Giuliano Pirelli
EC official and scientist at JRC-IPSC, he is the scientific and technical
co-ordinator of the VOICE Project, well experienced in both the technical
field and the problems of deafness, as indicated in the following lines.
Graduated in Electronic Engineering in Turin and in Science of Information
and Documentation in Brussels, he worked at FIAT in Turin in the field
of simulations of automatic soldering robots and transfer machines,
at the EU in Brussels in the field of legal information documentation
and retrieval and at JRC-Ispra in the field of education and training.
About 15 years ago, both for professional interest in the matter and
personal experience, as father of a deaf child, he had the opportunity
to dedicate a limited amount of time to collect the available information
in this field in the EC Services in Brussels as well as in international
Organisations or local Associations.
Later on, after being transferred to JRC-Ispra, he suggested new ways
of improving the use of technical aids for people with disabilities.
Since as 1996, he is in charge of the JRC-ISIS Exploratory Research
Project Voice to text conversion for the deaf and (from 1998)
of the VOICE Project Accompanying Measure supported by EC Directorate
General Information Society.
As Scientific Co-ordinator of this project, he organised a series of
conferences in order to develop an awareness rising process on
the potentialities of voice-to-text recognition systems. Approximately
5000 participants attended to the workshops, in which a prototype of
automatic subtitling, developed for this aim, was presented and used
to on-line subtitle the speeches, as a demonstration of feisability
and a way of validation on the field.
In 2001-2002 he has been in charge of the IPSC's Exploratory Research
Project Development and harmonistation of subtitling in European
television broadcasting, collaborating with CENELEC standardisation
commettee and the European Broadcasting Union.
At present, he is performing several activities for the European
Year of People with Disability 2003, in collaboration with the EC
InterService Group on Disability (ISGD), chaired by EC Directorate General
Employment and Social Affairs, as well as with other EC Directorates
General and international organisations.
(the Curriculum Vitae may be found following the link CONTACTS at the bottom of the present page)
The VOICE Projects achievements:
A similar, but more detailed, report:
The VOICE Project and the European Year 2003:
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Several participants (and particularly the interpreters) asked me for some document presenting a general overview of this area. I would suggest to read the above mentioned detailed DOC file and the following two HTML files:
Editorial Broadcasting for All, by Philip Laven, on the EBU
Technical Review
A journalistic overview i teleaspettatori on television subtitling in Europe, by Massimiliano Rubbi