News
Small updates. Not a blog.
Research update: promising results on an ASR auto-improve model
One of our research efforts — led by our student founder
Kyler Min
— is producing promising early results. We're building an
automatic speech recognition (ASR) auto-improve model
aimed at people whose speech is often mis-transcribed by standard
systems — including seniors and people with language disabilities.
The current prototype combines a small GPT-2-scale
language model with a custom embedding layer and the
CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (phonetic library) so that
the system can reason about how a word should sound, not just
how it was transcribed. Early results are encouraging.
The next phase is to see whether larger language models — in the
2B, 4B, 8B, 20B, 40B, and 70B parameter range —
can push the accuracy further, and whether that scale is actually needed
for this specific problem or whether the phonetic-plus-small-LM approach
holds up.
Life-skill program: adaptive swimming plan is live at Reston Community Center
Our swimming life-skill plan has been designed and is
now being tested in real sessions. We're running it on
Sundays at Reston Community Center, working with autistic
children on water safety, comfort in the pool, and swimming as an actual
life skill — not just an activity.
Water safety is not optional for autistic children — drowning is one
of the leading causes of death in this population — so we're treating
this as a core piece of our curriculum, not an extra.
Congrats to Serena Xu — 2025 USA Fencing Y-14 Women's Epee National Champion
Our student volunteer
Serena Xu
has won the
2025 USA Fencing Y-14 Women's Epee National Championship.
Huge congratulations from all of us at Hope In Steps.
Serena leads our research work and our California Chapter as a student
volunteer. She now brings a national title in Y-14 women's epee alongside
that work — the same focus and discipline she puts into helping shape
our learning paths for autistic children.
🎥 Her interview with USA Fencing is available on Instagram:
watch the reel →