On May 10-12, 2023, the EASIER consortium gathered for a 3-day face-to-to-face meeting in Guildford, England. The event, held at the University of Surrey, brought together over 40 representatives from 14 partner institutions. Those who could not attend in person participated remotely.
On the first day, a technical workshop was organized. The event was dedicated to updates on technical work packages, including avatar display, sign language (video) recognition, translation, post-editing translations, resource harmonization, affect-informed language technology, and integration (application development). The technical partners had a chance to provide detailed updates on the status of the tasks and activities they lead, and present results achieved to date and open points, that were addressed in the sessions that followed.
The second day saw a presentation by the leaders of the work package dedicated to user involvement (WP1). The EUD provided updates on the status of the activities concerning evaluation of the technical components: interim evaluation of the translation system that is currently ongoing and the final evaluation of the overall components that is scheduled to kick-off by Q3 2023. Then, the leaders of technical work packages presented a summary of the status-quo of their respective components based on the technical workshop held on the previous day and jointly addressed the remaining open points mentioned on the first day of the meeting.
In addition, there was a slot dedicated to an update from the members of the project advisory board. Gladys Tang (Director and Professor of Linguistics at the Center for Sign Linguistics and Deaf Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong), Johanna Mesch (Professor and Scientific Head of the Sign Language Section at the Department of Linguistics at Stockholm University), and Vassilis Pitsikalis (Research Associate at NTUA; Founder, Chief Science Officer at DeepLab) provided valuable feedback to the project partners on the direction that should be taken by the project so that it is able to fully address the feedback received during the interim review meeting that took place in 2022, and the current advancements of the components development and evaluation.
On the last day of the meeting, sessions covering communication, dissemination, and exploitation activities as well as project coordination and management were held. The consortium meeting ended with a focused discussion on the project’s key exploitable assets and lessons learned, which provided a great opportunity to exchange experiences gained thus far and make a clear plan for the remainder of the project.
The gathering has strengthened the consortium’s commitment to keep up the good work in the final months of the project. The EASIER partners are now preparing for the last consortium meeting to be hosted at the University of Hamburg at the end of September and the final review meeting, where they will present all project results to the European Commission.
