Our work in Web Platforms has made us leaders and participants in academic, national and international projects which often incorporate research on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. So far, Publisto has successfully participated in several national and European programs and projects. Among its H2020 projects is QTales a web and mobile collaboration platform that enables users to create books and apps for children; and,
Stories of Tomorrow an educational platform which streamlines student visions on the future of space collaboration.

Privately Publisto has created online stories and has also published multiple iPad apps in Greek, Portuguese, Spanish and English languages which have sold tens of thousands of copies around the world. More importantly Publisto’s own in-house product Story Chaser, a speed-reading game platform in iOS and Android, became a hit game and a one of a kind app that makes reading fun while helping children around the world achieve literacy and closely simulates a world of next generation Intelligent Tutoring Systems.

Every single day each person receives about 105,000 words or 23 words per second. Through mobile phones, the Internet, email, television, radio, newspapers, books and so on, people are famously having too much information in their heads. Should we worry? Every time technology makes leaps we are concerned about the effects this might have on our brain or health. Oxford University neuroscientist John Stein argues that in the Middle Ages, when printing was invented, people also worried that the human mind would not withstand all that information. Research confirms that we should never underestimate the human potential to construct meaning. In fact, U.S. researchers discovered that the human brain can interpret the images the eye sees in only 13 milliseconds. “The fact that you can do that at these high speeds indicates that what vision does is find concepts,” says Mary Potter, professor of Brain and Cognitive sciences at MIT. That was the basis for designing Story Chaser! We discovered that if we intensely motivate our users in finding meaning, they usually do. The reason is that the brain handles text more efficiently by breaking it into streams before parsing and interpreting it (National Reading Panel, 2000), reducing subvocalization and staying in cue. And the key to amelioration is practice! Oh! And practice! Asking from people to tap on words does not necessarily sidetrack them from looking for patterns, even when we decide to add increasing difficulty or emotive distractions in between, such as beautiful illustrations, animations and sounds. Indeed, relatively recent research (Duggan & Payne, 2009) indicated that the main points of a full text are better understood after skimming (speed reading that involves visually searching the sentences of a page for clues on their meaning) than after normal reading… with no difference between the groups in their understanding of less important information from the text. Practicing speed reading and context comprehension might be as important in navigating today’s world as learning to read.

Check out our News Release and the News Watch Review.

To find out more visit our blog or read the following articles:

• What Level-5 Leadership Really Meant: our StoryChaser Analytics Use Case


• Mummy! Mummies don’t forget the power bank!


• Feelings, nothing more than feelings: getting psychometrics right in the social profiling game


• Back to School with Artificial Intelligence