Stokoe Winner To Continue Work With Computerized Fingerspelling

Karen (Glassenberg) Alkoby, a Chicago native, has been awarded the William C. Stokoe Scholarship to continue research and development of a system that translates spoken English into American Sign Language (ASL) animation on a computer. She started this project while studying for her M.S. in Computer Science degree from DePaul University which she received last February with a concentration in information systems. She plans to make this ‘ASL Synthesizer’ project the topic for her Ph.D. dissertation also at DePaul University. A demo of her project is available on the internet at asl.cs.depaul.edu. She is married to Yossi, an Israeli deaf native where Alkoby went after graduation from Gallaudet in 1984 to teach young Deaf children. The William C. Stokoe Scholarship is an annual award of $2000 to a deaf graduate student. The goal of this scholarship is to increase the number of deaf social scientists who are actively involved in research on Sign Language or the Deaf Community, whether in linguistics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, or other fields. Support for the William C. Stokoe Scholarship comes from the sale of “Sign Language and the Deaf Community (1980), which is published by the National Association of the Deaf (NAD).