Multiple students won a cash prize at EnableHack 2024 on Saturday, Oct. 27 at Werth Tower. Annual hackathons are hosted by the University of Connecticut Global Health Spaces on Campus (GLOHSOC); this year’s focused on improving accessibility for the elderly and disabled, according to the club’s event website. Students began working at 6 p.m. on Friday and had until 10 a.m. on Saturday to develop their idea.
Ammar Alsadadi, Sahil Patel and Connor Lafferty were the winning group and won $250 total with their idea, “Sensory Shield.” According to their project presentation, their plan was to develop a phone app that would use artificial intelligence for audio and visual recognition to help people with impaired hearing or vision.
Their app would have two components to suit unique needs, according to the group’s presentation. “Sign Sense” would convert American Sign Language to text or speech to better communicate with people with impaired hearing. “Scene Sense” would convert visuals to audio for people with poor vision and for general safety. The group demonstrated a working prototype of “Sign Sense” that could track hand positions to convert 15 different ASL signs into text.
Ammar Alsadadi, a seventh-semester actuarial sciences and statistical data science major, talked about the effort the group put in. After winning, he said, “We didn’t sleep enough because we worked a lot.” He also mentioned how each member made unique contributions.
“I contributed a lot for the presentation and also an understanding of the programming, I had some input there,” Alsadadi said. “Sahil, he’s computer science and Connor is [a] computer science student, and they did most of the backhand work for the actual model training.”
Sahil Patel, a third-semester computer science and statistical data science major, elaborated on the work that went into the “Sign Sense” model. He highlighted Lafferty’s coding work for the ASL recognition, who could not attend the presentation.
“Connor is a machine-learning cloud computing genius,” Patel said. “Like, he’s genuinely amazing at it. The way his mind works, bro, it’s insane.”
The second-place team won $100 with their project “After Arts,” which emphasized improving the accessibility of after-school programs in public schools for children with disabilities. The third-place team won $50 with their project that would help people with Tourette’s syndrome monitor the amount and extremity of their tics.
A presentation by GLOHSOC’s executive board outlined how projects would be judged. Groups were evaluated on the quality of their solution, innovation, prototype or policy design, teamwork and presentation quality. Teams were judged by Kush Kataria, who focused on the health aspect of presentations; Ashutosh Ahuja, who focused on the technical and coding elements and Ashten Vassar, who focused on whether solutions would actually help people with disabilities.
Dhruv Tyagi, a fifth-semester computer science engineering major and technology director for GLOHSOC, and Faizdeenkhan Pathan, a fifth-semester physiology and neurobiology major and director of operations for GLOHSOC, explained the goal for the organization and the hackathon. They highlighted the collaborative nature of the event and how it highlights people with different educational backgrounds.
“You’ll notice like a business major is never gonna learn the same thing as a prep like a pre-med major,” Tyagi said. “But if you put them in the same group, they have different skill sets and they come up with, you know, their own unique ideas and they combine them into whatever their project is.”
Tyagi and Pathan explained that GLOHSOC members and the hackathon participants are made up of a diverse set of majors. They said that some focus on biology, some work with computer science and others specialize in business, among other majors. To make the event as inclusive as possible, the hackathons are meant to be more of a project creation event than exclusively coding.
“It’s a quote-unquote hackathon, but it’s more project development, more like innovation,” Tyagi said. “It’s more innovative than like, ‘Here’s a problem, code it.’”
EnableHack 2024 is the last main GLOHSOC event for this semester. The organization will host a Global Health Symposium in the spring that will relate to accessibility for the elderly and people with disabilities.