Two North Texas high school seniors are proving they do not have to wait until college to start building cutting-edge technology.
Lifelong friends Shiven Velagapudi and Aadi Sanghvi turned a home office into their own artificial intelligence lab, spending months developing a program designed to better predict and understand sign language. The project is called Hand Wave, an application meant to help translate American Sign Language in real time.
Velagapudi said the idea started outside the classroom.
“This was completely unrelated from school. We kinda just picked this up for fun and mainly because we noticed that this was a problem that we wanted to solve in the real world,” Velagapudi said.
The friends are using machine learning to program ASL letters and phrases. The signs appear like a hand skeleton and are translated through smart glasses with an integrated camera.
“I can look at you and behind the camera you can be signing and I can be hearing the translations live in my ear,” Sanghvi said.
The idea came from personal experience. Sanghvi has an uncle who speaks ASL, and Velagapudi’s father suddenly lost hearing in one ear. Velagapudi said the technology is meant to help more people understand the ASL community.
“Sign language is what connects those sorts of communities, and this is just a technology to help us better understand their community,” Velagapudi said.
Sanghvi said he sees the project as a way to bring people closer together.
“I think it fosters unity. I think there are a lot of things happening in our world that makes it easy to feel divided, I guess, so I think it reminds us that we are more similar than we might expect,” Sanghvi said. “Being able to communicate or share conversations about our fears, our strengths, our weaknesses, our dreams, just on a human level, I think that’s something we have to be doing.”
With more time and funding, the friends believe they could have a prototype ready to use beyond their home office.
