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Social good and education: The 9 next big things, from fairer refinancing to kid-friendly voice recognition

Astranis’s low-cost broadband satellites, Lenovo’s holographic education display, ReUp’s support system for adult learners, and more.

Social good and education: The 9 next big things, from fairer refinancing to kid-friendly voice recognition

BY Fast Company Staff3 minute read

Every tech company likes to say it’s making the world a better place. By tackling basic societal problems—or bringing fresh ideas to education—these projects deliver on that promise. They include an ambition effort to digitize human history, low-cost satellites that deliver broadband to parts of the world that currently lack it, and a holographic display that can help teachers bring lessons to life in new ways.

The companies behind these technologies are among the honorees in Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech awards for 2022. See a full list of all the winners across all categories here.

Social Good: Winners

Accenture 
For digitizing history
In the past, details from the Arolsen Archives, which document Nazi persecution, needed to be found through manual searching. Accenture’s AI and optical character recognition speeds up that process, bringing those documents—and the untold stories of millions affected by World War II—to the public. In the future, anyone in the world will be able to search the archives (which would tower nearly 12 miles high if stacked) and even submit an inquiry about a family member.

By satellite standards, Astranis’s MicroGEO is surprisingly compact. [Photo: courtesy of Astranis]

Astranis Space Technologies
For making smaller satellites to deliver internet
Astranis’s MicroGEO satellite is smaller, less expensive, and faster to manufacture than traditional telecommunication satellites. That feat required new electrical components, propulsion systems, radiation-hardening techniques, and more—and will help deliver reliable, and affordable, internet access to the more than four billion people who currently lack it today. The first MicroGEO satellite will go into orbit above Alaska this fall.

MPOWER Financing
For helping international students refinance loans
Refinancing your student loans often requires a minimum credit score and a co-signer, and can be tricky for international or DACA students. MPOWER Financing doesn’t—nor does it look at family income or assets. Instead, its algorithm looks at a students’ academic performance, university, degree program, and other factors, allowing graduates to refinance up to $100,000 of education loans from financial institutions around the world.

Social Good: Honorable Mention

Sceye 
For delivering broadband and monitoring climate change from 65,000 feet in the air

Education: Winners

Lenovo
For giving students an interactive and immersive learning environment
Using mixed-reality tech such as AR rendering and 3D human motion tracking, Lenovo gives students a holographic experience without the need for any head-mounted devices. Lenovo also offers a transparent display that allows teachers to manipulate 3D objects on the display with their hands.

Lenovo’s holographic technology gives education an immersive new twist. [Images: courtesy of Lenovo]

Quizlet
For utilizing AI to improve grading
Quizlet uses machine learning and natural language processing to grade a broad assortment of digital flashcards, matching games, electronic assessments, and live quizzes. More recently, the company developed its Smart Grading tool to better assess a student’s written response for signs of conceptual understanding, rather than solely rewarding rote memorization.

ReUp Education
For giving everyone a chance at a college degree
ReUp delivers one-on-one support to adults looking to go back to school and finish what they started. The company’s patented sentiment analysis identifies “natural language markers” that give insights into the student-to-be’s behaviors (much like how resting heart rate is predictive of cardiovascular health). Looking at those markers together, ReUp then creates a persona classification for each individual and provides tailored coaching and intervention techniques.

SoapBox Labs
For making voice technology more inclusive
Soapbox’s speech recognition technology helps applications and products recognize kids’ voices. Using thousands of hours of kids’ speech data from 193 countries, the company trained its AI system to recognize different speech patterns and dialects. Amid the pandemic-fueled global literacy crisis, the company’s proprietary voice engine, which focuses on kids ages 2 to 12, has proven especially useful as an educational tool to evaluate students’ oral reading fluency.

Education: Honorable Mention

Nuance Hearing
For creating an advanced microphone to improve speech intelligibility in noisy settings

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