Syrian Eng. Nour Ghadban was honored by the L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science initiative on the Arab World level for its scientific research “Improve Speech Recognition for Arabic Speakers Using Audio and Visual Features”.

Eng. Ghadban is the only Syrian winner along with six other winners from Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq.

Her project introduces a new idea to improve the audiovisual performance of Arabic speakers based on the speaker’s lips movement as this technology is one of the latest and most important automatic speech recognition systems.

Speaking to SANA’s Youth Bulletin, Ghadban said that the results of her research will influence a number of fields, such as command identification in motor vehicles designed for highways, which are automatically controlled by commands taken through cameras in the vehicle.

Eng. Ghadban was born in Lattakia and holds a master’s degree in computer engineering from Tishreen University with a grade of excellence. She also received al-Basel Certificate for Excellence and is currently working as a lecturer and researcher in Computer Engineering and Computer Control in Tishreen University and al- Manara Private University.

The L’Oréal-UNESCO for Women in Science initiative was founded in 1998 to promote the role of women in life and physical sciences. Since its inception, it has honored more than 2,250 distinguished women from 115 countries around the world who have contributed to the advancement of scientific knowledge.