SEMAPRO 2019 2nd Best Paper Award

We are glad to announce that our paper entitled "Static and Dynamic Haptograms to Communicate Semantic Content Towards Enabling Face-to-Face Communication for People with Deafblindness", by S. Darányi, N. Olson, M. Riga, E. Kontopoulos and I. Kompatsiaris, has been awarded with the 2nd prize for best paper award of those presented at the SEMAPRO 2019 conference, which was held in Porto during September 22-26, 2019.

The paper was presented in the SyMpATHY special track and describes the use of static and dynamic haptograms for the communication between deafblind and non-deafblind users. Haptograms can be conceived as tactical and conceptual representations of entities that use evolving dot patterns for displaying information to the body, inspired by the social-haptic communication. The methodology aggregates the use of ontologies for the semantic representation of haptograms and of semantic reasoning techniques for the inference of new knowledge that may be communicated to the deafblind users for supporting and improving their situational awareness.

The work has been carried out within the context of the SUITCEYES project that aims to create improved and interactive communication possibilities for people with deafblindness, through intelligent haptic technologies.