The goal of the project was to create an extension to Internet Explorer forStatens Tjänstepensionsverk (SPV) which would give the staff the experience ofSingle sign-on (SSO) to external web service providers as well as manage andupdate their passwords in a secure manner. The survey focused on the providersPalasso, ProCompetence and Wera. The extension was created as a BrowserHelper Object (BHO) with C# in .NET. The solution was implemented as aCOM object in a DLL-file that was running in-process with the browser. Theprogram used a locally stored XML file containing URLs, usernames andencrypted passwords to the providers. When a user came to a login page theprogram collected the HTML elements on the page and populated them withdata from the file and logged in the user. Encryption and decryption was solvedwith a symmetric key that was stored in the program. In the XML file was alsothe date for the latest update of the password. If one month had passed, theprogram either gave the user an indication that the password needed to beupdated, or updated it automatically with a new generated password, dependingon the provider. The conclusion was that the extension worked as planned butthat there were improvements to be made regarding the possibility to add newsites to the system. The project also included an analysis of alternative optionsto solve the problem using JavaScript, Add-in Express, or via a portal page. Theconclusion was that none of these were an equally powerful tool as a BHO.

Identifying word classes is an important part of describing a language. Research about sign languages often lack distinctions crucial for identifying word classes, e.g. the difference between sign and gesture. Additionally, sign languages typically lack written form, something that often constrains quantitative research on sign language to the use of glosses translated to the spoken language in the area. In this thesis, such glosses have been extracted from The Swedish Sign Language Corpus. The glosses were mapped to utterances based on Swedish translations in the corpus, and these utterances served as input data to a word space model, producing a co-occurence matrix. This matrix was clustered with the K-means algorithm. The extracted utterances were also clustered with the Brown algorithm. By using V-measure, the clusters were compared to a gold standard annotated manually with word classes. The Brown algorithm performs significantly better in inducing word classes than a random baseline. This work shows that utilizing unsupervised learning is a feasible approach for doing research on word classes in Swedish Sign Language. However, future studies of this kind should employ a deeper linguistic analysis of the language as a part of choosing the algorithms.

Par le passé, les Sourds des îles de l’actuelle Polynésie française semblent s’être « culturellement » fondus dans leurs terres et groupes d’appartenance, franchissant les siècles sans laisser de traces, ni dans les mythes et légendes, ni dans les sources ethnologiques. Aujourd’hui, invisibles et silencieux, ils tentent de sortir de l’anonymat et de se construire sur d’autres bases que celle de la déficience auditive. Au moyen d’une longue étude de terrain, cette thèse en anthropologie construite sur les concepts de vulnérabilité, de handicap et d’inclusion, interroge les revendications collectives et individuelles d’une identité culturelle sourde dans ces îles. Dans une Polynésie française contemporaine elle-même en quête de redéfinition culturelle, sur quelles représentations les espaces sociaux tissent-ils les relations avec ces personnes « différentes » ? Comment les Sourds se définissent-ils ? Quelle est ou pourrait-être leur langue des signes? / Across the past centuries, the Deaf people of what constitutes now French Polynesia seem to have blended into the "cultural background" of their lands and their community without leaving trace, neither in myths and legends, nor in the ethnological literature. Today, invisible and silent, they are nevertheless trying to emerge from anonymity while socially constructing themselves on bases other than sole hearing deficiency. By the means of an extensive field study, this anthropology thesis built around the concepts of vulnerability, disability and inclusion, explores the claim, whether collective or individual, of a deaf cultural identity in those islands. In contemporary French Polynesia, a place in search of cultural redefining, what are the representations upon which social spaces weave the relations with these "different" people? How do Deaf people define themselves? What is or what could be their sign language?

Federated Identity Management (FIM) and Single-Sign-On (SSO) concepts improve both productivity andsecurity for organizations by assigning the responsibility of user data management and authentication toone single central entity called identity provider, and consequently, the users have to maintain only oneset of credential to access resources at multiple service provider. The implementation of any FIM and SSOprotocol is complex due to the involvement of multiple organizations, sensitive user data, and myriadsecurity issues. There are many instances of faulty implementations that compromised on security forease of implementation due to lack of proper guidance. OpenID Connect (OIDC) is the latest protocolwhich is an open standard, lightweight and platform independent to implement Federated IdentityManagement; it offers several advantages over the legacy protocols and is expected to have widespreaduse. An implementation framework that addresses all the important aspects of the FIM lifecycle isrequired to ensure the proper application of the OIDC protocol at the enterprise level. In this researchwork, an implementation framework was designed for OIDC protocol by incorporating all the importantrequirements from a managerial, technical and security perspective of an enterprise level federatedidentity management. The research work closely follows the design science research process, and theframework was evaluated for its completeness, efficiency, and usability.

Masters of Science / The SASL project at the University of the Western Cape aims at developing a fully automated translation system between English and South African Sign Language (SASL). Three important aspects of this system require SASL documentation and knowledge. These are: recognition of SASL from a video sequence, linguistic translation between SASL and English and the rendering of SASL. Unfortunately, SASL documentation is a scarce resource and no official or complete documentation exists. This research focuses on creating an online collaborative video annotation knowledge management system for SASL where various members of the community can upload SASL videos to and annotate them in any of the sign language notation systems, SignWriting, HamNoSys and/or Stokoe. As such, knowledge about SASL structure is pooled into a central and freely accessible knowledge base that can be used as required. The usability and performance of the system were evaluated. The usability of the system was graded by users on a rating scale from one to five for a specific set of tasks. The system was found to have an overall usability of 3.1, slightly better than average. The performance evaluation included load and stress tests which measured the system response time for a number of users for a specific set of tasks. It was found that the system is stable and can scale up to cater for an increasing user base by improving the underlying hardware. / South Africa

Masters of Science / Recognising and estimating gestures is a fundamental aspect towards translating from a sign language to a spoken language. It is a challenging problem and at the same time, a growing phenomenon in Computer Vision. This thesis presents two approaches, an example-based and a learning-based approach, for performing integrated detection, segmentation and 3D estimation of the human upper body from a single camera view. It investigates whether an upper body pose can be estimated from a database of exemplars with labelled poses. It also investigates whether an upper body pose can be estimated using skin feature extraction, Support Vector Machines (SVM) and a 3D human body model. The example-based and learning-based approaches obtained success rates of 64% and 88%, respectively. An analysis of the two approaches have shown that, although the learning-based system generally performs better than the example-based system, both approaches are suitable to recognise and estimate upper body poses in a South African sign language recognition and translation system. / South Africa

Magister Artium - MA / This study investigates the use of language and signage in and around Parliament of Botswana by drawing from Linguistic Landscapes (LL) found in the area. The main aim of this study is to explore the symbolic and functional values of signs and languages found in and around Parliament of Botswana. Its main objective is to analyse the visual language in display in and around Parliament looking at the visibility and clarity of language and information/ messages on the signage and to interpret the distribution and frequency of each one of the languages in signage. Secondly, considering that embassies, international companies, organizations and one of the oldest and busiest malls are within the vicinity of Parliament, the study explored whether their presence is captured in the LL.Following Gorter (2006), Shohamy and Gorter (2009) and Shohamy, Ben Rafael and Barni(2010), the data used was drawn from the different types of signs in and around parliament and its neighborhood and included signs with municipal and infrastructural discourses as well as commercial discourses. Using descriptive qualitative research and a thematic approach for data analysis, the study captures the distribution, function, composition and size, clarity of intended information or messages of language on multilingual and monophonic signs.The study gives an insight on the dominance of English against other Botswana languages in LL.In terms of language vitality, the linguistic landscape gives the incorrect picture as if English and Setswana are the only languages spoken in Botswana. Interestingly, Chinese is occasionally found in the linguistic landscape. The presence of Chinese in the shops near Parliament, I argue, is a ploy to attract people to ostensibly “cheap” products. The linguistic landscape shows the apparent contradiction in which even monuments of heroes and pictures of past “Dikgosi”(Chiefs) are constructed in English. The study further reveals even where Setswana is used it is always on bilingual signs and the quality of translation is sometimes poor. The study also suggests that most of the signage was constructed in English and then translated to Setswana. It is not surprising then that the information on the Setswana LL is not always as complete as one on English. In some cases, it says something quite unrelated to the intended message. The different signs and discourses analysed clearly show that people are aware of the signs that surround them and the marketing strategies employed. The signage revealed multiplicity and fusion of discourses with types ranging from low budget to the modern visual signs by individuals to established companies. Both the consumers and the authors are aware of the link between the LL and economics. For this reason, signage is placed where it is expected to achieve maximum visibility and for maximum consumer impact. It is not uncommon to find someone placing their LL on someone else’s, and “ambush” marketing is common place. The diversity of signs used in the study have illustrated and given an insight into the contrasting marketing strategies adopted not only by Batswana, but also by foreign investors, all vying for a piece of space in the Botswana landscape.

>Magister Scientiae - MSc / The South African Sign Language research group at the University of the Western Cape is in the process of creating a fully-edged machine translation system to automatically translate between South African Sign Language and English. A major component of the system is the ability to accurately recognise facial expressions, which are used to convey emphasis, tone and mood within South African Sign Language sentences. Traditionally, facial expression recognition research has taken one of two paths: either recognising whole facial expressions of which there are six i.e. anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, as well as the neutral expression; or recognising the fundamental components of facial expressions as defined by the Facial Action Coding System in the form of Action Units. Action Units are directly related to the motion of specific muscles in the face, combinations of which are used to form any facial expression. This research investigates enhanced recognition of whole facial expressions by means of a hybrid approach that combines traditional whole facial expression recognition with Action Unit recognition to achieve an enhanced classification approach.

This thesis sets out to undertake research into the very important topic of sign language and its usage, particularly in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. Three schools are used in this study. Interviews and questionnaires were used to conduct research with teachers, students and deaf teacher assistants within this context. The analysis of this data is presented in Chapter five of this thesis.

The growth of the Internet has opened up tremendous opportunities for cooperative computations where the results depend on the private data inputs of distributed participating parties. In most cases, such computations are performed by multiple mutually untrusting parties. This has led the research community into studying methods for performing computation across the Internet securely and efficiently. This thesis investigates security methods in the search for an optimum solution to privacy- preserving distributed statistical computation problems. For this purpose, the nonparametric sign test algorithm is chosen as a case for study to demonstrate our research methodology. Two privacy-preserving protocol suites using data perturbation techniques and cryptographic primitives are designed. The first protocol suite, i.e. the P22NSTP, is based on five novel data perturbation building blocks, i.e. the random probability density function generation protocol (RpdfGP), the data obscuring protocol (DOP), the secure two-party comparison protocol (STCP), the data extraction protocol (DEP) and the permutation reverse protocol (PRP). This protocol suite enables two parties to efficiently and securely perform the sign test computation without the use of a third party. The second protocol suite, i.e. the P22NSTC, uses an additively homomorphic encryption scheme and two novel building blocks, i.e. the data separation protocol (DSP) and data randomization protocol (DRP). With some assistance from an on-line STTP, this protocol suite provides an alternative solution for two parties to achieve a secure privacy-preserving nonparametric sign test computation. These two protocol suites have been implemented using MATLAB software. Their implementations are evaluated and compared against the sign test computation algorithm on an ideal trusted third party model (TTP-NST) in terms of security, computation and communication overheads and protocol execution times. By managing the level of noise data item addition, the P22NSTP can achieve specific levels of privacy protection to fit particular computation scenarios. Alternatively, the P22NSTC provides a more secure solution than the P22NSTP by employing an on-line STTP. The level of privacy protection relies on the use of an additively homomorphic encryption scheme, DSP and DRP. A four-phase privacy-preserving transformation methodology has also been demonstrated; it includes data privacy definition, statistical algorithm decomposition, solution design and solution implementation.