Posted: 10/04/19
Last Monday, April 8th, DCU hosted their seventh annual President’s Awards for Innovation. The awards celebrate students and staff throughout the university who have exhibited excellence in their research to provide innovative solutions for problems in society.
At this years ceremony, winning projects included a software to correct the gender bias in machine translation systems, a program that makes it easier for those with Dyslexia to read online, and research towards cornea regeneration through the use of cultured cornea-limbal stem cells to prevent blindness.
Eva Vanmassenhove, a DCU PhD student at the ADAPT Centre won the Student Category Award for her research on Addressing Gender in Machine Translation. Eva describes that the issue with many machine translation systems is the loss of author traits which, depending on the author’s gender, affects the language and therefore the translation as well. Thus, when translating a non-grammatical gender language into one such as Spanish or French that do have grammatical changes based off of the gender of the speaker, there are incorrect translations as a result of (Neural) Machine Translation (MT). Eva’s software integrates gender information of the speaker into the translation system, which provides a more accurate translation.
Kevin Cogan, an undergraduate Computer Applications student at DCU, also received a Student Category Award for his project Dyslex-E. For the Academic and Research Category, Dr Finbarr O’Sullivan received an award for his research with the National Institute of Cellular Biotechnology (NICB), which has successfully treated a number of Irish patients suffering with blindness.
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