My project is titled Bridge, it is an AI powered sign language interpreter with a goal of bridging communication gaps between sign language users and verbal communicators.

Starting off the first week, my main goal is to finalize the idea that I want to pursue in two contexts: (1) framing it into the course and its requirements (specifically geared towards the short nature of the course); and (2) figuring out ways to use the progress from the course to set up the project in a bigger scale.

This journal is written through the process of writing the proposal as each component of the proposal needs significant thought and intention. Thus, I will follow its structure while writing this journal.

Project context (on a meta level)

This project is an idea that I have had and pitched during the Digital innovation competition that happened in school the past semester. This means that I have an established idea and have carefully considered its demand and feasibility. A short summary of what I have done is the following:

• Discovered a need for this software as there are a lot of sign language users but not a lot of people outside that community to understand them.
• Above leads to a lack of opportunity both professionally and in education.
• From a business standpoint, it is not only the people that are hearing, or speech impaired the sole users of this possible product, but also others such as family members, educators, companies.
• I have explored the possible software that can achieve this and found useful tutorials to follow and start training a model
• I have planned a possible workflow for the software to work based on input above (flowchart shown below)

Along with these previous progresses, I would still have to find ways to make it efficient and basically make it ready in a way that people can actually use it to communicate.

Revisiting Tools

There are several tools needed to make this happen but mainly I want to do something with open-source software because of the following reasons:

• Most related projects that are not proprietary use these same systems
• Free and downloadable by anyone