March 12 2018

ACM Projects Spotlight: ASL Translation

An interview with the ASL Translation App team of ACM Projects.

Meet the Team

Alex Baselice, Logan Padon, Brian Nguyen, Evan Sun, Aneesh Saripalli are the members of ACM Project’s ASL Translation team. Abhi Mahajan, the curriculum coordinator of ACM Projects, is their mentor through this process. I sat down with the team this build night to ask them a few questions.

Why did you decide to join ACM Projects?

Alex: It sounded like a lot of fun. I wanted to work on a personal project this semester but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. But when I heard about ACM Projects at the information session at the beginning of the semester, I realized that this was the way to go.

Logan: I actually really wanted to work on this specific project. Machine learning is a particularly interesting topic for me.

What’s been your biggest challenge so far?

Brian: Trying to isolate and identify the hand with python. Getting our program to track the hand in every condition was difficult, but we managed to train a model to do it sufficiently.

Aneesh: Project pipelining was a big challenge for us. Figuring out the best ways to delegate responsibilities amongst the five of us took a while.

What excites you most about your project?

Evin: I’ve been in a lot of super simple projects where one person just does the entire thing because of how trivial it is. But this project has been a huge challenge for every single one of us so we all have to take it seriously. Working as a team has been thrilling this time around because whenever anyone learns something new it gets shared with the rest of the group.

Logan: I like getting to work with cool technology. Like CNN, OpenCV, and Keras. I’ve looked through their documentation, but I’ve never had a chance to actually work with these before now.

What’s your favorite tv show?

Aneesh: Rick and Morty

Alex: Bob’s Burger

Evan: Mr. Robot

Brian: Suits

Logan: Mythbusters