Illinois Tech graduate, Luis Villaseñor Muñoz (ITM ’14), earned the Audience’s Award for Best Application Demonstration at the WebRTC Conference East (IV) in Atlanta. Munoz presented a demonstration and brief description of the BaBL application to an audience of more than 200 people, and was voted the best out of 27 other presenters.

In his presentation, Munoz demonstrated how BaBL allows several users to communicate via video over a computer network in real time — even if they are speaking different languages. He showed how BaBL, through speech recognition, will translate from one language to another by providing captions. In his demonstration, Munoz simultaneously communicated in English to a friend who spoke Spanish and another friend who spoke French. His application allowed each user to speak only their language, but through captions, all conversation was translated so that each user could communicate with the other users. BaBL also captured a written version of the conversation and archived the transcript of their conference.

Munoz developed the BaBL application as his semester projects in ITMO 546 and 547. He used the WebRTC Application Programming Interface (API) to create a multi-media, multi-user conference service that provides closed caption service, closed caption translation, transcription, and text-to-speech translation of the closed caption. He developed a WebRTC-based application and tested it on the Network Transport and Performance (NTAP) TestBed. It provides real-time closed captioning using the “data channel” provided by WebRTC which is a joint project of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Their goal is to build application interfaces into the browser to allow users to have direct voice and video communication between multiple browsers.

Users can try out the BaBL application at dixie11.rice.iit.edu. This application is also featured on Google’s internal Google+ developer’s site.

Carol Davids, Industry Professor of Information Technology and Management and Director of the Real-Time Communications Lab at Illinois Institute of Technology, also participated in WebRTC Conference East (IV). Davids spoke about research in the Network Transport and Performance (NTAP) Test Bed of the IIT Real-Time Communications (RTC) Labs, studying the impacts of WebRTC applications on the networks and the impact of the networks on WebRTC applications.

Luis Villaseñor Muñoz (middle) receiving his Audience’s Award for Best Application Demonstration. Also pictured (on the left) is Phil Edholm, Chairman of the WebRTC Conference East and President and Principal of PKE Consulting, (far right) Carol Davids, Industry Professor of Information Technology and Management and Director of the Real-Time Communications Lab