IC 2013

Ambition Team

Demian Flavius

Mihai Agape

Silviu Vert

Lucian Bara

Mentor

Andrei Stancovici

linkedtranslators.com

Ambition Team linked translators.com

Trailer -> video link

1. Raised Problem

John is in some big trouble. He just fainted while taking a walk late in the evening close to his home. He was brought to the hospital in a stable condition. He could move his head and arms, but he wasn’t feeling good at all. The doctors tried to find out what happened, but they quickly realized that John was speech-and-hearing impaired. This was a big issue, because an interpreter was hard to find and bring to the hospital at this hour in the evening. Even if this would have been possible, John was not so comfortable with a person being in the same room with him and the doctor. He had some personal information to disclose to the doctor.

John is not alone. There are around 72 million people in the world like him: suffering from some sort of speech and/or hearing impairment [1 - 4]. While not all problems that these people face are as dramatic and urgent as John’s unexpected necessity for hospital treatment, they do have to overcome a lot of challenges each day. From buying a ticket at the train station to answering long questions at a job interview, they are required to find a way to communicate with other people that are not affected by this kind of impairment.

But John is not alarmed because of the absence of an interpreter in the hospital. He pulls out his personal smartphone from the pocket, turns on the linkedtranslators app and presses a big green button. In less than 30 seconds, a human interpreter joins the live video streaming that just opened. Using the sign language that he learnt shortly after the accident that made him speech-and-hearing impaired when he was just a little boy, he starts communicating with the doctor. While he is gesticulating, the interpreter is telling the doctor, via the audio speaker of the smartphone, what John is saying. When the doctor is asking questions, the interpreter is translating them into sign language, which John is following up on the screen. The doctor is able to understand what happened to John and, after a few medical tests, gives him the correct treatment just in time.

2. Solution Analysis

Ambition Team linked translators.com

We have identified a problem that we want to solve regardless of constraints. We are an ambitious team and we are confident that we will succeed. We want to develop a platform to offer a 24/7 translation service for people with disabilities. The question that follows is: who will pay for this service and what are our gains? Just the participation in the Imagine Cup contest is not satisfying for us, we want to put in practice the idea, successfully analyzing all the risks. People with disabilities have the same rights to communicate as everyone else (hearing individuals). It is definitely not a good idea for people with disabilities to pay a translation service for the basic things for which everyone in the world has access without paying. To get in touch with people with disabilities and to ask for their opinion, we got in touch with David Balaban, a specialist in this field. David put us in contact with many people with disabilities from Romania, Germany, France, Spain and other countries. Until now, we have succeeded to poll 44 persons with disabilities from Romania through a questionnaire. 59% of them are aged between 30 and 40 years, 30% of them are aged between 20 and 30 years and 11% were younger than 20 or older than 40. 72% responded that they needed a sign language interpreter, only 20% believe that this service is free for all, only 18% have immediate access to an interpreter, just 34% have appealed at least once to an interpreter because some of them are always helped by a friend or a family member. They also specified that it would be important for an interpreter to be present when they appeal to some certain services (doctor, court, police, emergency services, notary, town hall, post office, bank, treasury, church, interview for a job, employment, school, agency, ticket office, shops, restaurant). Only 16% know the existence of at least one interpreter, just 25% of them use a mobile phone but 89% think it would be useful for such of system to be implemented. It is clear that such service is useful but the cost of the translation service for people with disabilities must be covered with special financial resources so we decided to develop a solidary business to overcome the communication barriers between people.

We noticed that not only the effortlessly communication between people with hearing disability is required; the translation business in general is growing due to factors like globalization, increase of international relations, the expansion of the European Union and the increase in the number of immigrants. In this context, linkedtranslators will provide a full interpretation and translation services, from general translations for the basic user to specialized translations for businesses, private persons and public or private organizations. The target platforms for the application are: personal computer, smartphone and tablet, but also conventional phones.

The solution for the problem we put forth consists in a national and international translation platform for speech, sign language and writing from the mother tongue to any other language supported by the platform (speech, sign language and writing).

After some research, we found many different products in this niche market of translation. We grouped the competitors in 3 categories:

1) traditional face to face translation without using any technological equipment (this is the most commonly used because today's technology still does not provide enough service quality)

2) automated interpretation by using video recognition, intelligent glove or other special equipment (these technologies are still at the research level)

3) video relay service / video remote interpreting In order to identify the major strengths and drawbacks of our proposal, a

competitor analysis describing more than 20 competitors was carried out. A summary of this analysis is presented in the file below.

Ambition Team linked translators.com

Analyzing the competition, we noted that:

1) The services available for deaf and dumb have no way to choose an interpreter according to preferences, the system automatically provides an interpreter based on some internal rules

2) Is not provided any information on the location of interpreters, such of service (localization) would obviously help if a person urgently needs a face to face interpreter

3) does not provide any service for people with disabilities to communicate in abroad (obs. signs for the deaf and dumb vary from country to other country), our system can provide this opportunity (go to chapter 4 see the last scenario)

4) cannot be outsourced services in some countries (for example Purple system from the excel list – see above), we want to globalize services, we want to unify all gestural sign languages

The project cash flow is presented in the next excel file:

Our target shifts towards multiple social and economic groups, opening new perspectives in the communication and interpretation field in order to juxtapose oral communication with the interpretation of sign language (both in the context of the same nationalities as well as different nationalities).

The main services will be: General translations(voice and sign language) Professional translations Text translations

Through linkedtranslators.com we want to offer solutions for the following situations:

- From the social point of view the hearing impaired people, although they receive a lot of help from the state, they still encounter a lot of communication barriers and difficulties at their workplace, in communication with the state institutions, in case of emergencies or even for their free time when going to the restaurant, cinema or theater.

- Individual persons which need cheap translation solutions in different situations

- Companies which need to adapt to the economic context where, due to the globalization process, the amount of international business trips has increased significantly.

Some key points which make linkedtranslators.com a competitive enterprise:

Worldwide coverage: Due to the increasing number of smartphones and the easy access to the internet (3G or wireless) we can provide our services with almost worldwide coverage.

Ambition Team linked translators.com

Promptitude: linkedtranslators.com will be prepared to generate a fast and efficient response to its clients every time they need it.

Competitive: Because the system uses mobile phone services or the internet we can provide fast access worldwide with minimal costs and with no travelling or need for offices we can minimize the costs even further.

Non-Stop availability: In this scenario we need to distinguish two different availability domains:

o Audio translations: The emergencies can appear all day long, even at night time, but this will not require translators to work during the night, we just use a translator from another time zone.

o Video translations for the sign language: due to the fact that sign language differs from one area to another, we need to have in each area at least one interpret during night time to handle emergencies.

Quality: Any translator/interpret that performs for linkedtranslators.com shall be required to show professionalism and maximum quality in each translation.

Pay by the minute: Because it is an online service and it doesn’t require transport to the destination so the initial cost for a translation is 0. This makes it easy to charge each minute.

Social: The goal is to eliminate the language barrier and to improve the communication with persons with hearing disabilities. This service shall be free for the communication with the police, fire fighters and the hospital staff. We will try to establish a partnership with national and international institutes and NGOs to help provide these services and cover part of the costs.

Because we cover the oral translations and sign language, we cover most of the market and our targeted client groups are companies, public institutions, private institutions and individuals.

Individuals: any person that needs to communicate through a translator Companies: can be split into the following groups:

Ambition Team linked translators.com

o Event organizing companies o Small companies that want to expand into foreign countries o Companies that want to extend in countries with different dialects

Institutions: o Public: local, national, European and internationalo Private: associations, NGOs, confederations

Main tasks of the project:The project is split into tasks of various importance degrees but the main tasks

are: Implement the speech streaming Implement the video streaming Implement the payment system Implement the database Find and recruit translators in different time zones Find and recruit sign language interprets in different time zones Start establishing partnerships with different state

Types of services:This service shall be split into two main classes depending on the type of

communication: Audio to audio (for all users) Video to video (for sign language)

3. Solution Description and ImplementationSystem components & architecture

In order to achieve scalability and extensibility at a low price, we designed a system based on the following major components:

1. Authentication2. Web API3. Client Application4. Web Sockets Server5. Streaming Server

Ambition Team linked translators.com

The general architecture and the interaction can be described by the following diagram:

General architecture showing the primary components

1. AuthenticationFor authentication we decided to allow the registration with the aid of authentication providers, such as Facebook. This allows us to fetch the user profile directly from Facebook, filling in profile details details such as known languages and location automatically in order to ensure an improved user experience.

2. Web APIKnowing that we need an easily extendable, scalable, flexible and secure solution, we chose

to implement the layer between the clients and the data access layer as a Web API service. This component provides data for the client applications; as a result of hosting it in Microsoft Azure, along with the database, we gained what we initially desired: scalability and security at a low price.

Ambition Team linked translators.com

As this is the central component of the system, using this abstraction makes it easy to extend the solution in many ways, from building clients for different platforms (e.g. Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, Windows 7, Web Client, Android, is etc.) to adding new components.

3. Client ApplicationAs aforementioned, we can easily build client applications for different platforms; for now,

we’ve chose to build a client for Windows 8 because it’s both an emerging platform suitable for developing great apps and it provides an extraordinary user experience thanks to Modern UI and its innovative improvements.

We needed to create a fast and fluid design and provide the end user a responsive application and ground-breaking user experience and we consider that the best option in order to achieve these goals is the Windows 8 platform.

4. Web Socket ServerExpecting a large number of users that interact with our solution, we encourage them to be

part of the multicultural community whose main goal is to break bonds of any type between people. Considering this, we integrated a chat component in the client application so they could easily communicate and bond.

The chat component is based on permanent communication between a Web Socket Server and every client application. Thus, every client can communicate at any time with any other available client in the whole world in a secure and confidential fashion because we do not maintain any records of their conversation.

5. Streaming ServerWhen a user needs a translation job, we have to provide a way for him to communicate with

the chosen translator via video call. When both users have the means of getting a public IP, the video call can be a peer-to-peer one; however, if at least one of them is inside a poorly configured network, behind a proxy, or in a corporate network, than we need a dedicated streaming server used as a middle point between the users. Respecting these constraints, we’ve implemented a solution based on the Azure Media Services architecture. This allows us to provide the desired service, scaling with the number of users requiring these means of communications and keep the bandwidth costs down.

Ambition Team linked translators.com

The interaction of the components in those cases is summarized in the following diagram:

Figure 2: Interaction diagram in case of Firewall

Ambition Team linked translators.com

4. ConstraintsTime

o The application must be launched by mid June

o A pre – register version must be available late April

Resources

o The project is done pro-bono so a minimum number of skilled people must be involved to maximize efficiency

5. Steps

1) Scope

2) Requirements Analysis

3) Design

4) Development

5) Testing

6) Deployment

7) Post Implementation Review

6. Solution ScenariosLanguage 1 Language 2 face to face

In this scenario the two individuals are face to face (video remote interpreting)

Ambition Team linked translators.com

Language 1 Language 2 different placesIn this scenario the two persons are in different places (video relay service). The first person

calls the translator and then searches the second person after the ID or username.

Language 1(sign-language) Language 2 face to faceIn this scenario the two persons are face to face. The first person selects the translation from

Romanian sign language to spoken English. There will be two translators: one for sign language and one for translation in the other language. The connection will be made by the cloud but the translation will be slower because the information needs to be passes between the two translators.

Ambition Team linked translators.com

Language 1(sign-language) Language 2 different placesThe first person calls the translators and then searches the second person after the ID or

username. In background the translators establish an internal connection and will be ready to start the call.

Ambition Team linked translators.com

7.Risk assessment

1) Misunderstood specifications

2) Underestimated tasks

3) Third party dependencies ( facebook, paypal, windowes azure)

8.Risk managemet

1) Develop requirements specifications with stakeholders

2) Proper planning – careful design, launch 2 weeks before deadline

3) Estimate taking into account risk factors – add 30%

9.ConclusionsWe designed a platform that can help people just like John to communicate

without barriers in almost any situation that they could encounter. The software solution can work on all types of devices, including PCs, tablets and smartphones. Because automated interpretation is not sufficiently accurate for all types of activities that one performs, we designed a system which is based on real human interpretation.

References

[1] http://wfdeaf.org/faq

[2] http://www.droregon.org/results/vri-video-remote-interpreting-services-ease-language-barriers

[3] http://www.ehow.com/list_6023189_issues-deaf-people-face.html

[4] http://www.videoconference-interpreting.net/BraunTaylor2011/09_Napier.pdf