Scholar News!

During the LCC Blanket-making event, Reena mentioned her interest in beginning a student organization at Illinois Tech. Due to my experience supporting several student organizations, including Illinois Tech Robotics (ITR), the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), Illinois Tech Railroad Club (ITRC), and Podium Pros, I extended an offer to help her with getting organization procedures underway.

I mentioned my personal interest in starting an org back in my first semester, as I was passionate about computer vision technology, and was interested in creating an org focused on learning how to make computer vision-related projects and actually developing projects that would be impressive to prospective employers. This pulls from my passion for working at Tesla sometime in the future to develop their autonomous vehicle technology.

Reena accepted my offer, and we began working on documentation and any other required steps to prepare for the student org to be decided upon in front of Illinois Tech’s SGA.

Our primary intention for the org is to incorporate Reena’s idea with mine, creating an org focused on ECE, professional development, leading events to bring a larger population of women into ECE, and to create interesting AI application to integrate them into the ECE hardware we create. I would be leading the AI and computer vision front while Reena and her ECE friends would be developing the hardware and components to run the software/applications I create.

One project idea we plan on moving forward with is a tool to help people who are hard of sight to sense objects and other stimuli using a haptic feedback suit, computer vision, and more! This would be a suit that people could wear as a supplement to their walking stick and receive live feedback and course correction suggestions through haptic impulses.

We have a lot more planned for this initiative. After our meeting with Graham, we will continue developing the organization, laying the foundation for it, and beginning to work on projects involving ECE + AI technologies!