Handicaps as strengths

How people with autism train toll systems

Lukas Fischer from the Software Competence Center Hagenberg is a member of the association's board. The Mühlviertel-based company is the initiative's research partner and is busy setting up a training station that is due to go into operation this year.(Bild: Kapsch TrafficCom, Markus Wenzel, Krone KREATIV)

For people with autism, finding a job is usually a "mission impossible". But they are very popular for training artificial intelligence. Read on to find out how their disabilities make toll systems better and what an association and the Software Competence Center Hagenberg are doing to help.

A diagnosis of autism is almost always synonymous with the fate of unemployment. "There are more than 80,000 people on the autism spectrum in Austria. Almost 80 percent of them don't have a job," says Martin Hartl from the Responsible Annotation association, which promotes inclusion in the labor market.

The annotation team at Kapsch uses image analysis to prepare learning material for artificial intelligence.(Bild: Responsible Annotation)

In job advertisements, Hartl asks for skills such as attention to detail, memory, resistance to monotony and perseverance - all talents that people with autism bring to the table. They are therefore highly qualified when it comes to new jobs in the IT sector - as annotators.

Annotation requires a high level of attention to detail and tedious processing of a lot of data. We have found employees who can do this.

Martin Hartl, Verein Responsible Annotation

"Annotation is very demanding and time-consuming, especially in terms of accuracy and large amounts of data," says Lukas Fischer, who is head of the Data Science department at the Software Competence Center Hagenberg and also a founding member of the association, which has already initiated a flagship project at Kapsch TrafficCom.

Training material for artificial intelligence
At the specialist for toll and traffic management systems, a team put together by the association is now busy creating learning material for the world's toll systems because the data is needed to train artificial intelligence.

What do the annotators at Kapsch do? Viewing images, recognizing vehicles, marking them and adding information so that the cameras can subsequently recognize which vehicle is passing through the location and how much toll is to be collected.