A team of Ukrainian teenagers won the Teens in AI international hackathon, beating teams from Great Britain, Turkey, Kazakhstan and Thailand. The winners were the students of the Polytechnic Lyceum of KPI named after I. Sikorsky, who presented the ConnectAbility project.
It is an AI-powered application designed to help people learn and understand sign language. It can also act as a “voice translator”. This is the first time that Ukraine participated in the Teens in AI hackathon and immediately won. The winners will receive prizes from international organizers, including Apple tablets, invitations to the AI4Good Incubator series of workshops, as well as a free access to Image Pathway image AI courses.
How ConnectAbility works
The developers recorded a video of the entire dactyl and the most used words are shown as gestures to train the neural network. The program uses MediaPipe to identify key points on the user's hands. The coordinates of these points are analyzed by a neural network written in Tensorflow, which uses a classification algorithm. Thanks to this, the program can recognize gestures and translate them into text or language.
At the beginning of the year, the Storm Prophet team of Ukrainian specialists won the Best Use of Data category at the NASA Space Apps Challenge international hackathon. In total, more than 5,500 teams participated in the hackathon, competing in 10 categories.