Christian Ocon

  • Computer Engineering Master's student at the University of California, Santa Cruz

    Hello, my name is Christian Alexis Ocon and I am a current graduate student from the University of California Santa Cruz(UCSC) where I received a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering with my concentration being Robotics and Control and a minor in Electrical Engineering. I have been accepted back to start my Master's Degree at UCSC in Computer Engineering with an emphasis on Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Computer Vision. I am passionate about robotics, more geared towards the programming and gathering of information to strategize and perform calculated measures from the information that has been gathered through sensors and analytics.

    Throughout my college career, I have strived myself in learning and perfecting my knowledge of artificial intelligence and incorporating what I learned when programming my robots to perform and complete tasks and objectives.

    For my projected Master's project, my idea is to develope software that can translate in real-time American Sign Language (ASL) to English Captions and have a 3-D model showing the movements. The second portion would also allow for spoken english to be put into captions or translated to ASL.

    This application is inteded to help those who are deaf or hard of hearing be able to communicate more effectively with those who don't know the language. The main reason this idea came to fruition when I was watching one of Rikki Poynter's YouTube videos. Rikki Poynter is a 27-year-old deaf vlogger on YouTube. She makes content about deaf awareness, accessibility/closed captioning awareness, mental health, feminism, and more. On one of her videos, she stated how she was flustered that when there is an emergency and a person is signing on-screen, there were no captions being placed. This is an issue in the Hard of Hearing and Deaf Community since there is still a large portion of them who don't know ASL and would still like to know what the person is signing on screen. Another issue that can be seen is that at times, the video is not well filmed so you can't make out what they are signing.

    This project would delve into the following areas:

  • Computer Vision
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Machine Learning
  • American Sign Language (ASL)
  • Research Papers

    Mining Sequential Patterns by Pattern-Growth: The PrefixSpan Approach

    My own personal hobbies include swimming, biking, playing volleyball, watching movies, anime, drawing, playing the piano, improving my penmanship, and playing video games.