#Ukrainian Institute of Scientific and Technological Research and Development

[science70]

Ukrainian Institute of Scientific and Technological Research and Development, Kiev, Ukraine, 1971.

Architects: Lev Novikov, Florian Turiev

Photography: Johansen Krause

[jen567]

Theme 1: Inner Space  

Artistic references

Frederik Heyman

Frederik Heyman is a fashion photography multimedia science artist born in 1984 in Belgium and graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 2007 with an MA in Photography and an MA in Graphic and Illustration Design. He has created 3D works for brands like Burberry, Y/project Kenzo, Gentle Monster and many others. His works present an imagination of the real world and the sci-fi future world, rearranging the real world with observations of desires and fantasies to create his own virtual worlds. He copies elements from the present world and pastes them into this alternate reality. This reality depicts detailed descriptions created out of a desire to overcome human nature.

Eero Lundén and Juulia Kauste

Another Generosity

Born in 1986, Alexey graduated from the National Technical University in Poltava, Ukraine with a Master's degree in Visual and Decorative and Applied Arts. He has created a series of CG works for the fantasy field, produced a large number of 3D models and collaborated with clients all over the world, and in 2012 he started his research and work in the field of scientific visualisation.

He has won several major awards in the field of 3D graphics, including two CGSociety 3D Awards and the ZBrush Image of the Year Award, and has been published in more than 30 international print magazines and books. in 2017 he founded Newt Studios, a medical animation company, with his business partner Mike Moran. He is also the founder of the Ukrainian company ARQUTE Ltd. He is also a strong believer in a healthy lifestyle and believes that a healthy lifestyle leads to a more fulfilling life.

Drew Berry

Drew Berry is a medical animator, artist and cell biologist who can make the violent cellular and molecular movements and abstract and complex science that occurs in the human body understandable in beautifully visualised images. He has worked as a biomedical animator at the Walter Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Australia from 1995 to the present. His animations have been exhibited in numerous museums.

Stine Deja

Stine Deja is a visual artist born in 1986 in Denmark and living in Copenhagen. Her work is about the impact of technological development on the human psyche, living conditions and behavioural patterns. It is a dystopian and critical perspective on the future of human culture, combining extensive conceptual research with transcendental aesthetics and a sense of irony. Deja's creations use different mediums such as monolithic installations, kinetic sculptures, sound installations, videos, 3D animations, and texts, and focus on the integration of human biology and digital technology, biology and digital technology. She focuses on the relationship between human emotional complexes, motivations and obligations, and the mechanisms that humans employ to help them fulfil their desires. Her work is in the collections of numerous museums and foundations.

[cyberbenb]

The week ahead: Key developments impacting global politics & markets

Editor’s note: This article is an on-site version of KI Insights' The Week Ahead newsletter covering events from Feb. 10-Feb. 16. Sign up here to start your week with an agenda of Ukraine-related events, delivered directly to your inbox every Sunday.

This week’s key event is the 61st Munich Security Conference (MSC), taking place on Feb. 14-16. European defense, Europe-US relations, and Ukraine support/ ceasefire talks will take center stage (all major themes at a somewhat nervous Feb. 3 “informal retreat” of EU 27 + UK + NATO leaders; Ukraine was not invited).

Special US Envoy for Ukraine and Russia Keith Kellogg is expected to visit Kyiv, either before heading to Munich or “later in February” (note: while it would make sense for Kellogg to visit Kyiv before Munich, heartening Ukrainians and signaling a peace deal will not be made “over their heads”, we see some uncertainty)

Kellogg stated that US President Donald Trump’s team is developing a reliable plan to end the war within 100 days. Kellogg is expected to attend MSC (but not to present the plan, which is Trump’s prerogative), together with Vice-President JD Vance (he will travel there from the AI Action Summit on Feb. 10-11 in Paris) and possibly the US president himself.

(note: This year’s MSC comes just a week before snap elections in Germany, which could influence ongoing German support for Ukraine.)

Earlier, the European Parliament will hold a plenary session in Strasbourg on Feb. 11 on maintaining the EU’s unwavering support for Ukraine, which is awaiting a vote. The session will review ongoing and future commitments across military, economic, and humanitarian assistance and Ukraine’s EU accession process

Key topics expected are additional weapons deliveries, long-term security assistance, joint procurement of ammunition and air defense systems, and legal and political challenges to using Russian assets held within the EU to finance Ukraine’s reconstruction.

MEPs will also discuss renewing the Agreement on Cooperation in Science and Technology between the EU and Ukraine. The agreement facilitates joint research projects, knowledge exchange and funding opportunities between Ukrainian and EU institutions. Renewal would ensure continued access to collaborative scientific initiatives.

The “Ramstein summit” of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group (UDCG) is expected to take place on Feb. 12 in London under the chairmanship of the UK (rather than the US, likely a signal of US disengagement from Europe). UDCG includes over 50 countries (incl. all 32 NATO members). It previously met at the US Ramstein Air Base in Germany

If you have an upcoming event that you would like featured in our newsletter, please get in touch via insights@kyivindependent.com.

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Other Events and Milestones:

Feb. 12 - Rebuilding Ukraine: Key Investment and Financing Insights (From 11:00 EET). A webinar providing an overview of investment and financing opportunities for Ukraine’s reconstruction. Register here.

Feb. 13 - Dutch Agrifood Platform Ukraine Meeting, (10:30 - 13:30 EET). A networking event in the Hague for the Dutch agrifood industry to connect, learn, and explore opportunities in Ukraine. Register here.

Feb. 13 - Reconstruction Opportunities for Dutch Entrepreneurs (13:00 - 14:00 EET). This session in the Hague will cover how International Financial Institution’s support impacts Ukraine’s reconstruction and opportunities for Dutch companies. Register here.

Feb. 13-14 - Mind Export Summit 2025 (From 09:50 EET): Held in Kyiv and organized by Mind Business Publication, this event will bring together business representatives with practical experience in international markets and those looking to scale beyond Ukraine. Buy tickets here.

Feb. 13-14 - 22nd International Conference Black Sea Grain Europe (From 10:00 EET). Held in Prague, Czech Republic, and organized by the IFC in cooperation with the Ukrainian Agribusiness Club Association. Register here.

Feb. 15 - the Day of the Military Journalist in Ukraine. A day of remembrance for all military journalists, correspondents, press officers, and public relations specialists who died in the line of duty.

Feb. 15 - Solidarity with Ukraine’s Fight Against Russian Occupation (13:00-17:00 EET). A trade unionist conference in London, organized by the NEU Ukraine Network in support of Ukraine’s resistance to Russian imperialism.

Opinion: Berlin’s coalition drama puts Ukraine — and Europe — at risk

Donald Trump’s re-election has sent political shockwaves across the Atlantic, pushing Germany — Ukraine’s second-largest donor — into a decisive moment. The election has intensified internal divides and sparked a reckoning over Germany’s role in European security. For years, German leaders deferred…

The Kyiv IndependentFelix Blatt

[nelc]

Ukrainian Institute of Scientific and Technological Research and Development in Kiev.

[michal-przychodzen]

118 | B Kyiv | Київ Lubitel 166b

[luliputu-blog]

The Ukraine Business E-visa Stories

https://ja.ivisa.com/ukraine-business-e-visa

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The internet education tool will also function as a platform for schools and students to communicate across different areas of Ukraine, facilitating additional integration.  Technologies already permit the development and implementation of the aforementioned, and E-Ukraine is already on the best way to its objective.  For each and every category of Ukraine visa application, there are a few crucial requirements and important documents that have to be offered.

1 page that differed from the remainder of the network was Ukrainerealiyi.  Your matchmaking service shall become back to you with all details and you can begin the next step.  The e-Visa for Ukraine is readily available for tourism and business purposes and can be readily obtained by filling out an internet application form that takes a couple of minutes to finish.

[fsuperp]

'Mourning for Kyiv' - 15-min noise / drone / tribal live interrupted due to the technical failure at the venue. Kyiv, 10/22/17, Ukrainian Institute of Scientific and Technological Research and Development. ‘Жалоба по Києву’ - 15-хвилинний лайв нойзу / дрона / трайбла, перерваний з причин технічної несправності під час заходу. Київ, 22 жовтня 2017 р., УкрІНТЕІ ("Тарілка").

[dorcasrempel]

Chernobyl: How bad was it?

Not long after midnight on April 26, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear power accident began. Workers were conducting a test at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine when their operations spun out of control. Unthinkably, the core of the plant’s reactor No. 4 exploded, first blowing off its giant concrete lid, then letting a massive stream of radiation into the air.

Notoriously, the Soviet Union kept news of the disaster quiet for a couple of days. By the time the outside world knew about it, 148 men who had been on the Chernobyl site — firefighters and other workers — were already being treated in the special radiation unit of a Moscow hospital. And that was just one sliver of the population that wound up seeking medical care after Chernobyl. 

By the end of the summer of 1986, Moscow hospitals alone had treated about 15,000 people exposed to Chernobyl radiation. The Soviet republics of Ukraine and Belarus combined to treat about 40,000 patients in hospitals due to radiation exposure in the same period of time; in Belarus, about half were children.

And while 120,000 residents were hastily evacuated from the “Zone of Alienation” around Chernobyl, about 600,000 emergency workers eventually went into the area, trying to seal the reactor and make the area safe again. About 31,000 soldiers camped out near the reactor, where radioactivity reached about 1,000 times the normal levels within a week, and contaminated the drinking water.

Which leads to the question: How bad was Chernobyl? A 2006 United Nations report contends Chernobyl caused 54 deaths. But MIT Professor Kate Brown, for one, is skeptical about that figure. As a historian of science who has written extensively about both the Soviet Union and nuclear technology, she decided to explore the issue at length.

The result is her new book, “Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future,” published this month by W.W. Norton and Co. In it, Brown brings new research to bear on the issue: She is the first historian to examine certain regional archives where the medical response to Chernobyl was most extensively chronicled, and has found reports and documents casting new light on the story.

Brown does not pinpoint a death-toll number herself. Instead, through her archival research and on-the-ground reporting, she examines the full range of ways radiation has affected residents throughout the region, while explaining how Soviet politics helped limit our knowledge of the incident.

“I wrote this book so it’s something we take a look at more seriously,” says Brown, a professor in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society.

Lying to themselves

To see how the effects of Chernobyl could be much more widespread than previously acknowledged, consider a pattern Brown observed from her archival work: Scientists and officials at the local and regional levels examined the effects of Chernobyl on people quite extensively, even performing controlled studies and other robust techniques, but other Soviet officials minimized the evidence of major health consequences.

“Part of the problem is the Soviets lied to themselves,” says Brown. “On the ground it [the impact] was very clear, but at higher levels, there were ministers whose job was to report good health.” Soviet officials, Brown adds, would “massage the numbers” as the data ascended in the state bureaucracy.

“Everybody was making the record look better by the time it go to Moscow,” Brown says. “And I can show that.”

Then too, the effects of Chernobyl’s radiation have been diffuse. As Brown discovered, 298 workers at a wool factory in the city of Chernihiv, about 50 miles from Chernobyl, were given “liquidator status” due to their health problems. This is the same designation applied to emergency personnel working at the Chernobyl site itself.

Why were the wool workers so exposed to radiation? As Brown found after investigating the Chernihiv wool factory itself, Soviet authorities had workers kill livestock from the Zone of Alienation — and then send their useable parts for processing. The wool factory workers had become sick because they were dealing with wool from highly contaminated sheep. Such scenarios may have been significantly overlooked in some Chernobyl assessments.

A significant section of “Manual for Survival” — the title comes from some safety instructions written for local residents — also explores the accident’s effects on the region’s agricultural economy. In Belarus, one-third of milk and one-fifth of meat was too contaminated to use in 1987, according to the official in charge of food production in the state, and levels became worse the following year. At the same time, in the Ukraine, between 30 and 90 percent of milk in “clean” areas was judged too contaminated to drink.

As part of her efforts to study Chernobyl’s effects in person, Brown also ventured into the forests and marshes near Chernobyl, accompanying American and Finnish scientists  — who are among the few to have extensively studied the area’s wildlife in the field. They have found, among other things, the decimation of parts of the ecosystem, including dramatically fewer pollinators (such as bees) in higher-radiation places, and thus radically reduced numbers of fruit trees and shrubs. Brown also directly addresses scientific disagreements over such findings, while noting that some of the most negative conclusions about the regional ecosystems have stemmed from extensive on-the-ground investigations of it.

Additionally, disputes over the effects of Chernobyl also rumble on because, as Brown acknowledges, it is “easy to deny” that any one occurence of cancer is due to radiation exposure. As Brown notes in the book, “a correlation does not prove a connection,” despite increased rates of cancer and other illnesses in the region.

Still, in “Manual for Survival,” Brown does suggest that the higher end of existing death estimates seems plausible. The Ukrainian state pays benefits to about 35,000 people whose spouses apparently died from Chernobyl-caused illnesses. Some scientists have told her they think 150,000 deaths is a more likely baseline for the Ukraine alone. (There are no official or unofficial counts for Belarus and western Russia.)

Chernobyl: This past isn’t even past

Due to the long-term nature of some forms of radiation, Chernobyl’s effects continue today — to an extent that is also under-studied. In the book’s epilogue, Brown visits a forest in the Ukraine where people pick blueberries for export, with each batch being tested for radiation. However, Brown observed, bundles of blueberries over the accepted radiation limit are not necessarily discarded. Instead, berries from those lots are mixed in with cleaner blueberries, so each remixed batch as a whole falls under the regulatory limit. People outside the Ukraine, she writes, “may wake to a breakfast of Chernobyl blueberries” without knowing it.  

Brown emphasizes that her goal is not primarily to alarm readers, but to push research forward. She says she would like her audience — general readers, undergraduates, scientists — to think deeply about how apparently settled science may sometimes rely on contingent conclusions developed in particular political circumstances.

“I would like scientists to know a bit more about the history behind the science,” Brown says.

Other scholars say “Manual for Survival” is an important contribution to our understanding of Chernobyl. J.R. McNeill, a historian at Georgetown University, says Brown has shed new light on Chernobyl by illuminating “decades of official efforts to suppress its grim truths.” Alison MacFarlane, director of the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy at George Washington University, and Former director of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, says the book effectively “uncovers the devastating effects” of Chernobyl.

For her part, Brown says one additional aim in writing the book was to help us remind ourselves that our inventions and devices are fallible. We need to be vigilant to avoid future disasters along the lines of Chernobyl.

“I think it could be a guide to the future if we’re not a little bit more thoughtful, and a little more transparent” than the Soviet officials were, Brown says.

Chernobyl: How bad was it? syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

[nancygduarteus]

Why Sign-Language Gloves Don't Help Deaf People

Along with jet packs and hover boards, a machine to translate from any language to any other is so appealing as a fantasy that people are willing to overlook clunky prototypes as long as they can retain the belief that the future promised by science fiction has, at last, arrived. One particularly clunky subspecies of the universal language translator has a rather dismal history: the sign-language glove, which purports to translate sign language in real time to text or speech as the wearer gestures. For people in the Deaf community, and linguists, the sign-language glove is rooted in the preoccupations of the hearing world, not the needs of Deaf signers.

The basic idea dates to the 1980s, when researchers started exploring how humans could interact with computers using gestures. In 1983, a Bell Labs engineer named Gary Grimes invented a glove for data entry using the 26 manual gestures of the American Manual Alphabet, used by speakers of American Sign Language. But the first glove intended to make interactions between deaf and non-deaf people easier was announced in 1988 by the Stanford University researchers James Kramer and Larry Leifer. It was called the “talking glove,” and the entire system cost $3,500—not including the price of the CyberGlove itself.

The first sign-language glove to gain any notoriety came out in 2001. A high-school student from Colorado, Ryan Patterson, fitted a leather golf glove with 10 sensors that monitored finger position, then relayed finger spellings to a computer which rendered them as text on a screen. Patterson received considerable attention for his “translating glove,” including the grand prize in the 2001 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair and a $100,000 scholarship. In 2002, the public-affairs office of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders effused about Patterson, sneaking in the caveat only at the end: The glove doesn’t translate anything beyond individual letters, certainly not the full range of signs used in American Sign Language, and works only with the American Manual Alphabet.

Over the years, similar designs—with corresponding hoopla—have appeared all over the world, but none has ever delivered a product to market. A group of Ukrainians won first prize and $25,000 in the 2012 Microsoft Imagine Cup, a student technology competition, for their glove project. In 2014, Cornell students designed a glove that “helps people with hearing disabilities by identifying and translating the user’s signs into spoken English.” And in 2015, one glove project was announced by two researchers at Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute, and another by the Saudi designer and media artist Hadeel Ayoub, whose BrightSignGlove “translates sign language into speech in real time” using a data glove.

The most recent project is from July 2017, when a team at the University of California, San Diego, published a paper in PLOS One describing a gesture-recognizing glove. The project was headed by Darren Lipomi, a chemist who researches the mechanical properties of innovative materials, such as stretchable polymer-based solar cells and skin-like sensors. On July 12, the UCSD news office promoted Lipomi’s publication with a story proclaiming, “Low-cost smart glove translates American Sign Language alphabet and controls virtual objects.” The next day, the online outlet Medgadget lopped “alphabet” out of its headline, and reports of a glove that “translates sign language” again spread far and wide, getting picked up by New Scientist, The Times in the United Kingdom, and other outlets. Medgadget wasn’t entirely to blame—Lipomi had titled his paper “The Language of Glove” and written that the device “translated” the alphabet into text, not “converted,” which would have been more accurate.

Linguists caught wind of the project. Carol Padden, the dean of social sciences at UCSD and a prominent sign-language linguist who is also deaf, passed along a critique of the sign-language glove concept to Lipomi’s dean at the school of engineering. The critique she gave him had been written by two ASL instructors and one linguist and endorsed by 19 others. It was written in response not to Lipomi’s paper, but to a notorious sign-language-glove project from the year before. In 2016, two University of Washington undergraduates, Thomas Pryor and Navid Azodi, won the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for a pair of gloves that recognized rudimentary ASL signs. Their project, called SignAloud, was covered by NPR, Discover, Bustle, and other outlets, but was also answered by vociferous complaints in blog posts by the linguists Angus Grieve-Smith and Katrina Faust.

“Initially, I didn’t want to deal with [SignAloud, the UW project] because this has been a repeated phenomenon or fad,” says Lance Forshay, who directs the ASL program at UW. “I was surprised and felt somehow betrayed because they obviously didn’t check with the Deaf community or even check with ASL program teachers to make sure that they are representing our language appropriately.” But after SignAloud received national and international media attention, Forshay teamed up with others in his department to write a letter. He gathered input for the letter from the Deaf community and Deaf culture experts.

Their six-page letter, which Padden passed along to the dean, points out how the SignAloud gloves��and all the sign-language translation gloves invented so far—misconstrue the nature of ASL (and other sign languages) by focusing on what the hands do. Key parts of the grammar of ASL include “raised or lowered eyebrows, a shift in the orientation of the signer’s torso, or a movement of the mouth,” reads the letter. “Even perfectly functioning gloves would not have access to facial expressions.” ASL consists of thousands of signs presented in sophisticated ways that have, so far, confounded reliable machine recognition. One challenge for machines is the complexity of ASL and other sign languages. Signs don’t appear like clearly delineated beads on a string; they bleed into one another in a process that linguists call “coarticulation” (where, for instance, a hand shape in one sign anticipates the shape or location of the following sign; this happens in words in spoken languages, too, where sounds can take on characteristics of adjacent ones). Another problem is the lack of large data sets of people signing that can be used to train machine-learning algorithms.

And while signers do use the American Manual Alphabet, it plays a narrow role within ASL. Signers use it “to maintain a contrast of two types of vocabulary—the everyday, familiar, and intimate vocabulary of signs, and the distant, foreign, and scientific vocabulary of words of English origin,” wrote Carol Padden and Darline Clark Gunsauls, who heads Deaf studies at Ohlone College, in a paper on the subject.

And the writers of the UW letter argued that the development of a technology based on a sign language constituted cultural appropriation. College students were gaining accolades and scholarships for technologies based on an element of Deaf culture, while Deaf people themselves are legally and medically underserved.

Also, though the gloves are often presented as devices to improve accessibility for the Deaf, it’s the signers, not the hearing people, who must wear the gloves, carry the computers, or modify their rate of signing. “This is a manifestation of audist beliefs,” the UW letter states, “the idea that the Deaf person must expend the effort to accommodate to the standards of communication of the hearing person.”

That sentiment is widely echoed. “ASL gloves are mainly created/designed to serve hearing people,” said Rachel Kolb, a Rhodes Scholar and Ph.D. student at Emory University who has been deaf from birth. “The concept of the gloves is to render ASL intelligible to hearing people who don’t know how to sign, but this misses and utterly overlooks so many of the communication difficulties and frustrations that Deaf people can already face.”

Julie Hochgesang, an assistant professor of linguistics at Gallaudet, said she rolls her eyes when another glove is announced. “We can't get decent access to communication when we go to the doctor. Why bother with silly gloves when we still need to take care of the basic human-rights issues?”

So why do so many inventors keep turning to the sign-language glove concept?

One reason is pretty obvious: Despite the popularity of ASL classes in American colleges (enrollment in such courses grew by 19 percent between 2009 and 2013), non-signers often don’t know that much about sign language. They may not even realize that ASL (and other sign languages, such as British Sign Language, Chinese Sign Language, and dozens of others) are distinct languages with their own grammars and phonologies, not word-for-word reformulations of a spoken language. Additionally, says Forshay, “People have no knowledge of the culture of Deaf people and how signed language has been exploited and oppressed over history.” As a result, they’re not aware of why the issue would be so sensitive.

An equally potent but less immediately apparent reason is the way engineers approach problem-solving. In engineering school, students are taught to solve only the mathematical elements of problems, says the Virginia Tech engineering educator Gary Downey. In a 1997 article he noted that “all the nonmathematical features of a problem, such as its politics, its power implications for those who solve it, and so forth, are given,” meaning they’re bracketed off. Students are prepared to focus on sensor placement or algorithm design, but often not the broader social context that the device they’re designing will enter.

The specific application of Lipomi’s glove as an accessibility device seems to have been an afterthought. The project’s purpose, he wrote on his blog later, was to “demonstrate integration of soft electronic materials with low-energy wireless circuitry that can be purchased economically.” The American Manual Alphabet was chosen because “it comprises a set of 26 standardized gestures, which represent a challenge in engineering to detect using our system of materials.”

However, engineers seem to be hearing and responding to linguists’ complaints. Pryor and Azodi, the inventors of the UW SignAloud project, signed on to the UW open letter. And when Darren Lipomi heard about the linguists’ criticisms, he changed the wording of his paper with an addendum to PLOS One and wrote a blog post encouraging researchers to be more culturally sensitive. “The onus is thus on the researcher to be aware of cultural issues and to make sure ... that word choice, nuance, and how the technology may impact a culture is properly conveyed to the journalist and thence to the public,” he wrote.

Still, as long as actual Deaf users aren’t included in these projects, inventors are likely to continue creating devices that offend the very group they say they want to help. “To do this work, the first rule you have to teach yourself is that you are not your user,” says Thad Starner, who directs the Contextual Computing Group at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The group develops accessibility technologies for the deaf, such as a sign language–based educational game to train the working-memory abilities of deaf children.

That’s not to say that Deaf people don’t have futuristic fantasies that involve technology. For example, Kolb says a dominant fantasy among her friends is for glasses that would auto-caption everything that hearing people say. Several teams of researchers are working on algorithms to make signing videos on YouTube searchable. Even more thorough, higher-quality captioning and better interpreting services would improve the lives of many.

And, Kolb added, technology could create ways to encourage hearing people to use ASL and become multimodal as well as multilingual.

“That would open up the possibilities of communication for all of us,” she said.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/why-sign-language-gloves-dont-help-deaf-people/545441/?utm_source=feed

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About Ivano Frankivsk National Medical University

Ivano Frankivsk National Medical University was founded on October 6, 1945. At that time, the institute had 395 students and 47 professors, some of whom were physicians and candidates of science. There were 14 theoretical and two clinical departments.

The institute's staff quickly became involved in academic, scientific, and medical work, and after ten years, 12 professors, PhDs of science, and over 1,000 students entered the university. The institute has served as the region's educational, scientific, medical, cultural, and educational center.

Later, the university awarded medical, dental, pharmaceutical colleges, and undergraduate courses. Since 1994 they have trained general practitioners, taught international students, and conducted pre-certification training for physicians in various fields.

More than 16,000 doctors have been trained since 1945, of whom 5,000 work in the field.

University Activities

The training of students and the professional training of doctors is improved in 51 departments. 93 doctors and 231 doctors do the training process. Among the university's scientists are 6 academicians, 6 outstanding scientists and technicians from Ukraine, 2 honorary persons of the Ukrainian University, two laureates of the State Prize of Ukraine.

University scholars are involved in developing 56 applied papers, four state-of-the-art programs in international multicentre research.

Nearly 200 effective scientific developments, innovations, and medical-diagnostic technologies have been transferred to practical health care over the years.

14 positive decisions were made for the inventions, 5 patents, including 4 Ukrainian patents and 1 European patent (for a system of bioindication testing for contamination of the environment with radionuclides).

Regional centers were created and operated on higher education: pancreas clubs, cardiac stimulation, occupational diseases, antihypertensive drugs, and diabetics.

Qualified medical care for the sick city and region is provided by university scientists in 40 specialist areas. About 40% of operations in city hospitals are performed by high school students.

At the Grammar School, the Advisory Board D 20.601.01 successfully operates in three areas: Cardiology, Gastroenterology, and Dentistry. In 2010 alone, 20 dissertations were defended, including 3 doctoral ones. PH.D. More than 70 people are working on the implementation. Currently, 27 dissertations and master's thesis are in the planning stage - and 35 for dissertation.

The university's scientists are participants, and the scientific laboratories of the base, have numerous congresses, congresses, international and national symposia.

The university's rector, together with the board of directors of the Ukrainian Medical Association, founded the journal "Galician Medicinal Herald," which operates the scientific and practical journal "Archive of Clinical Medicine."

The university is the home base of the National Student Anatomy Olympiad.

The university has computer courses, an internet network connected to the library, scientific and educational units.

The teaching system is being developed in student dormitories and academic groups. During the free listening time, students participate in circles, and the club works intelligently and. Three groups of amateur performances have been given the title of folk. There is a cabinet of aesthetics in the plan for the revival of folk traditions.

The university supports constructive contacts with the World Federation of Ukrainian Medical Chambers, the Board of Directors of the Ukrainian Medical Association of North America, Lublin Medical Academy, universities in Germany, Austria, Poland, and all medical universities in Ukraine.

 Click to know more about study MBBS Abroad, visit our website Orbit Guide.

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Why Sign-Language Gloves Don't Help Deaf People

Along with jet packs and hover boards, a machine to translate from any language to any other is so appealing as a fantasy that people are willing to overlook clunky prototypes as long as they can retain the belief that the future promised by science fiction has, at last, arrived. One particularly clunky subspecies of the universal language translator has a rather dismal history: the sign-language glove, which purports to translate sign language in real time to text or speech as the wearer gestures. For people in the Deaf community, and linguists, the sign-language glove is rooted in the preoccupations of the hearing world, not the needs of Deaf signers.

The basic idea dates to the 1980s, when researchers started exploring how humans could interact with computers using gestures. In 1983, a Bell Labs engineer named Gary Grimes invented a glove for data entry using the 26 manual gestures of the American Manual Alphabet, used by speakers of American Sign Language. But the first glove intended to make interactions between deaf and non-deaf people easier was announced in 1988 by the Stanford University researchers James Kramer and Larry Leifer. It was called the “talking glove,” and the entire system cost $3,500—not including the price of the CyberGlove itself.

The first sign-language glove to gain any notoriety came out in 2001. A high-school student from Colorado, Ryan Patterson, fitted a leather golf glove with 10 sensors that monitored finger position, then relayed finger spellings to a computer which rendered them as text on a screen. Patterson received considerable attention for his “translating glove,” including the grand prize in the 2001 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair and a $100,000 scholarship. In 2002, the public-affairs office of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders effused about Patterson, sneaking in the caveat only at the end: The glove doesn’t translate anything beyond individual letters, certainly not the full range of signs used in American Sign Language, and works only with the American Manual Alphabet.

Over the years, similar designs—with corresponding hoopla—have appeared all over the world, but none has ever delivered a product to market. A group of Ukrainians won first prize and $25,000 in the 2012 Microsoft Imagine Cup, a student technology competition, for their glove project. In 2014, Cornell students designed a glove that “helps people with hearing disabilities by identifying and translating the user’s signs into spoken English.” And in 2015, one glove project was announced by two researchers at Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute, and another by the Saudi designer and media artist Hadeel Ayoub, whose BrightSignGlove “translates sign language into speech in real time” using a data glove.

The most recent project is from July 2017, when a team at the University of California, San Diego, published a paper in PLOS One describing a gesture-recognizing glove. The project was headed by Darren Lipomi, a chemist who researches the mechanical properties of innovative materials, such as stretchable polymer-based solar cells and skin-like sensors. On July 12, the UCSD news office promoted Lipomi’s publication with a story proclaiming, “Low-cost smart glove translates American Sign Language alphabet and controls virtual objects.” The next day, the online outlet Medgadget lopped “alphabet” out of its headline, and reports of a glove that “translates sign language” again spread far and wide, getting picked up by New Scientist, The Times in the United Kingdom, and other outlets. Medgadget wasn’t entirely to blame—Lipomi had titled his paper “The Language of Glove” and written that the device “translated” the alphabet into text, not “converted,” which would have been more accurate.

Linguists caught wind of the project. Carol Padden, the dean of social sciences at UCSD and a prominent sign-language linguist who is also deaf, passed along a critique of the sign-language glove concept to Lipomi’s dean at the school of engineering. The critique she gave him had been written by two ASL instructors and one linguist and endorsed by 19 others. It was written in response not to Lipomi’s paper, but to a notorious sign-language-glove project from the year before. In 2016, two University of Washington undergraduates, Thomas Pryor and Navid Azodi, won the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for a pair of gloves that recognized rudimentary ASL signs. Their project, called SignAloud, was covered by NPR, Discover, Bustle, and other outlets, but was also answered by vociferous complaints in blog posts by the linguists Angus Grieve-Smith and Katrina Faust.

“Initially, I didn’t want to deal with [SignAloud, the UW project] because this has been a repeated phenomenon or fad,” says Lance Forshay, who directs the ASL program at UW. “I was surprised and felt somehow betrayed because they obviously didn’t check with the Deaf community or even check with ASL program teachers to make sure that they are representing our language appropriately.” But after SignAloud received national and international media attention, Forshay teamed up with others in his department to write a letter. He gathered input for the letter from the Deaf community and Deaf culture experts.

Their six-page letter, which Padden passed along to the dean, points out how the SignAloud gloves—and all the sign-language translation gloves invented so far—misconstrue the nature of ASL (and other sign languages) by focusing on what the hands do. Key parts of the grammar of ASL include “raised or lowered eyebrows, a shift in the orientation of the signer’s torso, or a movement of the mouth,” reads the letter. “Even perfectly functioning gloves would not have access to facial expressions.” ASL consists of thousands of signs presented in sophisticated ways that have, so far, confounded reliable machine recognition. One challenge for machines is the complexity of ASL and other sign languages. Signs don’t appear like clearly delineated beads on a string; they bleed into one another in a process that linguists call “coarticulation” (where, for instance, a hand shape in one sign anticipates the shape or location of the following sign; this happens in words in spoken languages, too, where sounds can take on characteristics of adjacent ones). Another problem is the lack of large data sets of people signing that can be used to train machine-learning algorithms.

And while signers do use the American Manual Alphabet, it plays a narrow role within ASL. Signers use it “to maintain a contrast of two types of vocabulary—the everyday, familiar, and intimate vocabulary of signs, and the distant, foreign, and scientific vocabulary of words of English origin,” wrote Carol Padden and Darline Clark Gunsauls, who heads Deaf studies at Ohlone College, in a paper on the subject.

And the writers of the UW letter argued that the development of a technology based on a sign language constituted cultural appropriation. College students were gaining accolades and scholarships for technologies based on an element of Deaf culture, while Deaf people themselves are legally and medically underserved.

Also, though the gloves are often presented as devices to improve accessibility for the Deaf, it’s the signers, not the hearing people, who must wear the gloves, carry the computers, or modify their rate of signing. “This is a manifestation of audist beliefs,” the UW letter states, “the idea that the Deaf person must expend the effort to accommodate to the standards of communication of the hearing person.”

That sentiment is widely echoed. “ASL gloves are mainly created/designed to serve hearing people,” said Rachel Kolb, a Rhodes Scholar and Ph.D. student at Emory University who has been deaf from birth. “The concept of the gloves is to render ASL intelligible to hearing people who don’t know how to sign, but this misses and utterly overlooks so many of the communication difficulties and frustrations that Deaf people can already face.”

Julie Hochgesang, an assistant professor of linguistics at Gallaudet, said she rolls her eyes when another glove is announced. “We can't get decent access to communication when we go to the doctor. Why bother with silly gloves when we still need to take care of the basic human-rights issues?”

So why do so many inventors keep turning to the sign-language glove concept?

One reason is pretty obvious: Despite the popularity of ASL classes in American colleges (enrollment in such courses grew by 19 percent between 2009 and 2013), non-signers often don’t know that much about sign language. They may not even realize that ASL (and other sign languages, such as British Sign Language, Chinese Sign Language, and dozens of others) are distinct languages with their own grammars and phonologies, not word-for-word reformulations of a spoken language. Additionally, says Forshay, “People have no knowledge of the culture of Deaf people and how signed language has been exploited and oppressed over history.” As a result, they’re not aware of why the issue would be so sensitive.

An equally potent but less immediately apparent reason is the way engineers approach problem-solving. In engineering school, students are taught to solve only the mathematical elements of problems, says the Virginia Tech engineering educator Gary Downey. In a 1997 article he noted that “all the nonmathematical features of a problem, such as its politics, its power implications for those who solve it, and so forth, are given,” meaning they’re bracketed off. Students are prepared to focus on sensor placement or algorithm design, but often not the broader social context that the device they’re designing will enter.

The specific application of Lipomi’s glove as an accessibility device seems to have been an afterthought. The project’s purpose, he wrote on his blog later, was to “demonstrate integration of soft electronic materials with low-energy wireless circuitry that can be purchased economically.” The American Manual Alphabet was chosen because “it comprises a set of 26 standardized gestures, which represent a challenge in engineering to detect using our system of materials.”

However, engineers seem to be hearing and responding to linguists’ complaints. Pryor and Azodi, the inventors of the UW SignAloud project, signed on to the UW open letter. And when Darren Lipomi heard about the linguists’ criticisms, he changed the wording of his paper with an addendum to PLOS One and wrote a blog post encouraging researchers to be more culturally sensitive. “The onus is thus on the researcher to be aware of cultural issues and to make sure ... that word choice, nuance, and how the technology may impact a culture is properly conveyed to the journalist and thence to the public,” he wrote.

Still, as long as actual Deaf users aren’t included in these projects, inventors are likely to continue creating devices that offend the very group they say they want to help. “To do this work, the first rule you have to teach yourself is that you are not your user,” says Thad Starner, who directs the Contextual Computing Group at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The group develops accessibility technologies for the deaf, such as a sign language–based educational game to train the working-memory abilities of deaf children.

That’s not to say that Deaf people don’t have futuristic fantasies that involve technology. For example, Kolb says a dominant fantasy among her friends is for glasses that would auto-caption everything that hearing people say. Several teams of researchers are working on algorithms to make signing videos on YouTube searchable. Even more thorough, higher-quality captioning and better interpreting services would improve the lives of many.

And, Kolb added, technology could create ways to encourage hearing people to use ASL and become multimodal as well as multilingual.

“That would open up the possibilities of communication for all of us,” she said.

Article source here:The Atlantic

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Dnipropetrovsk State Medical University (DSMU)

This university was established on September 15, 1916. It was founded on the basis Ekaterinoslav’s higher-female courses Institute. The Institute was granted the status of State Academy by Ekaterinoslav’s higher female courses Institute in 1920. It was then confirmed to Dnipro State Medical University in Ukraine (DMA) in 1994 by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine No. 234 dated 20/04/94.

Dnipropetrovsk State Medical university DMA - Centre of Education, Science and Culture in the highly industrialized region of Ukraine, Dnieper. Dnepr, Ukraine's main industrial city, is home to over 40% of the country's industry. Dnipropetrovsk is home to more than 40% of Ukraine's industry. It is the capital of Ukraine and is also known as the "business city". It is a highly developed city with a well-established infrastructure in all areas of life. Dnipro State Medical University is the fourth highest level of accreditation in Ukraine.

 646 teachers work in the Dnipro State Medical University's departments. Among them are 98 Doctors of Medical Sciences and 359 Candidates of Medical Sciences. 1 Academician of Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine. 1 Corresponding member of National

Academy of Sciences of Ukraine2, Corresponding members of Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine4, employees were awarded the Prizes of President of Ukraine. 5 distinguished workers of higher education in Ukraine, 9 State Prize winners of Russia and Ukraine, 9 distinguished workers of Science and Technology, 9 State Prize recipients of Ukraine and Russia. 9 State Prize winners of Science and Technology. 9 State Prize winners of Russia and Ukraine. 5 honourable Doctors of Ukraine. 24 full and corresponding members of many Universities, members of International Scientific Societies and Associations.Dnipro State Medical University is accredited at the 4th highest level among all universities in Ukraine. The Dnipro State Medical University was the first to organize and publish two medical journals, "Ekaterinoslav’s Medical Journal", and "New Surgical Archive." The Academy established a single scientific society with sections for paediatric, orthopaedic, trauma, and theoretical research.

Dnipropetrovsk State Medical University, which provides training for students in all seven faculties as well as a preparatory section for foreign citizens, is the only one in Ukraine.

These faculties are:

General Medicine

Paediatrics

Management of Public Health

Dentistry

Pharmacy

Nursing

Postgraduate Education

Foreign citizens can prepare for university

The Academy trains specialists in English, Russian, and Ukrainian languages.

The Dnipropetrovsk Medical Academy has been training approximately 49 000 doctors, dentists and pharmacists over its long history.

The Dnipropetrovsk Medical Academy, (DMA), is headed by Professor G.V., an Academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine. Dzik.

Presently, 4500 students’ study in Dnipropetrovsk Medical Academy. 700 students from 36 different countries are receiving training in various specialties. Most of them are from Jordan, Syria and India, Pakistan, Nigeria.

Since 1990, Dnipropetrovsk Medical Academy has been training foreign nationals. The Academy graduated its first batch of foreign doctors in 1995. Dnipropetrovsk Medical Academy, (DMA), has trained over 1000 specialists from more than 30 countries for the past ten years.

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