Math without barriers

***UPDATE***

We at the Polin Laboratory Team are incredulous, moved and grateful for the support you have given us! There are still 22 days left until the end of the campaign and we have reached and exceeded our goal!!

Now we are even more motivated and aiming higher!

In addition to the prototype of SpeechMatE, which we will create with the help of two research grants of six months, financed thanks to your support and the doubling of UniTo, we can think about financing, at least in part, Phase III of the project. We will therefore be able to immediately start designing and creating the final software. This will allow us to be operational and start the final phase immediately!

Our new goal is to reach 15.000 euros: so let's not give up now!

We still have time to raise more funds! Please, continue helping us to spread the campaign and reach the new goal!

Thank you again for your support! 

***

The story of SpeechMatE

In October 2019 Jan Berger, a young UniTo university student who became tetraplegic due to an accident, contacted the Polin Laboratory. Jan was enrolled in the Mathematics Degree Course and his request was simple: what software can I use to write formulas and carry out exercises, given that I can't use my hands? Unfortunately we were unable to provide Jan with an effective response.

We have received and continue receiving many requests from various schools for students who for various reasons cannot use their hands. There is currently no software capable of responding to these requests.

With a small loan we managed to develop SpeechMatE (Speech-Driven Mathematical Editor), a software for dictating some formulas. However, what we have built is now technologically outdated and has no functionality for editing and navigating by voice. Now we want to create the web version of SpeechMatE, in Italian, with the new features.

Help us with a donation to develop this one-of-a-kind project!!!

We are convinced that SpeechMatE will be essential for people with motor or visual disabilities or with learning disorders, but also useful for all those who study mathematics.

We care about this project very much, because we want Jan and all students like him to have the same opportunities as everyone else in studying STEM subjects.

The project

SpeechMatE is a large-scale and very complex project. Skills are needed from different sectors of contemporary scientific research: mathematics teaching, software development, Natural Language Processing, Human-Computer Interaction, Large Language Models. The realization of our project will require approximately two years of work.  We have foreseen some main phases:

1. In this phase we want to study how to use the new potential offered by Artificial Intelligence, in particular by Large Language Models, those of ChatGPT for instance. The idea is to sequentially use a speech recognizer (speech-to-text) and one or more LLMs (text-to-text) to correct recognizer errors. Let's consider a very simple example:

if I dictate x + 3 the speech recognizer writes "ics plus 3" (this is what happened with the first version of SpeechMatE) and we need to find a way to transform it into x + 3. An effective LLM will be able to perform this task by mathematical language transforming "ics plus three" into "x + 3".

For this phase we obtained funding from the CRT Foundation by winning a research call.

2. In this phase we want to create a web application prototype to test with teachers and students, under the guidance of researchers in mathematics education. This testing phase is crucial to identify the most important features for the final software.

The effectiveness of the project depends on the work of our researchers at this stage. We need your help to start phase 2 and create and test the prototype!!

3. In this phase we will use the research results of the previous phases for the design and development of the actual software. If we succeed, SpeechMatE will be a reality and students like Jan will be able to study scientific disciplines independently!!

How you can help us

We need your help to carry out Phase 2. Only with your support will we finance 2 research grants of 3 months each (but they will become 6 with the doubling of UniTo): one for the development and finalization of the prototype (IT skills) and the other for experimentation (skills in mathematics teaching) with teachers and students. This phase is very important for the creation of the final software. Having a prototype available that allows us to carry out tests with teachers and students, supported by researchers in mathematics education, is essential to effectively design SpeechMatE. Over the years we have understood that it is essential to develop software with the support of accurate tests carried out with teachers and students.

Help us create SpeechMatE, donate now!

Still not convinced?

The idea follows that of the voice assistants of our smartphones: we know that, if we cannot use our hands, we can use voice commands to send a message or call a person in our address book, simply by saying "send message to Luca" or "call Luca". With SpeechMatE we want to do the same, but in the context of writing mathematics: "Write one over two plus x to the second", "go to the first summand". Simple right?

Not really... We said that we can't really use current systems, which allow dictation in words, for several reasons. One is verbosity: have you ever tried to write a formula in words? A formula that isn't even too complicated is very long!

Furthermore, some vocal expressions are ambiguous: the same sentence could correspond to different formulas!

This is why we need a system that allows you to dictate formulas in their algebraic expression and that allows you to navigate and modify them through your voice!  Do we really want that in the era of chatGPT, Alexa, self-driving vehicles, a person who cannot use his hands to do mathematics exercises must necessarily have the help of a human assistant and cannot instead be autonomous? Don't you think that, in reality, SpeechMatE could be useful to everyone? If you think about it, Alexa and voice assistants are used by everyone, even those who can use their hands... 

And remember: if you believe that working with mathematical formulas is not essential (indeed, perhaps you would avoid them at all), think about the fact that we have been dealing with these objects starting from elementary school and that they are present in many disciplines, even very far from each other: philosophy, economics, psychology, biology, ... 

Who we are

Our research group, active at the "S. Polin Laboratory, for Research and Experimentation of New Assistive Technologies for STEM", was founded with the aim of guaranteeing the right to study for people with disabilities (motor and sensory) in studying STEM subjects. We therefore develop and test technological solutions that promote the accessibility of scientific content, such as formulas, graphs and tables, by people with disabilities, working both on IT development and in the field of research in mathematics education. Our group is large and varied, among us there are mathematicians, experts in mathematics education, computer scientists, physicists.

The group

Tiziana Armano: research technician of the Department of Mathematics

Pier Felice Balestrucci: doctoral student of the Department of Computer Science

Cristian Bernareggi: future research technician of the Department of Mathematics

Erika Brunetto: scholarship holder of the Department of Mathematics

Anna Capietto: Full professor of the Department of Mathematics

Sandro Coriasco: Associate Professor of the Department of Mathematics

Mattia Ducci: scholarship holder of the Department of Mathematics

Alessandro Mazzei: Associate Professor of the Department of Computer Science

Carola Manolino: researcher in mathematics education at the University of Valle d'Aosta

Nadir Murru: Associate Professor of the Department of Mathematics of the University of Trento

Margherita Piroi: PhD student of the Department of Mathematics

Adriano Sofia: former laboratory fellow - volunteer