The team behind this Alan Turing Institute Partnership pilot project is lead by Professor Mike Wald as the Alan Turing Fellow for AI and Inclusion.
Prof Mike Wald
Prof Mike Wald leads research into accessible technologies in the Web and Internet Science Group, ECS. He has advised HEFCE, JISC and Universities on enhancing learning through the use of technologies and established the University’s DSA assessment centre and the Disability and Assistive Technology Services of 7 Universities in the South of England. He was a founder member of the International Liberated Learning Consortium that included other leading universities (e.g. MIT) and organisations (e.g. IBM, Nuance) investigating how speech recognition could make teaching and learning more accessible. His research led to the development of Synote to make video easier to access, search, manage, and exploit by supporting the creation of synchronised notes, bookmarks, tags, images, links and text captions.
Other Team members
E.A. Draffan
E.A.’s main roles have involved collaborative research on a series of projects whilst lecturing and supporting post graduate students on subjects related to digital accessibility and disability related subjects. Recently she has been involved in EU funded projects such as MOOCAP that resulted in a series of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS). These have had over 20,000 registrants and the free materials have been used when working on other projects such as SlideWiki which offers open educational resources as an authoring and presentation platform. E.A. has also been involved with the development of Global Symbols where the Tawasol AAC Symbol set has been linked to several other open symbol sets as part of the UNICEF Innovation Fund project for Augmentative and Alternative Communication app development with the potential for further links through the use of Artificial Intelligence /Assistive or Augmented Artificial Intelligence.
Dr Chaohai Ding
Chaohai is working with the University of Southampton and MicrolinkPC on the project of Semantic Decision Support System for Accessibility Assessment Evaluation . He has also investigated the use of Linked Open Data for accessibility, mainly for enhancing the travelling and living experience. The aim of his research has been focussed on the establishment of a generic framework for integrating, consuming, reusing and maintaining the open accessibility data. Based on open accessibility data (open data) and user preference data (closed data), the system can make decisions for users with special needs