Category: Research

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Statement on B.1.1.529 Omicron variant

~ John Rochford

On November 26, 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) classified a new variant, B.1.1.529.   It is named Omicron. No cases of this variant have been found in the U.S. to date. CDC is following the details of this new variant. It was first reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) by South Africa. CDC is working with other U.S. and global public health and industry partners to learn more. CDC will continue to monitor its path.

CDC is always watching variants. The U.S. variant watching system has reliably detected new variants in this country. We expect Omicron to be identified quickly, if it emerges in the U.S.

CDC knows what it takes to prevent the spread of COVID-19. They recommend people follow prevention strategies: 

  • Wearing a mask in public indoor settings in areas of high transmission areas
  • Washing your hands frequently
  • Physically distancing from others

 CDC also recommends that everyone 5 years and older protect themselves from COVID-19 by getting fully vaccinated. CDC encourages a COVID-19 vaccine booster dose for those who are eligible.

CDC Omicron info

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) How to Protect Yourself and Others

~ John Rochford

COVID-19 cases are on the rise across the US.  It is important to be safe.  You can protect yourself and others by following some simple guidelines. This is critical during the holiday season.

Protect Unvaccinated Family Members

Some people in your family need to continue to take steps to protect themselves from COVID-19, including

    • Anyone not fully vaccinated, including children under 5 years of age who cannot be vaccinated yet
    • People with weakened immune systems or underlying medical conditions
  • Get Vaccinated
  • Wear a Mask
  • Stay 6 feet away from others
  • Avoid crowds and poorly ventilated spaces
  • Wash your hands often
  • Cover coughs and sneezes
  • Clean and disinfect
  • Monitor your health daily

These tips can help people to stay safe and healthy.

How to Protect Yourself & Others

 

 

 

National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) Foundation Disability, Health Equity & COVID-19

~ John Rochford

1 in 4 adults in the United States has a disability.

What is a disability?

  • A disability is when a person’s body, mind and/or emotional functions intersect with a physical or social environment.  This results in  limitation in activities or restrictions in full participation for the person.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)  data outlines the disability status of U.S. adults. It shows that:

  • 12.0% of adults have a Cognitive Disability
  • 5.9% of adults have a Hearing Disability
  • 12.8% of adults have a Mobility Disability
  • 5.0% of adults have a Vision Disability
  • 3.8% of adults have a Self-care Disability
  • 7.0% of adults have an Independent Living Disability

People with disabilities are  diverse  and have a wide-range of healthcare and support needs.

This infographic highlights the challenges facing the disability community. It shows clear steps that can be taken to support the health and well-being of this community.

Disability, Health Equity & COVID-19  Infographic

AI and Disability Interview

~ John Rochford ~ 6 Comments

AXS Chat recently posted to YouTube an interview of me about my artificial intelligence (AI) research and work for people with disabilities. I talk, in part, about:

  • the promise of a text-comprehension parallel between AI and people with intellectual disabilities;
  • how AI-driven Web text simplification will benefit other populations, such as non-native language speakers; and
  • my work to make sure people with intellectual disabilities and/or autism are not left out of online education.

I thank the AXS Chat members, Neil Milliken, Debra Ruh, and Antonio Santos, for their tireless work to inform the world about inclusion and technology.

Amazon re:MARS Accessibility

~ John Rochford


Amazon Machine Learning Research Awards generously sponsored my colleagues and me to participate in last week’s Amazon re:MARS Conference. It was a global artificial intelligence (AI) event focused on Machine Learning, Automation, Robotics, and Space.

The conference was great with accessibility. I was assigned an employee who guided me everywhere and was just wonderful. The conference website was accessible and easy to navigate. When I identified accessibility problems with the mobile app and with SageMaker tools, Amazon personnel immediately assured me they would be fixed.

The sponsorship included participation in the re:MARS VIP Leadership Networking Reception. I was honored to speak with members of Amazon leadership as well as senior researchers from industry and academia.

We discussed:

  • my AI-driven, Web text simplification research;
  • AI fairness for people with disabilities; and
  • developing an Alexa skill for DisabilityInfo.org.

 

AI Web Text Simplification: CSUN 2019

~ John Rochford

I will soon present part of my AI-Driven Web Text SiCSUN Center on Disabilitiesmplification research.

My talk:

We tested if people with intellectual disabilities understand Web text simplified with plain-language standards. (Spoiler: They do!)

We are operationalizing plain-language standards essentially to develop:

  • a reliable, easy-to-use method for human editors to create simple text; and
  • algorithms for AI to recognize and to create simple text.

 

 

 

 

AI Web Text Simplification: Partners

~ John Rochford

For my AI-Driven Web Text Simplification research, I lead a coalition of corporate and academic partners. They include:

AI-Driven Web Text Simplification: Intro

~ John Rochford

Research Goal

Make Web text so simple people understand it the first time they read it.

Background

Text comprises the vast majority of Web content. Poor reading comprehension presents significant challenges to many populations, including people with cognitive disabilities, non‐native speakers, and people with low literacy.

Text simplification aims to reduce text complexity while retaining its meaning. Manual text simplification research has been ongoing for decades. Yet no significant effort has been made to automate text simplification except as a preprocessor for natural-language processing tasks such as machine translation and summarization.

Short-Term Approach

In the short term, my partners and I are improving manual text simplification by creating effective, replicable methods for humans to produce it. We use national and international plain language standards. We conduct pilot studies to see if people comprehend our human-curated, simplified Web text better than typical Web text.

Long-Term Approach

In the long term, my partners and I are developing artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to produce simple Web text on a mass scale. We are training AI with enormous sets of aligned sentence pairs (typical/simple). We will soon start crowd-sourcing the generation of training data.

I will provide details in future blog posts.

Improving Web Searching for People with Cognitive Disabilities

~ John Rochford ~ 4 Comments

Using a website search tool is difficult for people with cognitive disabilities. Finding a relevant result is often thwarted by spelling errors they make, their inability to detect them, or a lack of understanding about how to correct them. Determining which search results are best can be equally difficult.

This post is a synopsis of an approach to circumventing such problems. An example has been implemented on a web site of the German Institute for Human Rights, which is an easy-to-read version of a United Nations convention on the rights of people with disabilities. A typically-appearing site search incorporates novel spelling-correction features and a simplified presentation of search results.

Spelling Correction

The site search suggests spelling alternatives only for words that actually appear within the content of the website. Searches for correctly-spelled words that produce no search results would be very frustrating for anyone.

To enable spelling suggestions, a manually-edited index of syntactically-similar words was created. Point values were assigned for similarities in the number of the same letters and the word length. A higher value was given to alternative words with the same first letter, but that was not essential.

To enable search-word spelling correction within the fewest steps possible, the most-similar alternatives are displayed in a word cloud. Of those, typically three, the one with the highest probability of matching the intended search word is presented in a larger text size.

Example Spelling Correction

The German word for “contact” is “kontakt”. Initiating a search with the misspelled word “kontat” produces a word cloud as shown in the following image.

Of the displayed three words, Kommunikation Kontakt Kunst, the second is shown in a larger font. All are hyperlinks.

The developers believe the word cloud makes it very easy to recognize the correctly-spelled word, and to select a search word. I don’t know why the first letters are capitalized.

Simplified Search Results

Search results are presented in plain language. Each has a bulleted, succinct summary of information on the linked page; and a contextually-relevant image to aid comprehension.

Example Search Result

The following image shows a single search result translated from German to English using Google Translate.

Contact - Here you will find: The address and telephone number of the German Institute for Human Rights. And a contact form.

One aspect of the search results I do not favor is that links to the search-result pages are not underlined. It is only when the cursor is hovered over a link, such as “Contact” in the example search result, that an underline appears.

Conclusion

I am impressed with this approach. This is the first time I have seen search results presented so simply, and with accompanying relevant imagery. I think the spelling-correction features are also worthwhile. In a pilot study of them, 9 of 34 people with learning disabilities could use the search site independently. I expect the developers will continue user testing. With funding and time, I would like to develop a site search using similar techniques.

Notes