Eina — Estudos em Inteligência Natural e Artificial.
Project to support learning for children with deficiency was completed, but schools never adopted it, author complains

In 1997, Armando Freitas da Rocha, then a professor at the Institute of Biology (Instituto de Biologia) of the State University of Campinas (Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Unicamp) – he retired the following year – opened Eina with his two sons and a partner and applied for funding in the first edict for the Technological Innovation in Small Businesses Program (Programa Inovação Tecnológica em Pequenas Empresas, PIPE), which had just been launched by the State of São Paulo Research Foundation (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, Fapesp). The project was aimed at developing a software for teaching and assessing the pedagogical and neural process of mentally deficient children. Ten years later, he is still struggling to convince schools and education administrators of the usefulness of the product Eina – the Portuguese-language acronym for Studies in Natural and Artificial Intelligence – has created, named Enscer. “PIPE was very good in terms of developing knowledge”, he says, pointing out that the project was the subject of articles in indexed journals and generated a brain charting technology of its own. “But financially it was a failure,” he admits. “The only reason we didn’t close down is because I’m a hard-headed guy.”

Rocha attributes Enscer’s poor commercial performance to two factors. One has to do with pedagogy: "All Education schools are in the area of Humanities. They don’t know how the brain operates. At the same time, they are based on authors of the first half of the 20th Century, who wrote before the advances in neuroscience of the past 30 years,” he explains. The second factor is the lack of interest on the part of education administrators, which makes it difficult for the product to enter what should be its largest market – public schools. “A company like ours won’t succeed unless the pedagogy or the posture of Brazilian politicians change,” he argues.

Enscer can be used to help non-mentally deficient children learn more easily as well, Rocha points out. The software’s efficacy for that is currently being tested in Mogi das Cruzes, a city in the São Paulo Metro Area, in a project with the support of Fapesp and the local Secretary of Education – “the only one that has agreed to test it”, he laments. First the system was used for characterizing the students that, according to the teachers, had learning difficulties. The characterization was the basis for a program that was put together using Enscer software. Today, 400 children with learning difficulties and 200 with no problems (the control group) spend two hours each week in the four computer laboratories set up by Fapesp, where they are helped by 16 teachers that the Foundation pays. The program is currently in its second year and, according to Rocha, the results so far are positive.

Eina’s owner says that 15 percent of all children in the world have learning difficulties, a figure that may reach 30 percent in certain areas due to influences of the environment. “Part of the problem we have in this country could be reduced, but no one wants to buy our product,” he complains. Yet he continues to work on its improvement, which he does with the help of researchers from the School of Medicine (Faculdade de Medicina) of the University of São Paulo (Universidade de São Paulo, USP) and of the São Paulo School of Medicine (Escola Paulista de Medicina). “When things get tight I put in money from my own pocket,” he admits.

The company plans to carry on the Enscer program, which has also been adopted in a private school in Guarulhos, also in the Greater São Paulo region. But in order to survive the company has directed its activities to neuroeconomics, and is now studying the process of decision-making based on the brain charting technology it has developed. “Economics are also in the area of Humanities, but they already know that it’s the brain that decides,” jokes Rocha, who was invited to set up a project in this area by the reputed Getúlio Vargas Foundation (Fundação Getúlio Vargas, FGV). He currently runs the company with his youngest son, who has a degree in Linguistics from Unicamp and is finishing his PhD in the same area at USP. Besides them, Eina has “one and a half employees” more — a secretary and a part-time programmer. How much does the company make? “Oh, never mind,” says Rocha.