WebSign, To break the silence of deaf

WebSign
To break the silence of deaf

The Research Laboratory UTIC, University of Tunis, Tunisia

Developer team

	Prof. Mohammed Jemni mohamed.jemni(at)fst.rnu.tn Mohamed Jemni is a Professor of ICT and Educational Technologies at the University of Tunis, Tunisia. He is the Head of the Laboratory Research of Technologies of Information and Communication & Electrical Engineering (LaTICE) of the University of Tunis (www.latice.rnu.tn). Since August 2008, he is the General chair of the Computing Center El Khawarizmi, the Internet services provider for the sector of higher education and scientific research in Tunisia. His Research Projects Involvements are tools and environments of e-learning, High performance & Grid computing and Accessibility of ICT to People with Disabilities. He is currently conducting three main projects in his laboratory: Development of a Tunisian Grid environment for scientific research (www.tngrid.tn). Development of an e-learning environment for students with disabilities. Improving accessibility of deaf community by the use of ICT and sign language. He published more than 150 papers in international journals and conferences and realized many studies for international organizations such as UNESCO, ITU and ALECSO. He has a patent for the application MMS Sign to make mobile phones accessible for deaf people. He won with his laboratory several awards as the UNESCO Prize 2008 for the e-learning curriculum they developed for blind people, the "World Summit Award (WSA) - Mobile 2010" in the field of social inclusion and recently in April 2012, LaTICE won the Google Student AWARD by Kabil Jaballah and the Best Communication Paper by Mohamed JEMNI and Mehrez Boulares of the Web For All 2012. He is also the president of an NGO created in June 2011: the Tunisian Association of e-accessibility (web site under construction www.e-access.tn). He lunched many initiatives to promote ICT accessibility in the Arab region as the project of WCAG2.0 translation to Arabic (http://www.utic.rnu.tn/wcag2.0) and the 2009 initiative for using ICT to develop Arab Sign language (www.icta.rnu.tn/asl/).

	Oussama El Ghoul oussama.elghoul(at)utic.rnu.tn Oussama El Ghoul is PHD student at The Faculty of Economics and Management of Sfax and researcher at the research laboratory of technologies of information and communication. He has obtained his master degree on the Higher School of Sciences and Techniques of Tunis, 2008. He works on the accessibility of deaf persons to the technologies of information and communication and he is member of the WebSign team. He is interested to the virtual reality and how it can help people with disability to access to ICT. His PHD focuses on the automatic generation of manual and non-manual gestures for sign language machine translation (in particular facial expression).

	Mehrez Boulares mehrez.boulares(at)gmail.com Mehrez Boulares is currently at the final step of PhD thesis under the supervision of Prof. Mohamed Jemni. He received in September 2009 the Master degree on Computer Science, with honors, from Tunis College of Sciences and Techniques, University of Tunis in Tunisia. His research interests are in the areas of Sign Language Processing. His current topics of interests include Computer graphics and Accessibility of ICT to disabled users. He has many contributions for Sign Language (Corpora, Methods and approaches). He is always looking for new projects and opportunities.

	Nour Ben Yahia nour.benyahia(at)utic.rnu.tn

	Kabil Jaballah kabil.jaballah(at)utic.rnu.tn

	Achraf Othman achraf.othman(at)utic.rnu.tn achraf.othman Achraf Othman is currently a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Mohamed Jemni. He received in August 2010 the MS degree in computer science from the Ecole Supérieure des Sciences et Techniques de Tunis (ESSTT), University of Tunis, Tunisia. His research interests are in the areas of computer graphics, especially in geometry processing. His current topics of interests include facial animation, mpeg-4 standard, shape analysis, mesh generation and optimization, deformation and space-time shape processing.

	Monoem Youneb monoem.youneb(at)cck.rnu.tn