This year's DeafIT took place on 9 November 2018 in Munich's Messestadt. The development of DeafIT has become more professional in recent years and has now established itself in the DACH region. Due to the size of the community, the variety of topics is much broader than one is used to from most events. This, in turn, has become a strength of DeafIT. In addition, there is a range of topics that are still rarely found elsewhere due to the special community. Nevertheless, as last year, there were topics and speakers that one might not necessarily expect there. For the first time, there were speakers from outside the DACH region, namely from Russia and Brazil.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning (DL)
It is no surprise that AI and DL have found their way into this community, and based on the number of talks on these subjects, they formed the predominant core topics of this event. This was rounded off with a discussion at the end of the day. Although these topics are not yet directly part of my own professional field, one can already discern certain future development trends that could become very exciting. This is because immediate application areas in concrete applications already exist, and fundamental research in sign language recognition, which is currently in its infancy, is also underway.
Sign Language Recognition with Deep Learning
From my perspective, one of the most exciting talks came from Alexey Prikhodko from Russia, who currently works in Hamburg. He demonstrated how gesture recognition works with Deep Learning (Tensorflow). Using motion sensors (Leap Motion), hand gestures are captured and transmitted to the computer. The gestures are dynamically transferred into a coordinate system. The movement is calculated with mathematical formulas and then recognised for its meaning. What is inherently much more complex in practice, he visualised very commendably and understandably for the audience.
It was personally tangible for me that, in the next ten to twenty years, the use of sign language avatars could reach a level of maturity, thanks to AI and DL, that is currently non-existent, or allow for new applications that we cannot yet foresee. I can well imagine that the expected development scenarios will also resonate in other areas where the visual strengths of sign language users could bring about new key technologies.
The need for special social responsibility to prepare us for potential future dangers was evident, among other things, in Manuel Gnerlich's talk on the opportunities and risks of AI, as well as the concluding discussion at the end of the conference.
Handtalk
Joaquim Amado Da Silva Júnior from Brazil presented the application Hand Talk with the virtual avatar Hugo. This runs, among other things, with AI, and with it, texts can be translated into Brazilian Sign Language via app or directly on a website. He also presented the Deaf World Tech conference, which has so far been active mainly in Romance language speaking countries.
Microsoft Flow
Vincent Rothländer demonstrated an application that also works with AI in his keynote on Microsoft Flow: automated workflow processes using the example of Twitter entries related to #DeafIT18.
Internet of Things
Harald Übele and Rafael Ulbrich from TechData showed the possibilities for the Internet of Things via the IBM Cloud in their presentation. Here too, AI-supported, entire automated processes can be assembled. They demonstrated how information like temperature can be transmitted to the cloud via Raspberry Pi. A practical example using this process is bakery chains that use software, based on weather data, to determine which food will perform better the next day.
Gamification and AI at delegs
Ute Meißner and Jörn from delegs.de presented plans in their talk on how they intend to further develop the sign script editor with AI and gamification, and immediately involved the audience in a survey whose results are to be incorporated into this development.
Hackerschool
I found Julia Freudenberg's talk from Hackerschool in Hamburg very refreshing. This idea arose out of the necessity to find and promote junior developers. In Germany, computer science rarely finds a place in curricula, and for this reason, Hackerschool was founded. It offers courses in various locations and provides young people with the opportunity to develop apps or games together with so-called inspirers during weekend events. Hackerschool strives to attract deaf and hard of hearing developers as inspirers for Hackerschool and aims to be barrier free in the future.
Rust and Mozilla
Florian Gilcher from asquera introduced us to the system-level programming language Rust from Mozilla Research. He led us through the history of Rust's creation and highlighted its special features. He showed how Rust differs from other programming languages like C or C++ and other system-level languages in its basic concepts and offers a solution for known memory problems or longer runtimes. Anyone involved with WASM (WebAssembly) will sooner or later come across Rust.
End of Password Based Authentication
Another very interesting talk came from Roman Kuznetsov from Systola GmbH. He showed us how important the problem of password based authentication is. Globally, 2000 passwords are hacked every minute. For this reason, two-factor or multi-factor authentication is more than just recommendable. He therefore showed us some password managers like Lastpass or 1Password. Furthermore, he assumes that password authentication will be replaced by new technologies in the future. His company has developed a password manager for Windows network environments that uses so-called One Time Password apps on smartphones as keys for authentication.
Competence Centre Digital Inclusion
Irmhild Rogalla presented the 'Competence Centre Digital Inclusion' in her impulse lecture. Initially, an expert opinion was prepared for the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag on the potential of mobile internet and digital technologies for better participation of people with disabilities in everyday life. It was found that the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) and the Barrier Free Information Technology Ordinance (BITV) are predominantly geared towards blind people. People with disabilities want to use the internet, apps or games just like everyone else. A key point was that disabled developers are the key when it comes to real benefits. In the subsequent discussion, I personally pointed out that the specific situation of accessibility in Germany had to be taken into account. On the one hand, there is WCAG and on the other hand, BITV with its rules. This makes things more complicated than they could be. Nevertheless, it was pleasing that accessibility was a topic.
Web Developer Roadmap
Florian Katzmayr from IMC FH Krems gave an overview in his talk of all the competencies and knowledge a web developer needs today. He has often had the experience with interns in the past that they lacked sufficient skills and knowledge for the currently required skills, even though they came from relevant educational institutions. This specifically showed why it is so difficult to find skilled workers in Austria as well. From this background, I found the Hackerschool idea extremely inspiring.
Performance Matters
In my personal talk, I gave the audience an overview of web performance. Google, as is well known, declared page speed a key criterion for ranking in mobile search results this year. In 2016, mobile devices first overtook desktop computers globally for internet usage. I showed what the situation currently looks like in Germany, Austria or Switzerland. Here, the changing of the guard has not yet taken place. African and Asian countries were responsible for this shift in global statistics. Nevertheless, the trend in this direction will also occur here, ensuring that performance becomes an increasingly essential factor. I showed how the web actually works, what is important, and which techniques can be used. And in a practical example, I demonstrated how to test performance with the Lighthouse Audit in the Developer Tools in the Chrome browser and how the results can be improved.
Networking with Social Media
DeafIT was opened with Nicole Weißkopf's keynote on professional networking with social media and its opportunities and risks for people with hearing impairments. She highlighted the possibilities with Facebook, Twitter, Xing, and LinkedIn. On the other hand, she also reported on her experiences. It is not easy to attend the most popular conferences with a hearing impairment. In the subsequent discussion, the wish for barrier free offerings such as live subtitling or sign language interpreting was expressed multiple times. I would like to note here that Nicole did an enormous amount of networking work for DeafIT. It was evident that one or another talk at DeafIT and this diverse range of topics would not have taken place otherwise.
Five Years of DeafIT and Conclusion
This year, DeafIT celebrated its fifth anniversary. Considering how small and under what circumstances it started, one can only congratulate it on this development. The anniversary gala in the evening beautifully rounded off the programme and allowed for some networking. Nevertheless, I would like to share some suggestions here. It is great to see that DeafIT, alongside the A-Tag in Vienna, can be seen as one of the IT events in the German-speaking world that exemplifies diversity and inclusion: sign language and written interpreting are standard. However, I would like to note that we still do not have optimal stage settings for this. Presentations become too small and unreadable because the subtitles (UT) take up so much space, or the UT is too far from the stage. There is still much room for improvement in the future!
