Public Funding for Adapt International Ltd

Nacro Education supports disadvantaged young adults, including young offenders, offering a variety of personalised study programmes, including certified vocational training and work placements. Learners often have low esteem, lack confidence and while they may be developing hard skills, they might easily fall at the job interview hurdle if they don't have the necessary soft skills. To make matters worse, lockdown has highlighted the inequalities disadvantaged young people face learning from home. Soft skills will be one of the advantages humans maintain over machines, so it is vital everyone in society has the opportunity to acquire them. We are going to prototype a remote soft skills training tool to help disadvantaged young adults develop a good set of soft skills they can use at interviews to complement their hard skills and dramatically increase their chances of getting a placement or job. We are going to use a cutting-edge AI-based British innovation to help them. Adaptive-media technology is a new immersive digital video format that uses artificial intelligence to adapt video content naturally to the viewer in real-time, based upon how they appear and how they react, just as humans instinctively adapt to each other. It can read the viewers facial inputs through their device camera (e.g. any smartphone, tablet, PC with modern web browser) to analyse the person in real-time and then serve the viewer appropriate content, based upon human factors such as emotion, attention and demographics, usually in the form of digital video. To use a simple analogy, it is like when we meet someone for the first time, we don't need that person's personal information or data to have a conversation, we just adjust and adapt to the person in front of us by analysing their face and reactions. Adaptive-media fully conforms to GDPR and is NOT doing facial recognition! All users must always first allow their camera to be used and there is no recording or storing of biometric data on any server. The Adaptive-media based remote soft skills training tool project will be the first adaptive-media pilot to solve an important and urgent learning requirement. It will create interview role play scenarios and evaluation for young adults to practice and acquire the soft skills they need to perform better in interview situations, even when they are unable to attend a physical school or college. The project will hopefully validate the Adaptive-media format, opening up many possible applications.

A-dapt has developed a new intelligent content format called Adaptive-media®. Our solution is the first AI-based media format that can actively perceive the viewer at home on their PC, tablet or smartphone adapting to screen based content, identifying factors such as their emotions, demographics and attention, whilst fully protecting their personal privacy. This project is the first adaptive-media pilot product designed for a post Covid-19 world that suddenly finds itself increasingly self-isolated and addresses a key education issue. During lock down teachers, parents and carers have been grappling with the challenges of how to keep children focused at home and in the classroom, with all their distractions, as education increasingly moves to screen based learning. This situation looks set to continue. The core idea for this project is to help children sustain attention better during remote / blended learning by measuring, maintaining and rewarding their attention whilst engaged in screen-based activities. We term this “Adaptive Learning” when the Focus Pocus application is integrated into new and existing education and national curriculum content, giving the parent and teacher the opportunity to identify lack of focus and intervene when appropriate. It saves them time. It also gives the content provider the opportunity to identify which element of the content attracts the greatest attention and provides an opportunity to provide content that is stimulating and constructive. Focus Pocus is a simple browser-based owl 3D character who responds to and encourages children to sustain attention whilst learning. To start, the parent inputs the child’s age range, level of attentiveness and session time. When they allow their device camera, Focus Pocus wakes up and measures their child’s attention for the duration of the exercise. What makes Focus Pocus unique is although it uses a device camera, no images are recorded or filmed. It is the first GDPR-compliant home learning aid of its type, using an Edge AI-based media format that can actively perceive the learner at home or in the classroom, on their PC or tablet and respond to attention levels, whilst fully protecting their personal privacy. Through Innovate UK funding, Focus Pocus is being developed to going into an evaluation with our partner White Rose Maths. By combining video lessons with Focus Pocus AI we are testing a Maths catch up program that will: • Overcome the challenges of making up lost ground with Maths • Enable student to work at their own pace • Providing encouragement to replay the lesson if not paying attention / confused Demo: https://focuspocus.ai Video: https://youtu.be/_A6r8X_WGWA