Technology for Autism Inclusion & Cyberbullying Detection Dinner
Technology has empowered us to connect with each other more easily than ever but it has also introduced new problems to modern society such as accessibility barriers and cyberbullying. Following on from her talk at this year’s TEDxBrum event about harnessing the #PowerOfUs, come dine with Victoria Yaneva to find out more about how to use Natural Language Processing and eye-tracking techniques to combat these issues and what each of us could do to help eradicate them.
We are going to discuss the accessibility barriers people with autism face when reading and using social media, and the devastating hidden impact these difficulties have on their academic achievements, independence, and social inclusion. We are currently developing a web app called AUTOR, which aims to address these issues by helping to create more accessible web content. The app is based on extensive studies involving eye tracking of participants with a diagnosis of autism and a control group of non-autistic participants. You are going to have the opportunity to experience first-hand how eye tracking works and see a recording of your own eye movements while reading.
Another topic closely related to the use of social media is cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is one of the most important security concerns around the world affecting millions of people and in worst cases it results in suicidal attempts by the victims. We are working towards building linguistics models to detect cyberbullying and identify abusive communication through automatic learning of features and patters of cyberbullying related contents and users’ profile through natural language processing and machine learning.
Book your place at bit.ly/VictoriaYanevaCC
Victoria Yaneva is currently completing her PhD in Computational Linguistics at the University of Wolverhampton (www.rgcl.wlv.ac.uk); exploring how texts and the web can be made accessible to people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). With a background in psychology, Victoria’s research focuses on the intersection between language comprehension in people with developmental disorders and language assistance solutions for these populations. As a result, she is developing AUTOR – a web app which helps experts and non-experts to write accessible content for readers with autism.
For more information visit www.tedxbrum.com/speakers
This event is part of #CityCampBrum – an open festival exploring and unleashing positive solutions for the future of the city.
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