ZESS Visiting Researcher Prof Abdelhadi Soudi Recieves Georg Forster Award

Visiting researcher at University of Siegen’s Center for Sensor Systems (ZESS), Professor Abdelhadi Soudi from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Rabat, Morocco, received this year’s Georg Forster Research Prize at the annual meeting of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH) at Humboldt Carré in Berlin on the 27th of June, 2024. The participants of the AvH meeting received a warm reception by the German President, Dr Frank-Walter Steinmeier at Bellevue Palace, Berlin on the 28th of June.

Within the framework of the Georg Forster Award Professor Abdelhadi Soudi and a junior researcher from Morocco have been working closely with Professor Kristof Van Laerhoven’s group at the University of Siegen’s Center for Sensor Systems (ZESS).

On occasion of the award, Prof Van Laerhoven stated that “the award acknowledges a great example for a successful long term scientific collaboration that would not have been possible without the excellent conditions ZESS offered institutionally”. The research team was previously awarded the German-African Innovation Incentive Award in 2020 for the project A Crowdsourcing Platform for Early Grade and STEM Vocabulary in African Sign Languages by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

The main focus of their research is in two areas. One explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs, e.g. ChatGPT) in three large Natural Language Processing applications: Machine Translation, Sentiment Analysis, and Automatic Text Simplification. The second area focusses on the development of an assistive technology that facilitates interaction between hearing people and the deaf, hard-of-hearing and deaf-blind people. Prof. Van Laerhoven and Professor Soudi's research has both a social and scientific impact. They have entered unchartered waters in developing a trove of educational assistive technology for a marginalized segment of society who have long struggled to be fully educationally, socially, and career-wise included in the mainstream of our society. The aim is to develop an integrated hardware/software system, entitled Accessible Translation Language Assistance Solution Technology (ATLAST), that enables hearing users to speak or text in their native language to a computer and have a sign language user receive sign language on another computer screen.

Prof. Dr. Abdelhadi Soudi is a full Professor at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Rabat, Morocco. He has made outstanding contributions to the field of Natural Language Processing and Assistive Technology for the benefit of both the Deaf and Hearing persons. Dr. Soudi has been awarded several international research awards, such as two PEER Science Awards (2012, 2014)-Partnership for Enhanced Engagement in Research- from the USA National Academies of Sciences and the Literacy Innovation Award from USAID, World Vision and Australian Aid. Dr. Soudi was a Fulbright Scholar at Carnegie Mellon University (USA) and Alexander von Humboldt Senior research fellow at several German universities. He was Founding President of the Maghreb-Alexander von Humboldt Alumni Association, founding member of the Fulbright Alumni Association, and has been Advisory Board member of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

The Georg Forster Award is granted annually to internationally renowned academics from developing and transition countries in recognition of their academic record. The research award was named for renowned German ethnologist Georg Forster (1754–1794) and is funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Further Reading:

• BMBF German-African Innovation Incentive Prize
• Abdelhadi Soudi, Mohamed Hannani, Kristof Van Laerhoven, and Eleftherios Avramidis. 2024. Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models in Adaptive Machine Translation for Generic Text and Subtitles. In Proceedings of the 17th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora (BUCC) @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 51–58, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
  • https://aclanthology.org/2024.bucc-1.6/
• Abdelhadi Soudi, Manal El Hakkaoui, Kristof Van Laerhoven. 2023. Do Predictability Factors towards Signing Avatars Hold Across Cultures? In Proceedings of the ICASSP 2023 8th Workshop on Sign Language Translation and Avatar Technology, Rhodes Island, Greece, June 10, 2023.
  • https://2023.ieeeicassp.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/443ICASSPW23_SatWkspsProg_Sat_June_10.pdf 
  • https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.02103
• Abdelhadi Soudi, Kristof Van Laerhoven, and Elmostafa Bou-Souf. 2019. AfricaSign -- A Crowd-sourcing Platform for the Documentation of STEM Vocabulary in African Sign Languages. In Proceedings of ASSETS '19: Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility October 2019, Pages 658 - 660. 
  • https://doi.org/10.1145/3308561.3354592