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LENA Foundation Established with Multimillion Dollar Gift
LENA Foundation Established with Multimillion Dollar Gift
Published 02-10-09
Submitted by LENA Foundation
BOULDER, Colo., Feb. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Terry and Judi Paul have established the not-for-profit LENA Foundation through a gift of $2 million and a donation of the assets of Infoture, Inc. Owned by the Pauls, Infoture developed the breakthrough LENA System in a $30 million research and development effort completed over the past five years. Assets donated include the LENA technology, a multimillion-dollar supercomputer, and a natural language corpus of over 75,000 hours of natural language audio recordings. Through this transformation, Infoture employees will become LENA Foundation employees, while the not-for-profit organization will remain based in the old Infoture building at 5525 Central Avenue in Boulder, Colorado.
The foundation's purpose is to develop advanced technology tools for the early screening, diagnosis, research, and treatment of language delays and disorders in children and adults. Its mission is in line with the Pauls' long-term objectives and opens up new opportunities to improve the diagnosis and treatment of language delay and disorders.
"LENA has been a dream of mine for a long time and has always been a philanthropic endeavor for Judi and me," said Terry Paul, president of the foundation and the principal inventor of the LENA System. "Operating as a non-profit foundation will make it much easier to work collaboratively with universities, child development and autism researchers and clinicians, and private and public foundations in the United States and around the world; we look forward to advancing LENA technology and getting it into the hands of pediatricians, speech-language pathologists, and parents. It's great that LENA is finally a real product that researchers and clinicians can use to make a difference in children's lives."
The LENA System will be the principal product and focus of the foundation's research and development program. LENA is in use at over 15 research institutions and has been used by researchers to investigate children's natural home language environment, reveal important information about gender differences in language development, and study the effect of TV viewing, birth order effects, autism and the correlates of language delay. Furthermore, university speech-language pathology graduate departments have started to train their students to use LENA in clinical settings and speech-language pathologists have begun using LENA as a diagnostic and treatment tool.
The LENA System provides more than 25 different metrics for researchers and clinicians on the natural language environment of children, including estimates and percentiles scores for adult words spoken to the child, conversational turns, and child vocalizations. In addition, the LENA System generates an automatic expressive language developmental age and percentile score based on the child's voiceprint.
About LENA Foundation
Established in 2009, the LENA Foundation is dedicated to advancing technology for the early screening, diagnosis, research, and treatment of language delays and disorders in children and adults. Philanthropists Terry and Judi Paul formed the not-for-profit organization through a multimillion-dollar gift and the donation of assets from Infoture, Inc. Over a five-year period, Infoture created the LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis) System, the world's first automatic language collection and analysis tool and the foundation's principal product. The foundation employs a team of scientists who are skilled in computerized speech and speaker recognition, microelectronics, statistical research, and children's language acquisition and development; they are passionately devoted to helping the foundation enhance language development worldwide.
