Potentials Reached through Research and Presenting

 Marina Abdalla, Verrazzano Class of 2022, completed major in Psychology and minor in Biology

One of my biggest accomplishments at the College of Staten Island was being a research assistant in a research lab. I was fortunate enough to participate in a Child Development research lab that is co-run by Dr. Sarah Berger and Dr. Lana Karasik. Without them, I would have not been granted the opportunity to work on my capstone project and work with children, even though it was virtually. My dream has been to work with children, whether it would be a doctor or something else in the medical/healthcare field. Being able to instruct parents to teach their infants how to safely descend stairs to avoid injury left a huge impact on my goal. Watching the infants’ ability to strategize and listen to their parents’ advice taught me how smart infants can be even though they are so young! I realized their motor potentials and problem-solving abilities when coding their behavior.

One thing I am not the best at is technology. When I started coding it was difficult because so many things were happening at once that I needed to focus on and note. On many occasions, the app crashed on me, which made me have to start a coding session over again as my hours of work were lost. Even though I had saved my work, it was still disappeared. Although it became exceedingly difficult for me to maintain my motivation to continue, it taught me how to work around the app and discover ways that could make coding much easier and consistent for me.

I am also not the best at presenting. I have the worst stage fright and I get extremely nervous. When I was able to talk to someone beforehand about the presentation, having the motivation and ambition to work on my fear put me in a better spot.

I have had the best experience with my advisors here at CSI that believed in me, when I myself could not. It also prepared me for possible presentations in the future, so for that I will forever be thankful to them for a wonderful time during my undergraduate experience. 

Creating an App to Assist the Visually Impaired with Public Transportation

 Joseph Tooker, Verrazzano Class of 2022, completed major in Computer Science 

For my capstone project, under the mentorship of Professor Zhanyang Zhang I developed MOVESmart, a mobile navigation application that assists people who are visually impaired.

Initially, the plan was for the app to work with airports but we both agreed that public transportation travel is much more common than air travel, so that is where we focused. I developed this app for Apple devices using the xCode IDE (Integrated development environment), and the Swift programming language.

With the app being developed for visually impaired users, the most important aspect of the app was accessibility. Any text written in the app, such as instructions on how to use it, would be read to the user. Upon opening the app, users would be instructed to tap the top of the screen to open the camera, or tap the bottom of the screen to access the map. Users could take a snapshot of what their phone would be pointing at, and any signs or text in the photo would be read to the user. This was done with the help of the AWS Rekognition API (Application programming interface). When a picture is taken, it would be sent to the AWS Rekognition server, and the AI would be able to detect any text that is in the image. Once the text is detected, it would get sent back to the app.

Unfortunately, the map feature of the app was unfinished. The intention of it was for the user to be able to have public transportation information read to them, and be able to plan a trip. If there were any delays or cancellations, the user would be notified. The map would be displayed using the Google Maps API.

Looking to the future, there are definitely some areas where the app could improve. The first area for improvement is the user interface(UI). While the app is mainly intended for visually impaired users, it is still important for the app to look nice. I mainly focused on the technical side of the app. Another area for improvement is having functionality with the Google Transit API. I struggled getting this API to work, so I wasn’t able to utilize it. With additional time and research, I should be able to have functionality to the app.