Karen Alkoby becomes the first deaf woman in the US to earn a PhD in computer science today. She’s graduating from DePaul University. She helped to pioneer behind a computer-animated dictionary. It interprets English words typed into the program and gesture them into American Sign Language. It helps in situations where hiring an interpreter would be impractical. Alkoby’s dissertation involved determining how the human brain interprets shapes like those made by hands in ASL. This may help with creation of a ASL-to-English dictionary.
