6 August 2008

International audience for Dundee computing student's project

A computing student at the University of Dundee has just returned from Austria after sharing his groundbreaking project work with an international audience of experts.

PhD student Martin Dempster (26), from Dundee, has been working on a project to develop a completely new way for severely physically disabled non-speaking people to communicate, by using the computer's ability to store information and transform it automatically into a variety of useful conversational utterances.

He was invited to present details of his project at the International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs, held in Linz, Austria.

'This has been great for me making new contacts from across the world and I’m hoping it will help towards a successful career in assistive technology research,' said Martin.

Martin's project supervisor Dr Norman Alm said, 'This was a wonderful opportunity for Martin to meet other young researchers but also more established figures in the field, and to share with them the innovative work he has been doing. It's a real feather in his cap that even though he has completed only the first year of his PhD, this conference judged his work to be of such a standard that they wanted to bring him over to Austria to present it on an international stage.'

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Roddy Isles
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University of Dundee
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E-MAIL: r.isles@dundee.ac.uk