the help of data scientist Dr. Fata Anwar as my external advisor and Computer Science teacher Mrs. Shahin as my internal advisor. With their help, I look forward to learning, creating, and sharing my experiences as I do this project!