Miner & Kasch is proud to present the 2019 winners of the annual HackUMBC hackathon – team The Vision. Our own Justin Chavez handed out the prize for the Best Data Science Hack.
Nick Solovyev, Jimmy Rodriguez, Maksim Eren, and Sofonias Habtemariam!
The best projects at hackathons are built through persistent dedication, collaborative teamwork, and wild imagination. The winning team, The Vision, fully embodies these characteristics with their innovative project. Team The Vision created glasses to help the visually impaired to navigate the world. Using a Raspberry Pi and a camera fixated on a pair of glasses, they are able to recognize objects using a pre-trained tensorflow-lite model. The Raspberry Pi can be controlled by voice through the Google Speech Recognition API. A user of the glasses can pose questions such as “What am I looking at?” or “What is the best university?” (hint: UMBC).
The impressive folks behind the team – Nick Solovyev, Jimmy Rodriguez, Maksim Eren, and Sofonias Habtemariam are UMBC undergraduate students. They met in classes and while working on side projects. With an interest in Computer Vision, they brainstormed ideas that aren’t just a gimmicky demo, but could have an impact to help others.
Each member of The Vision received a Nvidia GPUs (GTX 1660) for winning the Best Data Science Hack category.
Congratulations Nick, Jimmy, Maksim, and Sofonias!
