Celebrating its 15th anniversary in Asia-Pacific, Microsoft Research (MSR) revealed its latest cutting-edge technology advances achieved by MSR Asia, MSR Redmond and Cambridge, and universities and institutes in Asia-Pacific at Microsoft Research Asia’s Innovation Day 2013 event in Beijing on October 30. Presented at this event were over 20 research projects which were grouped into 4 themes: Big Data & Machine Learning, Cloud & Mobile, Natural User Interface, and Research-Driven Product Innovation. Among the projects demonstrated, data visualization and prediction tool “Power Map for Excel: 3D Data Visualization and Storytelling”, “Speech to Speech Translation”, and “Kinect for Sign Language” received priority in presentation, and the latter two are worthy of attention from language service industry.
The Speech to Speech Translation is capable of the simultaneous speech/text translation and the translation from one language to another. It is also able to simulate personalized voice, retaining the user’s pronunciation and tones. Based on the research results by MSR and University of Toronto, this breakthrough utilized Deep Neural Networks (DNN) to develop a language processing technology, therefore enabling itself to fulfill the translation between 26 languages supported on Microsoft’s platform. Up till now, this technology is still in testing phase and not yet released to the public.
The Kinect for Sign Language is a tool aimed at enabling the communication between the hearing-impaired and normal healthy people. Basing itself upon natural language processing, and speech and gesture recognition, Kinect for Sign Language draws on Kinect devices to realize the recognition and translation of sign language, thus making possible the recognition and translation of Chinese and English sign language and the translation of text into sign language.
For this year’s Innovation Day event, ACTivator provided all the interpreting service.