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Machine learning, body tracking and creativity

The Google Accessibility Blog has a collection of fascinating articles including one by Claire Kearney-Volpe, a Designer and researcher who made Creatability. This is a set of creative tools that can be used with any input device and have encouraged creation by a group of disabled users. The YouTube video about Creatability has captions and an expanded audio-described version of this video lives at: https://youtu.be/SbrMu6BuVWU

The various experiments use different input methods from head tracking to switch access. The site suggests that you explore ways to ” make music by moving your face, draw using sight or sound, and experience music visually. “

The system uses Posenet  combined with Tensorflow.js allowing a user to move in front of a webcam and create fun things within a browser – no downloading of programs or storage of data on other people’s servers. The code is open source and can be found on the Google Creativity Lab Github account.

There are lots of experiments that have been shared on the Creatability website with support and further resources.

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The Three Dimensions of Inclusive Design

swirls with the three guidelines

The three dimensions of inclusive design thanks to
Inclusive Design Research Centre

Jutta Treviranus has developed a ” a guiding framework for inclusive design, suitable for a digitally transformed and increasingly connected context. ”

The three dimensions of the framework are:

1. Recognize, respect, and design for human uniqueness and variability.

2. Use inclusive, open & transparent processes, and co-design with people who have a diversity of perspectives, including people that can’t use or have difficulty using the current designs.

3. Realize that you are designing in a complex adaptive system.

The three blogs about ‘The Three Dimensions of Inclusive Design’  were published in March, April and May 2018 and encourage us to think very seriously about how we can make everything we do in our digital world more accessible and inclusive. In her final blog Jutta says:

Including difference is how we evolve as a human society. Inclusive design is about far more than addressing disability. But disability has been called our last frontier. It is the human difference that our social structures have not yet integrated. This is paradoxical because disability is a potential state we can all find ourselves in. If we reject and exclude individuals who experience disabilities, we reject and exclude our future selves and our loved ones.

Jutta Treviranus
Director, Inclusive Design Research Centre, OCAD University

Dr John Gilligan from the Technical University of Dublin  sent me a link to on of Jutta’s tweets about AI and Inclusion. We are just beginning to explore in more depth where the gaps are when thinking about AI and inclusion and how this impacts in both positive and negative ways on at least 20% of the world’s population.

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Will AI combined with Inclusive Design make Digital Accessibility mainstream in 2019?

Isabelle Roughol published an article on Linkedin on December 11th, 2018 titled “50 Big Ideas for 2019: What to watch in the year ahead” and number six on the list was “Inclusive design will go mainstream“. She wrote:

“A growing awareness among professionals and advances in artificial intelligence are transforming inclusive design, says Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft (LinkedIn’s parent company). “We used to call it assistive technologies and it used to be a checklist of things you did after the product was built,” he says. Now it’s “about taking this way upstream into the design process. What if we said upfront we want a design for people of different abilities to fully participate?” He points to the new Xbox adaptive controller, where even the packaging was designed to be accessible, or new AI that helps people with dyslexia read and comprehend written text.”


Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella on Inclusive Design, AI and Digital Accessibility . (This video is also available on YouTube)

“This notion of inclusive design and the breakthroughs in AI, the combination of these two, the juxtaposition of these two in building the next wave of products is probably going to be what we are going to see in a much more mainstream way” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

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Southampton computer scientists named as Fellows of the Alan Turing Institute

Turing Fellows

ECS, University of Southampton 

Four academics from the School of Electronics and Computer Science  have been named Fellows of The Alan Turing Institute as part of a new cohort from the University of Southampton.

Professors Elena Simperl, Mike Wald, Sarvapali Ramchurn and Dr George Konstantinidis will address complex research challenges within the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence.

The researchers are among 19 leading academics at the University that will now bring to the Institute specific projects covering topics from machine learning for space physics to AI and inclusion.

The Alan Turing Institute was founded in 2015 to undertake world-class research that is applied to real-world problems, drives economic impact and societal good, leads the training of a new generation of scientists and shapes public conversation around data.

Read the full story