I'm Inês Lacerda, a passionate Master's degree graduate from Portugal.

• I’m currently working as an UX & Cloud Developer at SAP.

• Delivered my thesis on "Generating Realistic Sign Language Animations", obtaining a 19 out of 20 grade. My approach consists of the simultaneous animation of linguistic movements that account for the morphosyntactic motions needed in Sign Languages, and also secondary facial and corporal movements that account for the naturalness of the avatar. This approach provides a pipeline that can be used for multiple digital applications, for instance: an automatic text-to-sign language translator, a dictionary, a book translator, a virtual assistant, and a browser add-on.

• To demonstrate the generated animations, I implemented the first automatic Portuguese text to Sign Language Translator based on linguistic information extracted from a corpus. The animations were evaluate by 41 participants in three separate user studies. The overall good performance and positive feedback indicate that the generated animations by the translator show great potential in the field of synthetic animation of signing avatars. In this dissertation, I also introduced components that can be applied not only for Portuguese Sign Language but also for other Sign Languages.

• ⚡ Fun fact: I'm a triplet, I play music and I'm learning Sign Language.