REU!

This summer I went to a fantastic internship in Washington D.C. at Gallaudet University! My internship was a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU). For undergrads interested in Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (STEM) subjects, I highly recommend looking at REU’s for any curious student. They are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and cover all areas of research at many universities. REUs are fantastic opportunities to learn and explore different areas of science.

My REU at Gallaudet was called Accessible Communication in Technology (AICT) led by Dr. Raja Kushalnagar, Dr. Christian Vogler, Ms. Linda Kozma-Spytek, and Mr. Norman Williams. There were 15 students on six teams. Each team had two mentors and a graduate assistant. The undergrad population was composed of aspiring audiologists, psychologists, and fellow computer scientists!

My partner and I studied captioning latency specifically in captioned telephones. We wondered how does the delay between the audio of someone speaking and a live captioner keeping up with the speaker affect the understanding by the deaf or hard-of-hearing listener.

Other teams were also working on interesting projects. In no particular order, the projects they worked on are:

• Hearing Assistive Technology and how users use them such as phone apps in restaurants, hearing assistive devices in theaters. 
• Punctuation in captions and how the absence of punctuation or correctness of captions aid or disrupt user’s viewing. 
• Voice assistance devices, testing the feasibility of substituting voice instructions with ASL instructions. Imagine waking up a computer just by signing 'Hey!'
• Captioning interfaces such as how long each line of captions should be and how fast should captions go - they tried to find the Goldilocks zone such that the captions were not too long, not too short, not too slow, and not too fast! 
• Captions in virtual reality and not only added captions to a few virtual videos, but also added indicators to show who was speaking.

For a full scope on each of these projects, visit the AICT website. You can also see past years’ projects too!

I learned so much from working on this REU, but not just about computer science. With this REU, I was living and working at Gallaudet University, https://www.gallaudet.edu. For someone who was mainstreamed like me, it was an awesome chance to see what going to a Deaf University and living in the Deaf World would be like. The rooms were already fitted with flashing fire-alarms and doorbells that flickered the lights. Nearly everyone I ran into signed using American Sign Language (ASL). The fastest ASL I learned was coffee— because I was waking up three hours earlier than normal coming from the west coast to the east coast— the cafeteria lady would ask (sign) what kind of drink I wanted!

I loved the days where I did not have to speak, but still communicated regularly with people. It was freeing. Many people signed and spoke at the same time, especially in mixed company. That’s the level of ASL fluency I aspire to because it’s one thing to learn another language, it’s another to think and communicate simultaneously in two languages!

This REU was an experience. I learned so much beyond the scope of the original REU, expanding my computer knowledge, practicing ASL, and interacting with people from all walks of life with different hearing abilities.

Are you ready for an REU? Go check them out!