DeepSpark
Lead Participant:
HABITAT LEARN LIMITED
Abstract
Habitat Learn Limited (HLL) (formerly Note Taking Express Limited) provides a personalised learning toolkit (HabitatLearn) to improve learning outcomes for students. HabitatLearn is an eco-system of live closed-captioning, note-taking and mind maps to enable students to reach individual learning objectives more effectively. It has 20,000+ UK student-users, and 300 HEI partners in UK and North American. DeepSpark builds upon IUK project ANGEL, an AI tool for automated summary notes/lecture-transcript mind-maps generation.
Need and significance
At least 98.3% of UK/North American universities were forced online in 2021 and online/blended learning will remain a permanent feature of education. Curriculum digitalisation means that increasing numbers of international students will attend courses online. Not all students find the transition to online learning easy, especially in the presence of specific learning challenges.
The 2019 European Accessibility Act requires accurate video-captioning by all public sector bodies to make lectures accessible for students with specific learning disabilities. Despite advances in automated speech recognition (ASR), human intervention continues to be required for the desired accuracy, making the costs prohibitive.
Innovation Objectives
HLL proposes DeepSpark to develop end-to-end, continuous, automatic speech understanding (ASU) drawing upon a 250,000+ hour repository (growing at 50% pa) of human-curated lecture recordings and transcripts across a range of disciplines. DeepSpark will support the development of HLL's proprietary algorithms to create affordable, accurate, offline ASU services for low-energy consumption end-user devices for educational lecture contexts. DeepSpark will improve current state-of-the-art through:
\* designed once, used everywhere training/optimisation methodology;
\* personalisation for individual students;
\* accurate transcription cost reduction to mass-affordability levels;
\* speed improvement using mobile and off-line technologies;
\* creating secure storage on individuals' devices
HLL is partnering with University of Southampton's expertise in AI, accessibility and personalised learning to support these developments.
Project Outcomes
DeepSpark will provide transformational automation of speech recognition applied to education to substantially improve the accuracy, disciplinary specificity and speed of transcription, and to generate smart notes for students as a learning support tool.
DeepSpark will use AI, knowledge engineering and on-device methodology to deliver speed of response and affordability, resulting in a commercially viable proposition. DeepSpark will support the mass-adoption of HLL's knowledge engineering technology across the entire student population transforming it from a limited accessibility tool to a generic EdTech learning toolkit meeting Universal Design for Learning methodology for teaching and learning.HLL will create 8 highly skilled UK jobs over 5 years increasing FTEs to 25\.
Need and significance
At least 98.3% of UK/North American universities were forced online in 2021 and online/blended learning will remain a permanent feature of education. Curriculum digitalisation means that increasing numbers of international students will attend courses online. Not all students find the transition to online learning easy, especially in the presence of specific learning challenges.
The 2019 European Accessibility Act requires accurate video-captioning by all public sector bodies to make lectures accessible for students with specific learning disabilities. Despite advances in automated speech recognition (ASR), human intervention continues to be required for the desired accuracy, making the costs prohibitive.
Innovation Objectives
HLL proposes DeepSpark to develop end-to-end, continuous, automatic speech understanding (ASU) drawing upon a 250,000+ hour repository (growing at 50% pa) of human-curated lecture recordings and transcripts across a range of disciplines. DeepSpark will support the development of HLL's proprietary algorithms to create affordable, accurate, offline ASU services for low-energy consumption end-user devices for educational lecture contexts. DeepSpark will improve current state-of-the-art through:
\* designed once, used everywhere training/optimisation methodology;
\* personalisation for individual students;
\* accurate transcription cost reduction to mass-affordability levels;
\* speed improvement using mobile and off-line technologies;
\* creating secure storage on individuals' devices
HLL is partnering with University of Southampton's expertise in AI, accessibility and personalised learning to support these developments.
Project Outcomes
DeepSpark will provide transformational automation of speech recognition applied to education to substantially improve the accuracy, disciplinary specificity and speed of transcription, and to generate smart notes for students as a learning support tool.
DeepSpark will use AI, knowledge engineering and on-device methodology to deliver speed of response and affordability, resulting in a commercially viable proposition. DeepSpark will support the mass-adoption of HLL's knowledge engineering technology across the entire student population transforming it from a limited accessibility tool to a generic EdTech learning toolkit meeting Universal Design for Learning methodology for teaching and learning.HLL will create 8 highly skilled UK jobs over 5 years increasing FTEs to 25\.
Lead Participant | Project Cost | Grant Offer |
|---|---|---|
| HABITAT LEARN LIMITED | £349,448 | £ 244,614 |
Participant |
||
| INNOVATE UK | ||
| INNOVATE UK | ||
| UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON | £87,690 | £ 87,690 |
People |
ORCID iD |
| Jeremy Brassington (Project Manager) |