HumanWare: Plotting the Course
i'm already in it i'm already in it i'm going to win i'm going to win ah shoot if my outlook pull open got it got it oh i think i won we're going to find out dude one one of us will have sent it to you first peter peter yeah yeah check that emma vita is the winner so everything is also that all the technical stuff on the zoom uh should be working robert was going through the list yep so we're all good there um do we want to run um so if you're gonna share slides we recommend that just one person yeah be sort of the slide person and then if other people are speaking if you can say next or if you know when they're gonna go just click next um so if we want to practice that we should have that set up before attendees come in okay so you want to do it now or we can okay let me let me do that perfect just make sure if you have two screens open okay yeah it's the the right one that we see that's it that's the only thing i want to show okay right so do we want um do you have a title slide or anything that you want to go to um i have a title for each one okay which we'll just go to slide then you mean when uh we're going to start the webinar right yeah yeah um we should have made one i didn't title slide it i'm down for non-visual eight presentations yeah but uh is it something that uh the captioning is going to uh to describe or taking the the title describing the line the live caption will just capture what people are saying what we say okay okay okay okay okay see yeah so it won't describe it um what's on the screen um after the fact we'll do our own sort of actual editing um when we upload this to our channels um for on-demand video and we'll have descriptive text and all that good stuff you have four minutes to make a title slide yeah i'm doing that um you're doing one emma yes i'm doing one with the title and the speaker name 11 20 right yeah we have we have we have a good uh you know it's 106. we got time guys we have all the time in the world it's not 106. it's uh 2 206. wow for some of us we're all in different time zones here you know right um so while we're doing that uh i'll just go over to the general format so we will open up this webinar we'll get it out of practice mode at around 11 15 11 16 and just let people sort of come in um while we're waiting i'll do sort of a periodic update every like minute or so be like hi you know welcome if you just joined we're going to start at 11 20. that's in you know two minutes um if you guys want banter or anything that's totally fine um normally we play music but we found that really interferes with people's screen readers and stuff so we're not gonna go there um so i will introduce the session um and also introduce all of you and then i'll do some quick housekeeping things and then who should i hand it off to to take it from there so i'll i'll i'll take the uh kind of the intro sort of first section of it um and then i'll i i'm not sharing a screen writing i'll just do some do some general overview and sort of some of that but you can throw it to me for the for the intro and the welcome ladies and gentlemen yeah that kind of stuff okay great um so that'll be all good and then i'm just so i get everyone's names correct so i'm pronunciation i tried youtubing you all um so i have eric beauchamp yes yes yeah hey you don't have to pronounce the p at the end just boshin done um peter too sick and then francois i don't i couldn't do it i feel i i tried so hard i can't even do it robert so don't feel bad smith smith yeah just call him francois smith real just say about real quick otrell what so it's all good okay so great so i'll do that quick little intro i'll just name all the panelists um so here's what i have so eric beauchamp director of product management at humanware beautrill emerging technology leader at humanware and then peter tusik brand ambassador of blindness products at humanware rock and roll okay great um and so then are you guys planning on doing any sort of interactive q a at all with attendees not not while we're not while we're on no okay perfect so i'm going to direct them all the chat will be close to attendees but if you want to share something like some like a link or whatever you can send that in the chat um so everyone should have that capability and send that to all attendees but they won't be able to talk to you and they won't be able to talk to each other um so emma i think if if you can at the end if you can just drop our website into the chat it would be super cool okay and i can maybe do a slide with with our uh yeah like a conclusion yeah website yeah powerpoint uh slide with it i'm doing that at the moment great and so i'll direct people if they have questions or comments they'll put it in the q a um you should have access to that but i will copy and paste those at the end and then send that an email to emma and eric as well so you will all have it and then um once we're done i'll send an email pretty much right after and then if you can send me the recording that i can download um you might need to send me the passcode as well for the recording session if you don't know how to do that i can show you um and then we will upload that to our youtube channel in the next couple days um and then it'll also be on our website um added to sort of the agenda we'll have sort of video on demand i usually record i usually record it on my pc so then i have the file and send it directly to you yeah right and then i'm recording it as well to my computer too so we'll have we'll have at least two versions um just as a backup and then once you all are done with the presentation and you've all finished if you can just hand it over to me whoever's the last speaker um and then i'll just do a quick thank you and then i'll direct people to return to the main stage session okay so yeah that's great easy so um once your slides are ready and up um we'll do that and then we'll go live in about four to five minutes yeah i i need to say that they didn't change the title is it is it the problem or do you think it's okay from who changed it no no i mean uh robert i was thinking you were asking me to change the title of the slides oh no no no no he was asking if we had a title slide like an intro slide um [Music] plus we're going to go for live on facebook so that's what i'm preparing right now oh yeah if you are planning to stream please set that up i forgot to mention that um and then just i mean i don't to tell you all but if you're not speaking or whatever if you can put yourselves on mute um i don't if you want to practice that now and just make sure you can mute and unmute yourselves um sometimes there's a setting that yeah i just i just do it right on my headset so you will not actually see me go unmuted okay so who's going to show the slide the first slides the intro slides is it going to be francois or is it emma francois can can just you muted emma so francois you're going to show the the intro slide yeah it should be all in the same powerpoint so that like if you stay on that slide you're gonna have that slide in the intro and when you're speaking guys you were gonna see you on top of the the zoom meeting so i think it's better this way and then when francois wants to use the slides the other slides then you can just switch to uh to the the presentation that you want yeah because i i don't have an intro slider i don't have one in my i just have four slides there is no uh title or what you are looking for i don't have one so i'm doing one right now for you and i'm just gonna email you the slide so that you can just uh drag and drop in your okay presentation that that two minutes to midnight okay but at the very beginning of the presentation uh do we have one or not at all yes yes in like 20 seconds yeah that's what emma is going to send you yeah okay me okay thanks thank you there you go there waiting for it it's it's gone okay i got it oh god facebook just crashed on me [Music] no one will watch us there they'll just be confused huh everyone will be just be confused if you go live on facebook i i mean i hope it works but andrew and i have had trouble with the with it for some reason if you stay a while and that that live producer thing it it stops after a while and i do a try yep looks good cool let's do it wait just go on the second slide that i sent you okay no it's fine it's fine i thought it was written you aware but it's a human word it's good so i i keep it that way what you have to do this slide you put it it's the first slide and then the website slide you can put it at the very end with the the the thank you slide if you want to use it yeah but let's tell you when to change the size yeah i think i think i think it would be better if i i can show you now and then i stop the sharing no no well when you're inviting people in you want them to see this yeah yeah this is okay okay okay faith and confidence let's go fire away okay so starting recording and going live is that good guys perfect start recording go live hi and welcome if you're just joining us we're going to start at 11 20 so just hang tight grab a cup of coffee and we'll begin soon hi everybody if you're just joining us we're going to start in two minutes at 11 20. you're in the right place if you want to learn about delving into the past present and future of assistive technology so if that's what you are here for if you're if you're blind and you're not looking at the screen you're not able to there is a an intro slide up so you're in the right spot um now hi everybody okay we're going to start in a couple seconds here but if you're here for the human wear breakout session you are in the correct spot i'm just going to give it a couple more seconds to let people in okay great so hello and welcome to plotting the course delving into the past present and future of assistive technology for the visually impaired community through the lens of artificial intelligence my name is robert frawley and on behalf of site tech global i am excited to have you join us today in this 30 minute breakout session hosted by humanware you'll hear from eric beauchamp director of product management at humanware francois potrill emerging technology leader at humanware and peter tusick brand ambassador of blindness products at humanware before we begin just a couple housekeeping items this session is being recorded and will be available post event on our sitetech global youtube channel if you have any questions or comments throughout this breakout session please use the q a box and we will send those to our panelists after this session and with that please take it away peter thank you so much robert and thank you to everyone for being here it is definitely a different type of conference i know many of us have attended quite a few virtual events so we're really glad you are here and uh humanware myself included would like to thank the sitetech global uh conference chairs and everyone for giving us the opportunity to be here we do have an intro slide up which is basically has our our humanware logo and our our website but i i do want to talk a little bit about what humanware does for those of you again who aren't familiar with us we are an assistive technology company that's really our main focus is to improve uh the ability for those who are blind or visually impaired to interact with mainstream products as well as just the the world around them we have been around for a long time we're going on i believe just had our 32nd anniversary here at humanware in some form so we've been around for quite some time and as the brand ambassador of blindness products um as as robert gave you my title i am totally blind and i'm a user of many of our blindness and and speech products and i'll be talking about three quickly three categories of products that we make i'm really glad to have francois and eric here because once i give an overview a little bit of a who we are we're going to really talk about what we are and how we present and how we kind of get products um and have have brought products to market over the years and what we what we look at as well as kind of taking a glance at and looking at how the world around us is changing and how artificial intelligence specifically you know machine learning and through deep learning and these different types of emerging technologies are going to really play a role in the future of assistive technology i mean and i mean more specifically for those of us who are blind or visually impaired at humanware we have three really three main categories when it comes to the product uh sort of product set that we that we offer the first of which being braille or blindness products that are braille displays or refreshable braille products i did not want to make everyone sit through slide after slide of what these products are but when we talk about the braille side of things braille is a very linear way a braille reader reads one line at a time and it's a very linear way of taking in the world and what we try to do with refreshable braille products is not only encourage braille literacy well just literacy in general so that somebody can actually read the world around them meaning with a refreshable braille display we can read anything that is on a computer screen um anything that is presented through a screen reader such as voiceover or jaws uh or nvda but also it's a way to take information and make it more usable because a lot of times when information is presented to a sighted user or on a screen it can be very visually organized and we try to take that and help organize and present that information in a linear way so refreshable braille products are a big part of what we do we when we talk about refreshable braille these products work in conjunction with mainstream devices such as an iphone an ipad an android tablet as well as working independently so we do have independent google certified braille tablets uh which we refer to as note takers and those products are more of your full standalone braille first products that give access to april first word processor or email client a braille first planner as well as improving the usability of third-party applications so again when we launch something like a oh an app such as let's say amazon there are tabs across the bottom of the screen one of them may be for you and another may be titled with something else and we can use first letter navigation to quickly jump to certain parts of the screen right we're improving that usability to a braille user to somebody who reads the world one line at a time and this is actually something we'll we'll touch on at the end of this discussion in terms of how how can we and how do we determine what information and you know is relevant and how do we improve that so humanware is very much into promoting braille literacy we are also um have a speech product sort of category when it comes to our devices one of our most popular products worldwide is something called the victor reader stream or the victor reader line of products these are products that really are are used by a wide variety of individuals but mostly by those who use who are newer to vision loss or who who are not as comfortable or familiar with touch screen devices not at all saying that is our only sort of user group there but it is something that we we build to allow an easy way to access auditory content so a very easy way to consume podcasts a way to read books auditory content music and record notes in addition we also have a gps component to that so a standalone blindness sort of oriented gps system and that is where francois who is far smarter than i on these products will touch on and how we kind of how did we get there and how we developed these pieces but that sort of is our speech side of things so again a way for somebody who is blind or visually impaired to consume audio content um via via a push button device in addition to having the ability to work with gps for instructions whether we are walking in a car looking at points of interest around us so that's kind of that second uh sort of strand of what we do and the third is our low vision product category low vision can affect anybody but primarily it is something that you know is age related as we know that again does not mean that is our only focus but we make products that will range from uh devices that can magnify what is directly in front of you so a recipe book or a sewing or knitting knitting pattern uh two very intelligent devices much like our braille devices that incorporate mainstream google certified tablets we have this same sort of side of things when it comes to our low vision devices so being able to combine not only magnifying the book that you're reading but then being able to jump into google classroom uh or or use a third party application with screen magnification in addition to distance viewing and other other pieces so with the low vision side um we have the the standalone products we also have handheld magnification uh which would kind of encompass spot reading um or quickly looking at [Music] information such as maybe a bill or some mail that you're reading and you're doing that in a very portable way so when what the point i'm making is when we look at the product sort of the product set that we have we're making products for an age range of anywhere from four or five all the way up to 100 plus um as well as every facet or every level of vision loss from somebody who is new to vision loss whether that be age related or genetic conditions such as myself somebody who has been totally blind their entire life which is me and for you know making braille products as well as products for somebody who just finds using mainstream devices more difficult right we want to improve that usability on those third-party applications so we we a lot goes into how we get to what we do and i just wanted to give a brief overview kind of of what humanware does and and kind of the different levels of of products that we produce them will kind of guide us into what we're kind of having as a roundtable discussion with eric and francois and i guess it'll lead me in and i'm going to ask some questions um to really help eric and francois along here they don't need my help but really to help guide the discussion because what we want to talk about is how does or and how will artificial intelligence affect what it is that we have built and what we will build and i guess to start it off and i think it's very relevant to our audience and eric i mean when we talk about where you came from and francois is in the same boat how did you go from being somebody who was more on the development side of things because i know you were a programmer and you're really good at that but going from someone who who sort of built or programmed to to now being in a role where you're more of a visionary or you're adapting or reading the market and figuring out what people need because i think a lot of people out there are not familiar with assistive technology or as familiar so can you talk a little bit about how you got to kind of make that shift into 18 into looking at not just the programming but into the into the analyzing side of things thank you very much for that great introduction peter and i now i understand why we call you the brand and brass ambassador beautiful speech exactly uh my name is eric bosha i'm with the company for uh 10 years now and before i joined the company or when i joined the company uh 10 years ago i i developed i'm a computer engineer by trade and i developed a lot of applications ranging from simulation aircraft controllers or even in the financial world so i was doing all these kinds of programming then i ended up at humanware and human where we develop and help people out and i was always curious on the how what and for who were developing these products so by asking these questions i started being interested on on the who and and who when i started understanding the who means that i was getting excited about these products and i wanted to do more and i felt good about myself because i was helping people visually impaired that were visually impaired be more productive in their life so that's how i made the switch from the r d part of things to the marketing the product management thing so i became the product manager for low vision devices which you described very well our portfolio with the magnifying magnifier simple magnifier electronic magnifier range to the more complex and intelligent devices out there but it was my interest in the what how and who we do it for that uh gave me that that passion for this industry and it's i i for a second i thought you were talking about the band the who i thought you were just really got into the band who and that really got you into a.t but and
i know francois you you also i mean you you kind of had that development side and now you're in a very unique role too with with humanware can you talk a little bit about how you got to that level or how you got to where you are right now yes i've been um with the company for the last uh 18 years now and i was at the very beginning of the development of our gps navigation tool called tracker and for all those years we have tried to enhance to simplify the device to be more efficient and to be more usable by different type of people even old people can use this type of product but at some point we have realized that uh it was great we could lead a person to from point a to point b but we have realized that it was not enough playing with gps receiver playing with digital maps was not enough we could enhance a bit even more the user experience so we decided to maybe to take a step back and say okay what what does it exist in the uh in this industry but also in uh academic uh um fields uh with various projects um led by by researchers in ai and and we were wondering how could we uh take those new technologies not already uh uh in the mainstream and um uh think uh find the most promising one to introduce them in our own products so that's what we have been doing and it's a i would i would call it a job of applied research i would say so between the academic world startups and how um a job of integrating the technology for real products so we are in the middle of all that and and trying to to uh offer some some new type of uh of user experience at the end i love it and and i i think you know when we look at that and we talk about that we did this not decided but when we started to look and realize that technology it wasn't just solving a problem we used to build products and we still do that solve a problem of accessing information how do we more easily browse the web or how do we more easily look at the board at the front of the room but can can both of you and i'll throw it to eric first talk a little bit about about the first forays into how do we use ai originally the you know when when we started thinking about ways to not just make the font bigger but actually use artificial intelligence to to improve or start to build that into our products and i know one that comes to mind being something like diamond edge font if you wanted to touch on it but how how did we start to implement that and this is kind of more of that past side of this discussion before we get to where we are now and what we're looking at in the future yeah and and to answer that question you have to understand what what is artificial intelligence and i looked it up in a very simple definition of artificial intelligence is refers to a simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions so right away you know that first part of that definition when you think about our products is like you said the diamond edge what is a diamond edge it's really a marketing sentence that we use here at humanware but it really uh identifies the ocr part of things i know cr is an acronym called optical character recognition so what we do in our products in our intelligence product is that when we put it at something a reading material underneath a camera we take a capture of it and that intelligence or that program that algorithm will go through that capture and detect all the writing on the uh on the material and then replace that writing uh with a computer font and that computer fine can be magnified as big as you want because it without loss of any image quality because you've replaced that font it's not you're not relying on the um on the camera on the quality of the camera but you're really relying on on how well the algorithm or the the program did on detecting all these characters on the material and by doing that it gives you the biggest contrast the biggest uh zooming part of factor things and then what you end up doing is that you can have the machine read it out loud to you so that first definition of ai replacing what human can do you have it right there you have the reading part of things the seeing part of things and then the second part is more on the future that's coming i'll read it out to you but it's for it's for your thoughts you know and that i love this little definition the term may also be applied to any machine that exhibits traits associated with a human mind such as learning and problem solving so that is the future of ai but you're right peter it all started somewhere and that that's kind of where it started and we had several products in our past that uh that that that was the start of the um character recognition and the diamonds right and i i think it's neat because it kind of augments what optical character recognition did right when optical care we didn't invent ocr we just made it made it better right took it to the next level for somebody who is low vision using the ability to take a picture of text not only turn it into that font but then what if you want to read it by column by line right making it more applicable or more usable by implementing that ai so i love i just i always think of that example because we took something that already existed and applied some intelligence to it to make it more more functional and i guess and adapted to the needs of the of the user changing the contrast colors is one example awesome exactly and francois from from your side you know when you think of you know we've had products we've had gps products for over 15 years actually longer than that where have you seen or how did you see kind of that how do we bring some of that intelligence in from making it more than just turn right turn left you know which is which is enough intelligence in itself but i know even on those products we've we've done a lot to make that that better yes yes you are right so let me give you an example um on an ongoing project that we have uh we want we want to to guide a person to point b but at a certain point maybe the uh the address is not accurate or the gps position has some some accuracy and we need to be better in order to uh get the person uh to reach the very final destination which is the door in that case we we want to understand uh how what what's what's the um the outside world uh the the outdoor uh scene in order to understand where are the the buildings where are the possible doors so we we have developed an approach based on deep learning to understand all that and uh we are basically we need to do some some uh some work on the data so we have a definitive uh um ai pipeline to in order to do that to accomplish that ai task so we uh we collect some data and we i will uh uh share with you a few slides about that so it's perfect because that's where i was headed how do we collect that data how do we get kind of that information to know you know it's easy to say well i think i want to solve this problem but how do we how do we gather or collect that info anyway yes so um here we we what we want to do is to understand how the person can reach a door and enter a home or a store or whatever uh possible address he wants to reach and we have collected uh thousands of uh doors uh images of buildings and uh house numbers we we try to be uh not very specific to a given area we need to have a a broad a very various type of a database with many many images and we did that first in uh collecting some data in our own area in montreal in canada looking at residential areas looking at commercial areas even in the suburbs and trying to get the maximum that we could get just walking around in streets a bit like a global maps but specifically for for the for the pedestrian and then here you can see that based on those images we train some models because the the root of the of the ai we are looking at is the the training of models which which are are going to be the one uh the piece of software that that will take some uh decision and will help us to uh to accomplish a certain task and in that case in that very specific case it's to detect some doors that you that you can see here with house numbers and uh in that case we are able to take a better decision to say to the user okay you are not far from that location you can walk maybe 30 feet straight and you will reach the the entrance of the home and uh to do that it's it's good but we have to face to deal with very difficult task of handling some some images where the world is not perfect we don't have the door which is obviously on an image very visible on an image sometimes we have some occlusion what we call the occlusion it can be a stair ramp it can be a person which is in front of the door when we collect the data so uh we have very different situation where it's difficult and we have to take care of that so it's not an easy part when but when you get the right data it's uh uh we can offer something which is very interesting but i think the variables come into play as well right i mean it could be snowy or even if you have that perfect door um i think it's it's kind of you you get there are so many different variables that this that the the you know the ai has to account for exactly yes and uh but you know what what we want to do is maybe to do less but to do to do it better i think one of the principles that we are working with is the fact that if we want to accomplish too much if we want to be too much optimistic with ai maybe we will not succeed we need to be very pragmatic and say okay let's try to introduce the technology the best way that we can but tackling a few interesting problems but not everything at the same time it will take huge but we are studying and and i guess it it leaves me because again we're we don't want to run out of time and i think about we look at where we where we are right we've we have a wide range of products for a wide range of users and when we think about not only how we've begun and have successfully implemented a lot of intelligence whether that is you know improving mainstream technology developing our own specific technology when we look at moving forward and we look at this i i love this sort of what we're delving into what we're getting into on what you're looking at francois with with learning how to traverse very uh complex environments right or being able to walk and identify where doors are or or signage or things like that but when we look at where this is going and and taking the last couple of minutes here when we think about the future how how will this ultimately how it's how is it going to impact us as a blind visually impaired community um and not only how will it do it but will that be in steps i mean how do you foresee or how do you think it will come into play um and and how many years do you think we're looking at because i think we're we've perversely i mean we're always hearing two years from now or three years from now but we heard that four years ago right so what are your thoughts there in terms of how will this technology ultimately help build these types of products and i think i can build on what fossa francois was saying previously is that we need to azerite the right questions to the right uh users and what do the users want to do with it and where we can bring that technology my friend is talking about a subset of objects that we can detect which objects can we detect and be good at what would make a difference to the users in their day-to-day lives in this example that francois was saying it was from point a to b and then what what makes it better as a ux or a user experience is to bring that person to the door directly and how can we bring that person to the door by detecting the address for example and then what happens at the door open the door where do we go we go inside what's going to happen next is it indoor navigations is it scenery the uh detection is that where we're going to go i think the technology will with time develop and we can use that mainstream technology and apply it to these uh for the visually impaired community and and have them more effective in their day-to-day tasks i don't know if you want to add something to that so if you would agree with eric is that it's going to be in stops right we identify and i love what you're saying about start with less is more let's perfect the task we can for perfect is what i'm hearing and then we start to move on because again if we bite off more than we can chew uh we're never going to really we're never going to we're never going to get there right it's kind of in phases yeah i i totally agree i think there are two points here the first thing is how uh people will interact with the system so we didn't talk about uh dialogues and personal assistant agents that can help the user but we there is something which is very important is the the speech recognition capability the natural language understanding so it means that people uh in a few years from now and it's already starting uh people will interact uh in a very is easier way with the natural language understanding so they will be able to establish a kind of dialogue with a system it would be less uh difficult to operate with some buttons and and menus etc and what i think is uh at the moment uh what the such a system does is for the user it's a bit of a passive um situation the the person is requesting something and the system gives an answer i see it as passive and in the future it will be much more proactive people will take uh the um the initiative to ask a system a specific request where where do i have a an empty seat in a restaurant can you guide me can you get me to the approaching uh crosswalk in the street you see this type of thing so i think it's it will take some years i think to be honest it will be more than two years probably three to five years it will be much easier to to work with but um uh it's the way i think the the the development will go uh the those uh better interaction better user interface and to have the user in the center of of of the the system the user will be uh controlling the system not the other way around i like i agree with i agree with and and the how the user will interact and how we're going to present the information to the user is very important you can have all the technology and all the intelligence and the technology but if if you blur out all the information at the same time what is that user going to do with that all that information and there's a lot of thinking that has to go in there and how to present that information to the user i i totally agree with that transformation thanks so much well we're almost out of time and i will say as somebody who's totally blind and travels all over the place the day i can go to an airport gate um and easily locate a seat to sit in and i have no problem asking for help but it's it's that whole that whole point to make that that final task right how can i simply without any assistance locate a restroom some of those very very simple tasks that that are they're simple ones they're not seen as that major problem but there's something that we face and i think that this sort of ai in the intelligence and combining it into the products and our experience that we've put into play over the past 32 years is going to start to make some major differences so thank you so much you guys uh thanks for being here and i really appreciate it i hope this was helpful i know we had a it was like a it went by fast we're like on the bullet train over here but uh thank you to the site tech global uh conference chairs again for giving us the opportunity um we hope everyone found this helpful and for more information you can visit us at www.humanware.com and if there's anything else anybody wants to say please uh make it happen francois thank you so much and thanks so much to eric and i think we should pass it on to robert to finish it off great thank you guys this was a great breakout session um so i will be sending any q a's that your team received to you via email so be on the lookout for those um so everyone we're going to be closing out this session now um please make your way back to the main stage by going to sitetechglobalboards.com forward slash event and we hope you enjoy the rest of the show thank you thanks friends
2020-12-28 19:17
