Each year, multiple Senior Design Projects are entered into the Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition to win up to $10,000. Entrants must make an elevator pitch showcasing their project to prospective investors and endure three rounds of judging, at the end of which the top three teams are then announced and celebrated at the Innovation Expo. This year’s winning title went to SIGN, a real-time American Sign Language transcriptor created by a team of computer engineering seniors: Brianna Garland, Jayden Pereira, and Chloe Sharpe.
The project idea was something that Garland came up with her junior year of high school, and she was excited to finally be able to see it through. Garland explained, “Being a peer leader on campus has taught me how to have in sight into the experiences of each individual’s life and how different and how challenging different obstacles can be.” After speaking with another fellow peer leader, Pereira, and then Sharpe, they decided to move forward with this project. Pereira also shared, “I was just excited to work on something that was seemingly not solved yet or had implementations that really did not provide enough to individuals that had to communicate through sign language.”
In the words of Sharpe, “SIGN is a revolutionary software application that will change the lives of Deaf persons across the U.S. This application was designed to use Computer Vision and Machine Learning algorithms to display ASL-to-English translated captions in real-time.” Additionally, Pereira emphasized that the software “tracks over 1600 points on the human body in order to translate someone doing American Sign Language all in real-time and without any special equipment – it works right on a standard desktop/laptop webcam or a phone’s camera.” If you are interested in learning more, check out their website, pitch video, and MVP.
When asked about how they feel knowing that all their hard work paid off, Pereira exclaimed, “Incredible. I was actually on a Roving Reporter asking what my New Year’s Resolution would be and I said that I wanted to win the Expo – so definitely great feelings when I was actually able to accomplish that goal. It has been an incredibly bumpy 9 months working on all of the machine learning models, with many sleepless nights and failed ideas; but, having so many people acknowledge and appreciate the work put in gives me the energy needed to keep this momentum going and work on SIGN more!”
Garland found it to be, “so rewarding to see the project start to finish with how much work we have put into it […] It showed that we could accomplish anything we put our minds to and gave us so much experience along the way.”
Sharpe also stated, “It feels amazing knowing that our hard work has paid off, but more importantly we are beyond excited that we have the opportunity to assist thousands of Deaf persons across the U.S. to communicate with others. We plan on continuing the development of SIGN over the summer and hope to release it to the market within six months.”
The winning team also had a few words of advice for future Senior Design teams — they all said to choose a project that you are passionate about. Pereira said, “even if your project doesn’t win or there’s not executives rushing with open checkbooks to acquire your ideas, as long as you care about the ‘why’ behind the project everything else will fall into place.”
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