Vacation students tell of Meraka experience
13 July 2005

A group of students, totalling 20, participated in the first vacation student programme organised by the Meraka Institute during the recent university recess. The programme is aimed at providing university students with exposure to potential research careers in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). As part of the programme a mini-exhibition was held on July 8 2005 to showcase the progress and achievements of the students in the various projects in which they were involved. These ICT students, hailing from various tertiary institutions around South Africa, were specifically selected to contribute to a number of research and development projects within the institute.

The participants ranged from first year through to Honours students. It is envisaged that this pilot programme will be the first of many exchanges between the Meraka Institute and tertiary institutes, in which a culture of learning and promotion of excellence in ICT can be fostered.

The students worked with Meraka ICT experts on the Digital Doorway, the National Accessibility Portal, and the Human Language Technologies projects. Mashudu Nembaleni, a third-year BSc Computer Science student at the University of Venda worked with the Institute’s Grant Cambridge to create an external indicator device for the Digital Doorway. This 220 Volts neon device has different indicators for all the Digital Doorway functions and promotes easier maintenance by showing which of the machine’s many functions may be malfunctioning at a given time. This obviates the need to open the machine and labouriously search for faults.

Final-year BSc Computer Science student from the University of Zululand, Gugu Khalala, worked with Meraka Institute’s National Accessibility Portal (NAP) researcher Andrew Smith on a project titled Human Computer Interactions. The project uses an educational computer game format to enhance the physical abilities of children between the ages of four and nine. “By using body gestures, instead of the keyboard to play the game, children learn how different parts of their body can be used for different functions,” Gugu explains.

Also active with Andrew Smith on a NAP-related project is Zondy Mothoa, who has completed his BSc Computer Science studies at the University of Venda. His project of developing the Palm Braille Reader is targeted at people who are visually impaired and unable to read the traditional braille. “The Palm Braille Reader is attached to a computer’s parallel port and uses a screen reader to translate text into braille format. The device’s six pins then send the braille information to the blind person’s palm,” Mothoa said.

Jan Vermeulen and Lubabalo Qoto who are both BSc Computer Engineering students at the University of Pretoria and the University of Cape Town respectively, worked on Human Language Technology (HLT)-related projects. Vermeulen was supervised by Prof Etienne Barnard, while Qoto was guided by Natasha Govender. Vermeulen’s project entitled: Workbench for Phrase-based Statistical Machine Translation aimed to extend work that has been done in word-for-word translation into more effective phrase-based translations.

Qoto’s project dealt with the text-to-speech translation for Xhosa-speaking people. “The system will be unique in that it will not only focus on direct text-to-speech translations, but will also focus on the tone. This will help avoid misunderstandings and misinterpretations during translations,” he said. Both projects will make computers more accessible to non-English speaking users.

For more information on the Meraka Institute vacation student programme, e-mail: Hudson Mahlare of Human Resources at, HMahlare@csir.co.za

Lubabalo Qoto (centre) explains his Xhosa text-to-speech translation project	Phrase-based translations is the focus of Jan Vermeulen's work (Vermeulen stands to the far left in the picture)
Learning through play: Gugu Khalala demonstrates her Human Computer Interactions project	These students broadened their ICT horizons during the recent Meraka Institute vacation student programme