SAP: The Berlin company supports or exploits autistic programmers?

When German software giant SAP said last month it plans to employ hundreds of autistic people as IT experts, the news was welcomed especially at a small Berlin computer consulting firm.

The pioneering company, Auticon, already employs 17 people who live with autism, the disorder characterised by difficulties with social interactions and exceptional abilities in specific fields.

Mueller-Remus

"Many people say that if a company like SAP said it makes sense... it's very good for us," said its chief Dirk Mueller-Remus. "That means it's something serious, solid."

SAP, which makes business software, said in May that after pilot projects in India and Ireland, it plans to employ hundreds of people with autism as software testers and programmers.

Its goal is that by 2020, people with autism will make up one percent of its worldwide workforce of 65,000.

Mueller-Remus created his far smaller company in November 2011 with the idea of "investing in the strengths" of these potential employees.

His son was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, a variant of autism, as a teenager, and Mueller-Remus has long known that many people with autism excel in fields like programming or quality control.

"This is my talent," one of the employees, 27-year-old Melanie Altrock, stated matter of factly, sitting at her screen in a white-walled, modern top-floor office in western Berlin.

"Other people are interested in languages or math, for me it's computers. I don't just search for errors, I see them."

Auticon now has 25 staff and offices in Berlin, Munich and Duesseldorf, with plans for another in Hamburg. It looks to break even "by the end of the year", said Mueller-Remus.

"We wanted a normal consulting company, without subsidies, without donations, without funding from a foundation," he said, adding that the aim was to "combine social commitment and business".

"Today, after a little over a year, we have good customers like Vodafone, it's looking good," said Mueller-Remus.

But he also emphasised that working with autistic people can be "a very complex issue".

"We can make many mistakes because people with Asperger are very demanding people," he said.

"People with autism are very concrete, unequivocal," added Elke Seng, a "job coach" at Auticon who assists the employees in their relationships at work and with clients.

"There is no innuendo, there is only one or zero. It's rather nice," she smiled.

Friedrich Nolte, board member of the Federal Association for the Development of People with Autism, said "only five to 10 percent of people affected by autism find a place on the regular job market".

Mueller-Remus said that "their CVs often have brief episodes of work interspersed with long interruptions".

Often people with autism "have no situational awareness, may seem arrogant, have no interest in small talk, and are not interested in people because people are not logical," he said.

All of this can give rise to misunderstandings with sometimes serious consequences, he said.

In this context, the SAP initiative was widely applauded at the small company.

"That more people with autism can access a job is simply fantastic," said Seng, who confessed she finds her work "fascinating".

An autism specialist, psychiatrist Kai Vogeley of Cologne University Hospital, told a German medical journal that people with autism who work can "develop confidence in themselves".

He cautioned however that "certain conditions must be met for this to succeed".

"I hope that SAP knows how difficult it is," said Mueller-Remus. "If things are done well, you can really achieve great results."

Altrock, the autistic programmer, agreed.

"I have a full-time job, I take pleasure in it, I earn my own money and I have my own apartment," she said. "I'm glad it's like that."

Autistic pupil Douglas Parr 'terrified' by Psycho scene

A 13-year-old autistic boy was left traumatised after seeing the shower murder scene from the film Psycho at his school, says his mother.

Douglas Parr attends mainstream classes at Comberton Village College in Cambridgeshire.

His mother Kate Bourne said no consent was requested from parents for the 15-certificate film to be shown and the scene had made her son sick.

Mrs Bourne has accepted an apology from the teacher.

The school said it was "very regrettable" that the pupil found the film distressing and added it was "reviewing this particular scheme of work".

The famous scene from the 1960 Hitchcock film shows Anthony Perkins, as the troubled Norman Bates, stabbing Janet Leigh through a shower curtain.

'Sensitive to noises'
In the email to Mrs Bourne, the teacher said the clip had been used to illustrate how music was integral to the mood of a film - but it would not be used again.

Mrs Bourne said: "Dougie came flying through the door after school on Monday saying, 'I had to watch the bloody shower scene from Psycho in music, today'."

He then told her he had been sick.

Douglas Parr

Douglas Parr was sick after seeing the film

"Dougie is quite sensitive to noises, so even if his teachers had just played the soundtrack it might have distressed him," Mrs Bourne said.

Douglas's teaching assistant had made a note in his school diary - which details work the pupils have done during the day - informing his mother that he had been upset by a film.

She had removed him from the classroom and he had been sick, the note said.

Mrs Bourne emailed the school, saying: "I cannot for the life of me understand why this has been shown.

"The film carries a certification of 15 years. Dougie is 13.

Autism: Autistic Children omit inefficient actions

When a child with autism copies the actions of an adult, he or she is likely to omit anything 'inefficient' or "silly" about what they've just seen.

In contrast, typically developing children will go out of their way to repeat each and every element of the behaviour even as they may realise that parts of it don't make any sense.

The findings, reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on April 8, are the first to show that the social nature of imitation is very important and challenging for children with autism, the researchers say.

They also emphasise just how important it is for most children to be like other people.

Antonia Hamilton

"The data suggest that children with autism do things efficiently rather than socially, whereas typical children do things socially rather than efficiently," says Antonia Hamilton of the University of Nottingham.

"We find that typical children copy everything an adult does, whereas autistic children only do the actions they really need to do."

The researchers made the discovery after testing 31 children with autism spectrum conditions and 30 typically developing children who were matched for verbal mental age.

On each of five trials, each child was asked to watch carefully as a demonstrator showed how to retrieve a toy from a box or build a simple object.

Importantly, each demonstration included two necessary actions (e.g. unclipping and removing the box lid) and one unnecessary action (e.g. tapping the top of the box twice).

The box was then reset behind a screen and handed to the child, who was instructed to "get or make the toy as fast as you can." They were not specifically told to copy the behaviour they'd just seen.

Almost all of the children successfully reached the goal of getting or making the toy, but typically developing children were much more likely to include the unnecessary step as they did so, a behaviour known as over-imitation.

Those children copied 43 to 57 percent of the unnecessary actions, compared to 22 percent in the children with autism.

That's despite the fact that the children correctly identified the tapping action as "inefficient", "silly," or simply not "sensible."

Hamilton says the researchers now want to know precisely what kind of actions children copy, and how that tendency to copy everything might contribute to human cultural transmission of knowledge.

She says that parents and teachers should be aware of the social value in going beyond the successful completion of such tasks.

Reference
Children with autism do not overimitate. Current Biology, 2013 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.02.036