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Who is behind AAC?

is the culmination of a decade of high-impact research on AI and Human-Computer Interaction for AAC.

Mauricio Fontana de Vargas, PhD

Founder

Google Scholar Website

Its founder, Mauricio Fontana de Vargas, holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from McGill University and is the inventor of the first AAC app capable of automatically generating complete topic boards from photographs (Click AAC, 2021). That work won both the Best Paper and Best Artifact awards at ACM ASSETS, the leading conference on computing and accessibility.

He then worked with Dr. Howard Shane and Christina Yu, MSc (Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard), to transform Click AAC into QuickPic AAC, conducting research and publishing scientific papers together. QuickPic was later licensed to Attainment Company as GoTalk About It.

In 2023, Mauricio joined Meta Reality Labs as a Research Scientist, developing AI-powered systems that personalize user interfaces to each person's needs and goals. After the layoffs, he decided to apply that experience to advancing AAC technology, a field that is also deeply personal to him as the brother of a lovely, disabled person. He founded Assistive Technologies Inc. with that mission in mind.

This didn't come out of nowhere.

Every idea in has a paper, a field study, or a shipped product behind it.

Click AAC · ACL 2021

The first AI-generated AAC vocabulary

During his PhD at McGill's Accessible Computing Technologies Lab, Mauricio created Click AAC, the first AAC app to use AI to generate communication vocabulary automatically. Snap a photo of a moment, and it builds a relevant board of words and pictures. The method was published at the ACL Meeting, the top computational-linguistics venue.

Read the ACL 2021 paper →

ACM ASSETS 2022

An award-winning field study

Click AAC went into real classrooms and therapy rooms. The study of how children and their SLPs actually used it won both Best Student Paper and Best Artifact at ACM ASSETS 2022, a rare double recognition for one project.

Read the ASSETS 2022 paper →

QuickPic · ACM CHI 2024 · IJERPH 2024 · with Dr. Howard Shane

Co-designed with the field's best

The successor, QuickPic, was co-designed over 17 months with SLPs and special educators, and with Dr. Howard C. Shane, director of the Autism Language Program at Boston Children's Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School. It was published at ACM CHI 2024, and a follow-up study with Dr. Shane, Christina Yu and Dr. Ralf W. Schlosser was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2024).

Read the CHI 2024 paper →Read the IJERPH 2024 paper →

Licensed · Attainment Company

QuickPic ships to the world as GoTalk About It!

QuickPic was licensed to Attainment Company, a long-standing special-education publisher, and now sells commercially as GoTalk About It!

2023 · Meta Reality Labs

At the frontier of the technology runs on

After a postdoc at McGill's Shared Reality Lab, Mauricio joined Meta Reality Labs as a Research Scientist, developing AI-powered systems that personalize user interfaces to each person's needs and goals.

Now ·

Everything, in one app

Each of those projects solved one piece. is the whole thing: every kind of AAC support in a single app, built and personalized just by asking, held to the clinical bar a decade of research demands, and finally made simple and affordable enough that it actually gets done.