Research

Cultorale’s main research area are:

Physical Rehabilitation

The main aims are to define innovative ways of delivering VET considering the evolving needs for skills in physical rehabilitation sector and to create new specific competencies in using and managing modern ICT solutions for rehabilitation in order to spread the use of modern and effective ICT tools that are today not yet involved in the rehabilitation protocols.

Audio-book

Cultorale is particularly interesting in "reading disabilities" due to blindness or dyslexia, for this reason it develops a research line centered on the Automatic Treatment of Language (TAL).
The guiding principle of this research line is the study of methods and tools enabling the automatic editing of audio-books that are usable by visually impaired and blind people, but that are also enjoyable for an audience able-bodied, in the form of e-books with synchronized audio track. The project involves the automatic processing of a written text containing dialogues.

The research activities foresees:

• the development of a linguistic engine able to identify the speaking voices and the narrator and that transfers these information using a tagging system which will form the basis for the automatic creation of an audiobook;
• the focus on the tools and systems Text-to-speech (TTS) used both to produce the audio corresponding text, but also to give to each character a unique synthetic voice, making it really enjoyable audiobook;
• to pursue the uniqueness of synthetic voices, the exploration of audio editing tools called Morpher;
• the study of the standards for the realization of audiobooks (such as Daisy) and the research to implement them in an automatic way through the aid of software that generate audiobooks in standard form. The standard Daisy is a standard for audio books accessible and "open" developed by the W3C. This standard provides full accessibility to the use of e-book by anyone and, in particular, to the disable;
• standards and W3C guidelines for accessibility of Web sites, with a view to sites and software systems for visually impaired or blind.

National research funding

The team of professionals working in CultOrale has gained significant experience over 10 years in the definition of innovative technological and / or methodological prestigious partnerships, such as universities and research centers, relevant bodies at national, European and international level.