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Hey, fellow Bobcats! Have you been out to the Meadows Center? Going there is a great way to learn more about Spring Lake and is a great example of a cross-section of technology, environmental sustainability, and education. The glass bottom boats on the lake are a great example of technology’s role in sustainability. You’ve heard of electric cars, but did you know that the glass bottom boats on Spring Lake are electric? This is to reduce the impact the boats have on the environmentally sensitive lake.

Discovery Hall, inside the Meadows Center, offers interactive educational displays that help you feel closer to Spring Lake and learn more about the ecosystem and about the native species to the area. This is done using an interactive map of Spring Lake, where you can click on certain parts of the map and see informational pictures and videos about that location.

There also are interactive displays that share facts about specific species living in the Spring Lake ecosystem. Most notability, the native Texas Blind Salamander, which is endangered. Wsing the display you can learn about why they are endangered, why are they are blind, and much more. My favorite fact: The Texas Blind Salamander has blood-red external gills for absorbing oxygen from the water.

Another interactive display you’ll want to check out is the augmented reality sandbox. You can mold the sand, creating different topographic environments and simulating rainfall to learn more about the run-off into lakes, rivers, and streams.

The Meadows Center is a great place to go with friends or family and I highly recommend taking a glass-bottom boat tour, taking a walk on the wetlands boardwalk, and checking out Discovery Hall and the interactive displays and native species. Check out the video below to see The Meadows Center and all the tech mentioned in this post.

Cedrik Chavez is a student employee in the IT Marketing and Communications office.

It has been a long-standing goal for the Division of Information Technology to allow Texas State University to provide an inexpensive method for captions and transcript generation for video and audio files used to support multiple activities across the institution. These activities include marketing, archive videos, and, most importantly, instructional media. Captions and transcripts help the university address ADA requirements, while also providing support for multiple learning styles.

The main barrier for a university-wide implementation of a captioning/transcription service has been cost. Under the current implementation, the captioning/transcription services available to the university community cost $60 per hour of video.  These services rely on human captioners.  This makes a system-wide adoption of captioning extremely costly.

The Technology Innovation Office embarked on a study to determine the cost of implementing an AI-driven platform that would leverage speech to text services to produce captions. The team put a random set of previously captioned files through the AI-driven speech to text services provided by AWS, Google Cloud Platform, IBM/Watson and Microsoft Azure, deriving accuracy and cost measures from the output. This assessment is considered as Phase 1 of an initiative that can lead to an implementation process, Phase 2, where an AI-driven captioning service would be integrated with MediaFlo to automatically create captions for all uploaded media. This service will also provide support different learning styles by providing transcripts of videos, which can be delivered to users via the video delivery platform.