Montreal startup Stradigi’s AI game teaches people sign language

Responsibly applied artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to solve some of the world’s toughest challenges. One needn’t look further for evidence then the winners of this week’s IBM Watson AI Xprize wildcard round, which included a Montreal startup — Aifred Health — developing a model that helps clinicians choose personalized patient treatment programs. In related news, just this past Sunday, Google subsidiary DeepMind unveiled AlphaFold, AI that can predict protein folding more accurately than any system before it.

Accessibility is another burgeoning area of what’s been coined “AI for good” research, and one which Montreal startup Stradigi AI is committed to advancing with a new tool for the deaf and hearing impaired. At the NeurIPS 2018 conference in Montreal this week, the four-year-old startup — which its two cofounders, Carolina Bessega and Jaime Camacaro, pivoted from software development to AI research in 2016 — demoed a game that uses computer vision to help people learn American Sign Language (ASL).