imagine that we all could be iron man or superwoman these were the words a friend of mine used the first time she tried to explain exoskeletons to me she talked about being able to raise a pen by herself for the first time during her whole career as a lawyer she continued on speaking about eye tracking and about that helping her being able to foster prepare for court proceedings technological and digital development is right now advancing at a furious pace artificial intelligence virtual reality and new ways of performing tasks using technology constitute promises of a world and a work life where no one is left behind a world where every human being has the opportunity to get a job with decent working conditions the global goals and the 2030s agenda for sustainable development is a global political commitment to such a world with increased participation for people with disabilities in the labor market in the nordic countries a new nordic vision sets the goal that in 10 years the nordic countries will be the most sustainable and integrated region in the world providing inclusion and equality so how can new technology artificial intelligence and digitalization help governments across the globe to fulfill the right to an inclusive work life and how do we make sure that this fast advancement actually constitutes and create possibilities rather than consolidates negative attitudes and the notion that disabilities are conditions that need to be fixed to fit into the labor market how do we do all this with a human rights lands on with working with non-discrimination and with a focus on universal design welcome to this webinar inclusive future of work life a half day conference arranged by the nordic welfare center and the swedish public employment service today some of the leading researchers within this area and the leading practitioners will give us their insights on the impacts of technology for people with disabilities in the labor market my name is hannah gerdes i'm a swedish human rights lawyer and educator and i'm the founder of hannah and goliath law and education and today i've been given the task to moderate this very important webinar this webinar will end at four o'clock and we will be taking short breaks at about 10 to 2 at 2 25 and at 3 15. here in the studio today it's only me and lars lindberry and the technical staff since we are trying to make it as corona safe as possible with us however and as a part of our team today we also have emily smeadslund who works at the nordic welfare center and she will be the one replying to your question so hi emily can you just wave hi so now you're awesome emily now i actually would like to continue with asking some questions and i would like to ask them to a very important person here today that's actually here with me in the studio and that's lars lindbergh lars lindberry is a senior advisor at the nordic welfare center and he has a long experience of working with disability policy in sweden amongst many things lars has worked at the ministry of social affairs with responsibility for coordinating disability policy and also at a head of the accessibility center at the disability ombudsman in sweden lars is also now a project manager at the nordic welfare center and the host for today's seminar oh and he just joined me here from behind saying hi so i would like to start off by actually asking you a question lars when i say inclusive work life and the future labor market what do you think about thank you hannah first and foremost i think about that it's so important that everyone else should have a opportunity to contribute in working life and it's so important as we all know this uh question of livelihood personal development and so on but we do know those that are so many people with disabilities that don't not have jobs or don't have the opportunities to participate in working life as they want to do i think there is a glass feeling in my ways that is due to amongst managing lack of accessibility discrimination and there's so important to empathize that is the focus must be to ensure that the workplaces are accessible and to take advantage of the opportunities that the technology provides today um a friend of mine went blind uh 20 years ago and she said all family that has been blind in the right time of her life because there are so many opportunities today and so on but and say maybe in the future in the short future maybe could drive a driverless car on the other hand we also know that technology can create new barriers and this technology is a double-edged sword so so we have to be realistic but use my barriers your man-made and therefore something we can eliminate and choose to avoid so the barriers are man-made and you talked about the glass ceiling but then of course i have to ask you so i mean you're a project manager at the nordic welfare center and you're responsible for your work so what have you done to like you know shatter this glass ceiling what are you doing to create the more inclusive labor market i work at a nordic workforce which is an institution under the nordic council of ministers and this project started 2019 and this summer and it's commissioned by the nordic labor market committee and in this project we have worked very closely together with labor market authorities in the nordic countries and we are conducting this webinar today in collaboration with the swedish employment service which we are very happy about in the project we have uh consistently different parts but we will produce some publications and the first one is a compilation of knowledge about research about rich and research and research needs uh on digital and technical solutions and uh we uh uh under the reverse uh published this spring i think you will get the link in the chat from emily a sample collection digital and technical solution also will be published within a few months a few weeks and thirdly there will be a toolbox that will be a support for employers employees and professional groups who work with assistive technology and workplace adaptation and this toolbox will be published also in june so we're there in a couple of weeks so for example there was um there's almost 450 people joining us today so if they want to like uh take have this toolbox what should they do where will they find this toolbox can you find it in your web page uh where do you find the toolbox i don't you probably will be able to find the toolbox i guess the most difficult in the project uh has uh partly the development uh is one hand so very fast on the other hand if we cannot see that it has given so much big impact yet when it comes to technology and working life the resources have produced the compilation of research and knowledge they couldn't find so much resource that we had expected so instead we have to look elsewhere uh we have to find an example from conferences and innovation competitions uh a lot of a big digging job job quite simply so there's been a lot of difficulties i mean finding information actually about the research can i ask you something do you have any hopes for the future yes on one hand i think it's uh this webinar is a very important focus on the technology i think we must work to ensure that work life the programs and the tools we are using in workplaces and working life are accessible the other hand also to utilize the potential that's existing technology and uh technology assistive technology and devices are not himself a quick fix we know there's just a complex issue from unemployment to work but it's an important future for the puzzle so people with disabilities want to work and there are a resource in society but then we must remove the barriers and then we can technology could be a help in this process so what are your expectations for this afternoon for this webinar what's your expectations now it's so exciting to listen to all their different voices and the percentages that are participated today and there are so many inevitable persons so and above all those of course so glad to hear so many participants and registered to this webinar i'm very happy that we have the collaboration with the swedish employment service and i hope that this day will lead to some kind of new short new ideas that can contribute all together to a more inclusive working life thank you so much lars um we will now start off with the first part of this afternoon and i just want to remind you that please feel free to ask questions to all the participants throughout uh throughout the whole webinar and you do this by going into sli.do sli.do you write that and then you write the code 034370 and you will be able to ask questions and you can also just turn your device your iphone or ipad or something towards the qr code that is now shown also in the picture if you can see that so um otherwise go into sli dot d o and write zero three four three seven zero and you will get into slider where you will be able to answer ask all your questions um let's start off with looking closer at how can artificial intelligence become a door opener to working life for people with disabilities to give us a brief note on this today we have with us hector minto he is a senior technology evangelist for accessibility issues at microsoft hector minto has worked in the field of assistive technology and alternative communication and special education needs for 25 years including at many nordic assistive technology companies so he also has a great knowledge of the nordic countries hector focuses on being on emerging technologies and how to maximize its effectiveness across a wide range of different issues for people with disabilities physical learning and sense of disability so i'm going to actually hand over to you hector we're very happy that you're joining us today thank you hannah great to be with you all great to be back in the nordics has spent many many happy years in the region so great to reconnect it's like start yeah you can start your presentation yeah perfect okay thank you so much okay so look great great to be back with you and i'm going to spend 10 minutes now just digging into the topic of what accessibility means at microsoft now you know in the year 2021 um i started my career 25 years ago working with disability technology with this thing in the top left hand corner of this screen the the the pneumatic page turner which used air pressure to essentially turn pages on a newspaper and you know that was an early insight in my life into the into exclusion you know the news what was going on in the world people with disabilities were routinely excluded from reading the newspaper because newspapers weren't designed for people with disabilities with physical disabilities it was an amazing kind of start to my career especially as i started in chemistry actually believe it or not but i just wanted to do something more sociable you know more interactive more engaging with my community i soon migrated into working with people with speech disabilities through light writers which is now owned by a swedish a norwegian company and then i worked with stephen hawking with his communication aid before joining toby in sweden for the last 10 years of my career before microsoft and throughout my career it was always focused on the individual we always met the person with the need we were really focused on essentially the the individual solution at that individual point of contact about five years ago i joined microsoft because i could start to see what was happening out there people were starting to talk much more about the structural accessibility of technology not just the essentially the the hack the fix the solution but they were talking much more about this is not designed for people with disabilities it became more of a overarching design conversation than just about the innovation around uh the assistive technology every single piece of assistive technology that works out that works out there is incredibly innovative but essentially it's being designed around an imbalance an exclusion we're now moving into a world where the technology is going to be capable of some of those things just to go back sorry some of those things that will happen some of those things that create exclusion we now live in a world where pictures can be recognized and described for people who are blind we live in a world where speech recognition is becoming incredibly accurate and can be optimized in the moment for increased accuracy to support people who are deaf or people who don't have first language skills we're also starting to see that people can interact with technology using more than just the cursor and the mouse using voice and having much more control of technology with voice than ever before in human history and so the challenge now i think is for us to start looking at these emerging technologies reaching out to the innovators designing assistive technology but also reaching out to the organizations within pub within the public space within our societies where people with disabilities are or increasingly want to be and i would include the workforce in this now part of our mission at microsoft is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more this new focus of microsoft is much more kind of customer focused essentially it's not so much about us creating the best solution and selling the best solution it's about us building technology in partnership with organizations around the world large and small meeting the smallest innovators looking at what they're doing with the latest emerging technology but also engaging with the largest organizations around the world and helping them build their digital platforms so when we think about the lives of people with disabilities there's so much more we can do as microsoft to actually start to deliver platforms industry-specific platforms that are increased increasingly accessible to people with disabilities can we start to build in inclusive healthcare inclusive education inclusive banking only if we have these conversations and so essentially that's my role at microsoft to get across to people that we are a connected society to get across to people that the people who use technology nowadays are so so more much more diverse than ever before and to start deliberately building people with disabilities into the experience we make sure that people understand some of the nuts and bolts of disability inclusion vision hearing mobility some of the things that people quite often think about when they think about disability and technology but increasingly and very interesting for the the the larger community or the community at large we're starting to talk much more about learning difference neurodiversity and mental health and these are issues that are really is starting to impact many of the largest employers and largest organizations around the world uh particularly through this pandemic period that we've all lived through we're seeing rapid digital transformation happening around us but what's also starting to happen is that this conversation about disability inside workplaces and inside organizations is starting to find voice and being amplified we take the responsibility of accessibility incredibly seriously at microsoft uh not just least not least in the kind of the legal requirement of our products but actually what we like to think more as we uh engage on the why of accessibility it's getting across to people that only one in 10 people get access to the products that they need and that wherever we can find the data there is double the unemployment rate for people with disabilities we look at microsoft products office windows teams and we say if these products are inaccessible we risk creating unemployment for people with disabilities we take away the chance for people with disabilities to be included in the workplaces around the world so we've had five years of learning much more about this topic really starting to invest much more in our product and we're starting to get loads of people talking to us around the world around the products that we're building particularly with accessibility in mind but as we move forward we're thinking about our new commitment in this space we want to make technology that's affordable and readily accessible and discoverable make sure that people find the things they need built into the products that we that we create we also want to help organizations around the world understand the importance of skilling of people with disabilities and the skilling of workplaces to incorporate people with disabilities if you know about accessible technology you're much more likely to employ somebody with a disability if you don't know how somebody who's blind reads an email then you're never going to give that person a job when you meet them so we need to work two ways on the skilling and the routines feeling of people with disabilities but also the skilling of workplaces to become to create inclusive workplace culture and that's something where we think we can really share some of our learnings and so we see disability as a strength at microsoft the more disability we have inside microsoft the more feedback we get around what we're doing but also the more diverse thinking we bring bring into our organization we absolutely need more people with disabilities inside microsoft and more people hiding their disabilities inside microsoft to share their lived experience when people share their lived experience with us and with our products we start to create better products examples might include teams captioning and the blurred background this is swether sweather works with us in our in our ai team at microsoft swetha's deaf she won't mind me telling you that and she created the blurred background that we see all around us in society people you'll join meetings all the time where people have turned this feature on it was created to support her lip reading her need for lip reading she created that innovation for herself and now we go out and we sell that product for security reasons you know the idea that you can hide things that are behind you this innovation came from the lived experience of disability inside microsoft what that's also leading us to is a greater experience within those built-in accessibility settings in windows people are telling us what they need inside microsoft and that's driving updates so if you haven't looked at the ease of access center inside windows for a while go and learn that the magnifier has read aloud built into it now go and see the color filters that you're seeing here on screen for people who are color blind we're constantly iterating our products to be more inclusive now an example of where ai comes in here is the automatic description of images for people who are blind every single image you put into an email or into a document now uses machine learning to describe it and i've got some of the descriptions up here in swedish and in english and some of you might notice that the english are more accurate than the swedish so there's work here that we need to do to start to create a more equitable experience around the world this is all to do with the data set that ai leverages we need data sets to be more inclusive and to give us more global experiences now another example is the immersive reader that's built into every website in the world this was designed with dyslexia in mind but now it supports people with all reading abilities around the world and it's built right there in your browser right click read aloud or right click and enter the immersive reader on any website in edge now just to close i wanted to tell you about the xbox adaptive controller this is a piece of pure assistive technology that was created by microsoft to allow people with physical disabilities to game this created a load of energy inside microsoft about us delivering assistive technology at low cost globally but what it led to was people across the industry of gaming to design more inclusive games design communities of people with disabilities talking to each other about how we could create more accessibility in that industry and that's the analogy i want to leave you with we create great energy around innovation but the long-term impact we want to have is on industries to start creating more inclusion whether it's in education employment healthcare banking etc innovation does spark some of that and so what i'd like to share leave you with is the ai for accessibility program we want to invest in innovative projects but we want to innovate in specific industry-led innovation projects and so if you are thinking about how you want to innovate your industry moving forward and create more inclusion get in touch with us to learn more thank you thank you so much hector what a great message to leave us with if you have an ideas of great innovation get in touch with hector um i would like to ask you a question hector i mean during all this time that you've been working with these issues at microsoft what is the most important lesson you've learned i mean working with these issues within such a big company representation is is absolutely critical so many organizations that we meet around the world don't necessarily give deliberate voice to people with disabilities uh the more that we can actually create that internal conversation leads to better external outcomes and i would include government organizations in this as well um the people who care about your success as an organization are your colleagues and your employees so i think it's critically important that we deliberately you know reflect on ourselves the product that we're all creating now when people go and say let's go and do some market research and go and find out from our customers the lens is slightly different so i think starting having a that internal conversation about disability really helps get that buy-in about what you're delivering to your consumers to your citizens to the public i think that's that's critically important so the more representation leads to more credible delivery of product and i remember in my years working with assistive technology companies i would i would argue that sometimes there was too much designing for people and not designing with people some of the best bosses i had were people with disabilities inventing for themselves and then they built businesses off the back of it so i think just having credible lived experience and and spending time investing in lived experience is the trick so thank you very much i'm happy to hear that microsoft is leaving us with the same message actually as the global goals nothing about us without us um i have another question for you um many of the ai based solutions today that exist for example speech to text live subtitling all of that is almost in english right and this is an order conference so of course i have to ask you what are you doing to include the nordic languages as a part of these functions so it's not just nordic languages so don't feel don't feel bad this is about data set size so if you imagine you know the biggest data sets are in english in fact some of the most accurate captions that we see nowadays are english being spoken with a strong indian accent because again we have huge data sets for that audience and now increasingly we'll start to see uh it's about when we get to the bar of confidence with a data set before we deliver it now all of our data sets for speech transcription for example are out there for you to test you can go to translator.microsoft.com
and you can actually start testing what you know what norwegian sounds like with what the accuracy is like for norwegian what you should also then do is look at how we start to land those products so if you go to word and go for word transcription or you go to powerpoint for powerpoint captions you'll start to see all of those languages are there but they're not there in teams yet for live meetings and this is all to do with the amount of information we can glean to drive the accuracy so just stay with me a minute hannah if you think of a presentation in norwegian with norwegian words in the powerpoint powerpoint reads those slides and helps you get accuracy so that you we're reaching that bar of our accuracy and that's why we've put norwegian out when we go into a random teams meeting where somebody's speaking norwegian that we've got to get more data before that becomes uh gets to an accuracy level so the trick is with ai is what level of ac what size of data set do you have and how can we start driving more of that forward but but the aim is for us to go global on accessibility all these things will will exist and we'll will come but we've got to work harder to build those data sets thank you so much i mean this is really interesting i mean i learn a lot listening to you um i would actually ask to ask we have emily with us um and i would like to because emily is looking at the chat and did we do we have any questions perhaps a short question just for hector yes there are some questions and i well if we are short of time i have to choose one so what do you think of cooperation with game developers many peeps in game design are very creative and have developed technology which could also be of interest for people with special needs yeah i think this is fantastic yeah there's amazing um creativity coming out of the games industry right now around disability and i i think i'll tell you now a lot of it is sparked because they have deliberately created forums for people with disabilities to communicate with the industry so if you think of just the very nature of gaming nowadays for any of you who are gamers or have kids who game most of it is not just the game it's the community and so what they're doing is they're deliberately investing in those communities and the communities are telling people you know what they need just from the gaming industry the closer that we drive that relationship between people with disabilities and those industries the more exposed people will be to what people need within that industry but also people with disabilities see what's coming down the track and they say i could use this so an example is if you look at something like seeing ai our app for um vision for people with disabilities people are blind to use artificial intelligence to narrate the world around them that came from an amazing developer at microsoft called sakib who created that app for himself because he was living in a world of machine learning and he could see what was possible so he innovated for himself so it's i would say it's proximity and empathy both ways is what we're aiming for and you only get that if you have great representation within your community or within your business wow thank you so much hector thank you so much uh for joining us and giving us this uh brief but uh very full of information uh presentation and you will be joining us again in a little while where we're gonna have uh comment discussions with some of the other speakers so i say hi bye for now but i also just would like to tell all of you listening that if you have any more questions for hector please do not hesitate to write in them in you do this through slido so you're going to sli.do um or you just um and then you write the code um or you put you can also do the qr code that is now in the picture you just put your device towards that qr code and you can automatically write in questions otherwise you just go into your browser you write sli.do and you use the code 034370 and now i would like to introduce our next guest the next speaker which is irian kitsara who works at the world intellectual property organization irian has worked for the european patent office the european commission and the greek ministry of internal affairs today iren is the product lead of the publication technology trends providing analysis on innovation trends and technology insights and she will now be speaking with us about emerging assistive technology what is around the corner oh i'm really looking forward to that so tell us iran what's around the corner and hand over to you hi hannah thank you so much and thank you for this wonderful opportunity to be with some nordic audience uh i typically spent uh mid-summer in england shopping so it's even nice to be in this way with some nordic audience so um may i start with yes so um as you mentioned i work for the world intellectual property organization and um i'm leading a product which is a publication where we use patent data as an indicator of technology trends to see what is happening uh who is uh patented what where and with whom so in the um words of andre ong who is one of the thought leaders in the in the area of artificial intelligence he could not imagine any industry which would not be revolutionized by artificial intelligence in the first issue of the technology trends report which was dedicated to uh artificial intelligence we had 20 industries which were um mentioned in documents as publication for um this promising um fields such as machine learning computer vision and other ai functional applications so we had examples such as agriculture entertainment so the gaming industry we talked about before life and medical sciences etc so in this year's report we published this may our second issue on assistive technology and we uh we could uh really uh confirm that uh ai was also revolutionizing the field of assistive technology we looked at seven different domains and we identified more than 350 assistive products and their accessories in areas such as communication hearing mobility the built environment self-care and vision we looked at innovation that happens in improving existing well-known products and we should not undermine also the importance of that because that can be really impactful on people's lives and we looked also at emerging assistive technology meaning products that use more advanced technologies or even introduce new assistive products we also looked at the wider context such as policy regulation standards and we also got insights from 72 experts uh representing different uh industries and perspectives so uh what we saw was that this emerging assistive products that we identified were possible thanks to what we called the enabling technologies uh with artificial intelligence being one of them but also others such as brain machine interface advanced sensors new materials virtual and augmented reality advanced robotics and additive manufacturing so what we saw was that assistive pro emerging assistive products were using at least one of these enabling technologies or a combination thereof to offer to the users more advanced solutions and thanks to that because of the use of these technologies we could also explain some of the general cross-cutting trends that we identified across the seven domains that we looked at so we saw that assistive technologies become uh are smarter they tend to be more connected more customizable and personalized we also saw a convergence with other disciplines we saw a convergence with data science with medical technologies and also we would see a convergence with consumer goods so we see a lot of these assistive technologies which tend to be the specialized products for persons with functional limitations to overlap with some consumer goods either from the gaming industry from wellness all these wearables uh that that we see in fitness and wellness um and uh we also tend to see two opposite trends we see um some assistive products which go towards recovery of function so what's what we heard before about this fixing um aspect and we see some which which tend to be less invasive exactly because we have more advanced sensors and uh that allow also for these applications in the consumer electronic goods looking at the innovators the people who are behind this promising solutions we have seen from what companies are concerned from startups to multinationals so we have these specialized 80 companies but we also see because of this overlap because of this enabling technologies and because of this overlap with consumer goods we see a lot of consumer electronic companies patenting in the fields of assistive technology we even saw automotive industry in some mobility related solutions exoskeletons etc we saw some activity from universities but a lot of independent inventors so people who really want to um invent find solutions for themselves or their loved ones who who are facing some challenges now how is assistive technology connected to the work place we could see a lot of different their solutions spread across different areas so there are solutions which relate to accessing having an accessible environment so that we we could see solutions related to smart homes smart cities um or uh some furniture which are for accessible workplace a lot in the communication we see of course a lot the importance of ict for the workplace all these speech input related technologies word processing speech to text gesture to text or voice navigation aids smart assistants or sensor or brain computer interface to allow controlling of devices just to name some examples when we look at the future of of work and the general trends we are moving towards more teleworking it things are becoming even more digital um so if we look at it we can we can look at technologies which help access to more material to education so that one has the skills to access the workplace things that relate to recruitment processes and physically accessing the workplace having an accessible workplace and digital accessibility it also depends on the type of disability we're talking about and let's take a look at some of the opportunities that emerging technologies offer so machine learning computer vision voice input affected computers are very powerful technologies and they can be used at the service of persons with disabilities they can make some of the assistive technologies become obsolete they can simplify some of those or even offer new possibilities that were not there before they can offer more intuitive and integrated solutions and technologies which are similar uh to be used by persons with disabilities or more general population they can also help to reduce stigma if one cannot really tell if something is used for a need or for a out of comfort in this way they can allow mobility communication and digital accessibility through these technologies this ability can be used as a different type of input in this digital technologies replacing um so far one-sided expectation of what should be an input or how it should look like which would exclude some some users from the use of of different technology applications technologies such as effective computing which help identify emotions and share this with the user can support workforce with cognitive functional limitations and support them understand better their environment and participate easier in a workplace the increased use of assistive technology can contribute to what hector was talking before about the increased use of data from all users including the ones with disabilities and if we look in a long-term future of ai we can hope that ai will be able to work with smaller data sets and in this way service different user profiles as diversity is a key characteristic of disability voice input technologies computer vision brain machine interface silent communications can save valuable time for persons with disabilities and make workplaces more inclusive uh you can find more information about the e-publication which is fully accessible on our website and we also have information about how much of this technology is really in the market and how far they are in their commun commercialization uh journey also in an accessible uh format i look forward to your questions and to the dialogue and thank you very much thank you thank you so much rin this was so interesting um i have a question at once for you um because listening to you i thought a lot about this thing when it comes to consumer products um a clear trend that we can see now is that special assistive technology solutions are converged together with consumer products right so how do you see this relationship i mean for the future how how do you think it's going to look with consumer products and assistive technology so this is also a hope that i think a lot of uh um stakeholders have that this will lead to a increased market share in the market shaping so the the fact that there is uh more audience which is interested and more potential consumers that can really lead to products which you mentioned before you know the solutions that are available for users around the globe so if we have some products which can service both uh all kinds of users um that can lead to a solution which will uh later be more affordable also for users which are for instance in developing countries um at the same time we can uh we can talk about uh solutions which will be uh you know the the spectrum of possibilities will be wider so right now it is about what can i have so that i can live with one single product so uh what we would expect is that we see more variety in products which can um can be much more uh you know servicing uh people with disabilities exactly because of the overlaps that we talked about with consumer electronic goods thank you so much i'm going to ask if we if we have emily online and see if there's any questions for you also hi there you are emily if you have any questions just one here again just a brief one because we're going into a pause afterwards but yes i have a brief question how much of the innovative and new technologies in assistive technology are developed into real products and how many become just prototypes or projects so um when we look at this emerging assistive products we have seen in this assessment that we did that only 18 are already commercialized so uh i think 56 percent are in in the prototyping phase uh and that shows you know the the opportunity that this uh this offers and also the challenges that there are for technology developers to making it to the end market so thank you so much you will be joining us soon again um for a panel discussion and we are right in the beginning or in the beginning of the whole webinar but in the middle of the first session that is focusing on how can artificial intelligence become a door opener to working life for people with disabilities and i will now want to introduce our next guest that is john paulin hanson john is a professor at the technical university of denmark his research focuses on human factors and human computer interaction with a special focus on innovation and usability of new technology much of his research and development work has focused on the use of eye tracking technology for people with disabilities and john will now be speaking with us a little bit about telepresence and teleworking new possibilities for people with disabilities so thank you john for joining us and i hand over to you thank you it's a pleasure to be here for more than 30 years i've been working with gaze tracking involving people with severe motor disabilities for instance people suffering from als and it's a pleasure to see how technology developments have made it possible for these people to stay connected with their friends and maybe in the future they will also be able to monitor and operate a job as part of the workforce and this is actually what we're working on in these recent years we have combined now gaze tracking with different kinds of new technologies including taylor robots and this is the kind of combination that i'll be talking about today the first example i'll show you here is a person laying in a bed wearing a pair of glasses a helmet mounted display for virtual reality but of course we do not expect people to walk around with these glasses in the future so what you should imagine is a future where we'll actually have case tracking and displays built into a pair of normal glasses but we like to work with extreme use cases and this is an example of a person laying in a bed who is unable to move but still can participate in a meeting through a taylor robot that he can control with his gaze what you see in the monitor behind him is what he sees in the helmet-mounted display that he's wearing and inside this there is a gauge tracking system all of this by the way is built on a gaming platform called unity so it's a good example of this uh gaming industry having a huge impact on the potential and way to to integrate new technology the fove head-mounted display is equipped with eye tracking and is placed on the user the pink circle on the monitor functions as a cursor which indicates the user's gaze point a user may interact with a robot via an interface that contains several functions such as a map and an augmented reality keyboard for text messaging routes to destinations can be programmed via gay selection on the map the user may create and edit waypoints which the robot uses to navigate to the user's desired destination once the route is entered the robot autonomously navigates to the program destination with the help of its integrated collision avoidance system after the robot reached its destination the user can once again control the robot via gaze in order to explore their full environment in 360 degrees of course only being able to interact through gays movements is a very extreme case we have worked with people in wheelchairs who would like to be able to use their wheelchair not only to play computer games but also to control remote devices like a robot this next video will show a collaborative or co-creating process we meet with some users at a care home using their wheelchair to interact with robots you see this person wearing the headset and the platform that we develop will allow to transform the motions of the wheelchair to the motions of the robot and now he will be at the location of the robot and it is a very compelling experience for him he actually feels like being at the other location where the robot is god there are several potentials of this technology it can be used for remote collaboration mostly i would expect for knowledge workers but it could also be used for remote operation you can imagine driverless cars being monitored by a user remotely in cases it wouldn't be able to find its own way warehouse trucks could be driven by people remotely floor cleaning robots digital documentation of construction sites where you would like to know what have happened from day to day could also be recorded with driving robots and drones of course security inspection last mile delivery robots and even agriculture robots some of the new work types that we envision could be handled remotely by telepresence robots moreover this technology would allow us to build in visual support systems for people with low vision including for instance the ability to see contrast enhancements or focusing on the areas in the visual scene that you are fixating at exoskeletons is a very interesting new technology now moving from the lab into an actual workforce with people working with support of exoskeletons to for instance carry heavy lifts but we could also imagine these exoskeletons being used for remote assistance of people who are not able to fully use their hands or legs we are part of an eu project building exoskeletons to for rehabilitation of stroke patients and this in the ego just to have an early prototype that we could play around with and again we use the gaming platform unity to do all of the controls it will later be integrated with a hololens system to have augmented reality prompting of the user to do daily stroke rehabilitation exercises i'll look for the future well i might say outlook for japan because they are a little bit ahead of us when it comes to robots i visited a conceptual cafe being operated by robots remotely driven by people with disabilities so in the middle you see a picture of one of the pilots driving the robot the robots were serving coffee to the guests in this cafe and they were having long conversations with the guests all of them controlled from long distances all over japan this company ori jaime developing the robots they have a very successful product in the table robots you see to the right which is um two robots operated by two people with disabilities from two different parts of japan now having a conversation together but the robot is meant for children school children with social anxiety so they can be at school and uh communicate with the teacher and their friends and you can see one of them raising their hand to as an indication that this person would like to say something i would like to conclude this talk with swat analysis of taylor presence for tailor work the strength we see are obviously that it'll be possible to include people into the workforce and thereby increase their quality of life and the weaknesses is a risk of being isolated not just isolated at home but also isolated at the job place because you might not get the same recognition as a robot as you would as a living people being there in real life and we know that isolation is actually one of the biggest disadvantages of the working from home experience that many of us have had during the last year we did a survey in europe with more than 10 000 participants and it turned out again and again that isolation is a real danger with uh working at a distance also you may risk that some of the jobs that will be available for people with title robot assistant presence would be quite repetitive routine tasks opportunities well we'll see a lot of new technology coming and all of that could support and improve on the uh taylor work done by till robots and it would be possible to work globally so if you have a special expertise and some type of work you could uh actually actually press practice that all over the world and finally threats if it's possible for people with disabilities to do the job uh via a robot it may then also be outsourced to low wages countries outside for instance scandinavia and people might be victims of ignorance or discrimination maybe even more so if they are only present as a robot and we have seen examples of chiller robots being bullied people covering the camera of the robots and trying to to close the door in front of them or or in other ways put up obstacles just to test how intelligent is this robot really but on the other hand if you knew that there is actually a living person making a work line of for instance being the floor cleaner it could be that you would relate differently to this robot finally i would like to give a few examples of the research publications we have made within this area and i encourage you to look up some of them if you find this subject interesting wow thank you so much john it's so interesting listening to you i think for many of us when we think or hear about robots you know it's easier thinking about for me at least you know like some futuristic films or star wars if you're brought up in the 80s like me but i mean this is the future is here and now i have a question for you though because um when you talk about future work life and you hear about robots i think there is a many people are afraid or there's an anxiety actually because you think about robots taking people's jobs away um and you often hear this discussion but when i listen to you and i i also know about your research i know there's also like more uh a view of robots actually enhancing people and enhancing work life by technology so can you just give me some brief reflections now what's your take on that well i think lars said it very well in the beginning it is a double-edged sword and and technology in itself is not good or bad we really have to have some policies around the use of them and if one policy would be for instance that responsible workplaces would all work think twice before introducing robots and if they do they would consider could these tailor robots potentially be used by someone who are not part of the workforce at this moment we will get back to that just briefly in the panel actually about responsible policies and things me being a lawyer of course i think these things are very interesting but i do have one more question um i think emily actually has some question coming in from the audience so i'm going to let her in so we will also let hi emily hi we have any questions john yes there's one question using the eyes to control is potentially very tiring since normal eye movements are scanning how do you design for that well there are several ways and that's actually what i've been doing research on together with for instance toby but they're the general experience is that user uh users of of eye tracking technology they they soon become very good at it and um you have for instance something called dwell activation where you would have to look at a button for a short time before you activate it and you see a lot of new ingenious interfaces that are designed just to be operated by gays so the keyboards we have today are designed to be operated by fingers but in the future we're confident that you would see completely different ways of interacting based on the fact that you're interacting with your case so thank you so much john i would like to now invite back actually irene and hector um and uh i'll ask you to stay now uh john i would like to actually start off where you ended uh we talked about policies right um and within um i mean with artificial intelligence that opens for tremendous opportunities of course but also risks and within my working field we speak a lot about sustainable ai and how to avoid prejudice and discrimination and that actually ai amplifies that by bias and now the eu has just proposed a new legislation when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence so of course i have to ask you three experts like you what is your take on that would you like to start hector i mean regulation's a great thing right and innovation you know it's that balance between regulation and innovation and innovators will constantly innovate without necessarily thinking about some of the human impact and and we need an educated political framework or educated policymakers to start kind of building an ecosystem that allows innovators to innovate while not having negative impacts on humans i would i would just say you know we've got many other regulations around the inclusion of people with disabilities not least in how technology is purchased today that is not adhered to routinely across europe right so to me a lot of this is is regulation will sit in its place experts will sit in its place but the main role i think is to actually get these ethical considerations both policy and implications out into the mainstream you know get them to the people who are actually building mainstream technology building or selling technology and buying technology i think there's so much more impact we can i think we can we can learn from existing regulations that are not having an impact they want or need to have and go and focus on those as we move into this ai age and think about the impact on lives of people with disabilities thank you so much and iran what's what's your do you have any thoughts here sure uh i think that the uh there are a lot of thoughts uh currently in a lot of discussions and regulations standards uh around fair um fair ai et cetera and i think the that there is this challenge that very often uh vulnerable groups tend to be you know the ones who are more exposed to different risks uh that relate to privacy and often they they are not able to uh to express their concerns uh or their consent give their consent about uh the use or not of their data and i think the the key here is that we don't have the silos that we have the regulators working together because i i'm participating in the ieee global initiative on ethical considerations and there i have participated as a lawyer myself in some committees where you see the lawyers will think of some uh regulation not bearing in mind the limitations of ai and on the other side the the technical people will not be aware unnecessary of the legal implications or so there is always this balance between over-regulating um or having a race to the bottom like i want to advance and i don't care uh and let's figure it out later so i think it's it's not an easy uh task for anyone working in this but there has to be this this balance and uh the code design that was mentioned before is extremely important like not guessing what end users would maybe like but ask them and make them part of the discussion so i would like to continue on with the question also uh you also spoke about this john but i mean i in the beginning we saw almost 80 percent of the people joining us today are from different kind of public authorities or governmental authorities so of course i have to ask you then what would you wish for i mean if you could wish for authorities and politicians what what would they need to do are there anything that need to be implemented that is not there today that you would like to see to make your research your work at microsoft or you're working more easy and to make the past go better and faster i would suggest one kind of regulation actually um to have a uh and pilot license for uh operating uh tillet robots and uh we actually experienced when working with the users in wheelchair that they were extremely good at driving these wheelchair uh remote tiller robots because they could con reuse all of the expertise they had from driving their own wheelchairs directly into driving a robot and by having a pilot requirement that would take uh this into consideration that that there are people on already out there who are very good at these tasks it could be a way to promote that they would be the first ones to get the jobs that comes within uh till operation hector do you agree on that licenses for robots we used to have a license for uh computer use i don't have people as old as i am but we used to have like a license you could get for using a using a computer i mean yeah i think it's part part of the journey you know my call to action to people is is knowledge and readiness frankly uh you know so many organizations are talking kind of about disability inclusion without having a re without having really any understanding of how people with disabilities use technology even as standard nowadays so one of the learnings we've had inside microsoft is to drive out a big knowledge program across the whole organization every single microsoft employee has to take level 101 on how people with disabilities use technology and how we need people with disabilities inside our organization so there's this there's this piece here that tech's going to carry on you know text just going to keep evolving but the inclusion of people with disabilities in the process is the safest guard you have against us getting it wrong yeah and that comes with confidence you know when you know how a blind person reads an email and that my blind colleagues get through their inbox eight times quicker than i get through my inbox through screen reading technology you'll employ more blind people into some of those administrative roles right you know but people i don't have that confidence and that confidence comes from knowledge honestly you know we have got this the very highest leaders inside microsoft i mean from satya and brad down you know the the people who you see on the television have taken their accessibility badge they have learned how people with disabilities take technology uh use technology and i think that's the biggest call to action policy you build better policy you build better product when you have knowledge and it's not difficult it's just taking some time to go in there go and learn it's very interesting listening to hector because a couple of months ago we had another seminar at the nordic welfare center with the ceo of toby and he was actually saying exactly the same thing um and then we we all you also you always hear there's a lot of private companies actually speaking about that so i'm very interested in how does it look at our public authorities actually how does it look when the employment rates of people with disabilities do we actually work like that we work with nothing about us without us or don't we it's an interesting question to post to ourselves and governments and authorities all uh across the nordics of course uh iran do you would would you like to add something do you have anything that should be done that you public authorities and governments should think about i think i agree on the on the importance of create a common understanding so awareness about different aspects that that play a role and what i see often is that everyone is working on separate aspects and somehow i would i think what is missing is a more holistic approach to things that we we don't just look at needs we don't just look at regulation we don't just look at legislation but we see like a whole product life cycle that we see the whole context because somehow there there are this connection between these different phases missing and then uh what happens is that we are lost in translation between technology legislation regulation and uh somehow it doesn't seem to work so we need to certainly change our paradigm could the universal design become the norm for everybody independent no matter if you're a lawyer or if you're working with is that an ambition should universal design be a norm what do you think i'm happy to come in on that 100 you know universal design is it's like empathetic design is really how i would describe it yeah universal design is is recognizing kind of you know a spark from an exclusion but then just recognizing that loads of people benefit from this this this inclusive design um as i say i always think this just comes first and foremost from you know colleagues working together and representation you know we had the um the canadian minister for disabilities uh at microsoft summit recently and she was explaining that the cabinet in canada you know the very highest level of government all of the documents are made accessible now because she's there and it was like there you go it was that easy you know it was just actually making sure somebody with a disability was in the room and everyone's behavior changed so i just think you know if you just take that as a microcosm and then extend it out uh universal design is is kind of sitting there thing thinking about what doesn't work in your environment right now hacking on it making it better and then actually realizing loads of people benefited from that change you made so yeah proximity drives empathy i keep trying to get that through to people it's really about the the closeness to people with disabilities that's going to make the difference yeah we have a lot of examples of that also in sweden actually of change actually first coming after there are people with uh own disabilities actually being in the place and uh telling about it and showing it um i would like to actually turn out to emily now because perhaps there are any questions from the audience as well so i would like to have time to take them before we take a small recess in two minutes and yes there's one question for hector how do i access the accept accessibility training hector mentioned an internal badge so quite often when people will see our internal badging going out on social but we have a training called accessibility fundamentals uh i can share the link in the slido afterwards but it's ak dot ms forward slash accessibility fundamentals we've also just released some linkedin training on modern workplace and accessibility so i'll share the link for that in the in the slido in a moment but yeah i mean we're trying to be as transparent as possible with our training and make sure it's available more more widely to the public thank you so much um hector john iran thank you so much for joining us for the first part of this uh webinar we're very happy that you're so many joining us today you're almost 450 people from all around the nordics and even outside of the nordics actually who are with us here today um if you want to ask questions um to any of the participants during the day we are very happy uh that you do and please then log in to sli dot d o it's it's a separate function that we use it's called slido so you have to go into uh through your browser or you can just take any kind of a device that you have perhaps an iphone an ipad and you can just point it at the qr code that is now in the picture and then you will automatically get there but otherwise just go into the browser and you write sli dot do and then you route write the code 0 3 4 3 7 0 and you will be able then to ask questions to all the participants during the day during the first part of today we have been listening to researchers and practitioners speaking about how can artificial intelligence become a door opener to working life for people with disabilities and we will now continue on exploring innovation of new technologies just like in the previous sessions um you will be able to comment and write through slido as i just told you um but i would like to now start off by introducing uh svarika brundin uh hi sparker i hope you're here with us hello yeah there you are very nice of you sverker is the head of the innovation competition at the unit for digital participation at the swedish post and telecom authority and apart from the innovation competition the unit also works with telephone and postal services for persons with disabilities and on promoting development of assistible accessibility and universal design in information and communication technologies and sverkey will now be giving us a short brief note on innovation competition for universal design so i hand over for you okay well uh i think i have to get back yes this is the first picture i want to to show you um [Music] and well we had we have a pts have an innovation competition and we we have that because well we think everyone should be able to take advantage of the p
2021-06-19