27-05-2019
Chieko Asakawa, an internationally recognized scientist for her pioneering work in the areas of accessibility technologies, will be on May 29 at FCT NOVA.
The Japanese researcher is the speaker of the NOVA LINCS Influential Seminar with the lecture "AI for Accessibility", where she will analyze the central trends in the history of accessibility and discuss its relevance to her latest work in accessibility in the real world. "Throughout the lecture, I will emphasize how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help to improve the quality of life of people with visual impairments," she explains.
Chieko Asakawa is an IBM Fellow working in the area of accessibility. Her initial contribution in the area started from braille digitalization and moved onto the Web accessibility, including the world first practical voice browser.Today, Chieko Asakawa is focusing on advancing cognitive assistant research to help the blind regain information by augmenting missing or weakened abilities in the real world by the power of AI. In 2013, the government of Japan awarded the Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon to Chieko for her outstanding contributions to accessibility research. She was elected as a foreign member of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2017, and inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF) in 2019. She has been also serving as an IBM Distinguished Service Professor at Carnegie Mellon University since 2014.
The seminar is scheduled for May 29, at 2:00 p.m., in 1D Amphitheater, Building VII at FCT NOVA, and was organized by the Department of Informatics and the NOVA LINCS Research Center of FCT NOVA.
