“Seventy-five percent of Ultranauts employees are on
the autism spectrum….
Its culture has certainly resonated with [Jamie] Davila,
who is autistic and was hired four years ago, with no
formal training in computing. Since then, she has
mastered not only programming languages but also
skills as a manager.
Ultranauts has also been her ladder to the middle
class. ‘Before I got the job at Ultranauts, I was on food
stamps,’ Ms. Davila recalled. ‘Now, I own my own
house. And it’s a nice house in a nice neighborhood.’”
“It turns out, Apple CEO Tim Cook’s famous quip
about the company investing in good accessibility
practices—that the tech giant does it not for ‘the
bloody ROI’—cuts both ways. A company, whether
titanic like Apple or tiny like Hiki, should make their
product(s) as accessible as possible because it’s
morally right. By the same token, however, it surely is
not lost on Cook (or Karriem) that accessible products
are better, well-rounded products that will have a
definitive effect on the return on investment..’”
“Peter Korn, Director of Accessibility at Amazon
Lab126 said: ‘We share the company's vision to
help people with speech impairments live more
independently through voice. We were delighted to
support them through an Alexa Fund investment
and now through an Alexa integration via their
mobile app."
The Department of Defense, intelligence agencies and
other federal programs are increasingly deploying
emerging artificial intelligence technologies and
accurately labeled data to train AI systems. Enabled
Intelligence’s neurodiverse workforce of highly-trained
U.S. based employees provide the subject matter
expertise and secure systems able to handle the
government's most sensitive data.
Floreo is currently being used as a supplementary learning
tool by schools, therapy practices, medical practitioners,
and parents. In this video, Ravindran describes what led to
the development of this virtual reality tool for individuals
with autism, how Floreo went about securing academic
research partners, and the importance of Small Business
Technology Transfer funding to the development and
testing of the program. Floreo is currently running several
studies, including a study in collaboration with the Center
for Autism Research at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
