March 6, 2024 – post-event update
In March 2024, CREATE gathered with industry and community partners for a hackfest to explore and invent the future of AI and Accessibility.
The event featured invited speakers Heather Nolis, Ian Stenseng, and Shaun Kane and exciting workshops on building custom GPT and creating accessible Jupyter notebooks. See the full lineup of brainstorming, hacking, and presentation sessions.
The 3-day hackfest attendees included those with no experience in coding or hacking, others with advanced experience in generative AI and building software or tools, and, at the center, attendees with lived experiences of disabilities who contributed their experiences and expertise to invent an accessible AI-enabled future.
Prizes awarded
While appreciation and congratulations go to all participants, these projects were awarded prizes:
First place: LookLoud.ai
Nishit Bhasin and Lakshya Garg
LookLoud.ai is voice-activated assistance technology, powered by GPT-4 Vision, and designed to make e-commerce accessible to everyone. Users can navigate, select, and buy products using simple voice commands.
Second prize: AI Posture Monitor & Intervention Alerts for Home Health
Max Smoot, Lige Yang, and Richard Li
AI Posture Monitor & Intervention Alerts for Home Health monitors someone’s seated position to identify when they are in an at-risk posture and subsequently alerts a caretaker with recommended corrections.
Third prize: Formflow Ai
Abdul Hussein, Abreham Tegenge, and Aelaph Elias
Formflow.ai reads PDFs, mail, and forms and gives an easy-to-read summarization, with the goal of helping people read and understand documents and forms.
Fourth place: Clearview Assist
Dhruv Khanna, Ritika Rajpal, Minal Naik, and Menita Agarwal
(No description provided.)
Fifth place: Student Success Portal
Mia Vong, Cameron Jacob Miller, Keyvyn Rogers, and Jerid Stevenot
Student Success Portal provides AI-powered assistance for challenges in supporting K-12 students with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs).
Sessions, workshops and hack time
Friday
- Introductory session about the potential of AI for accessibility (also on Zoom)
- Invited speaker Ian Stenseng, Director of Innovation & Accessibility at The Lighthouse for the Blind, Inc. (also on Zoom)
- Brainstorming project ideas
- Learn from community members with lived experiences of disabilities to make sure your hack is solving a real accessibility need.
- Lunch (provided) and conversation, mentoring, team forming, idea hatching
- Invited speaker Heather Nolis, Principal Machine Learning Engineer of the Digital AI Team and Chair of the Accessibility Community at T-Mobile (ACT) at T-Mobile (also on Zoom)
- Optional Workshops and hack time
- Hack time
- Pizza dinner and opportunities to get feedback from mentors
Saturday
- Work time
- Lunch (provided) and opportunity to present for feedback from mentors
- Presentation of judging rubric
- Invited speaker, Shaun Kane, Researcher at Google AI and Director of the Superhuman Computing Lab at University of Colorado Boulder (also on Zoom)
- Hack time
Sunday
- Optional hack time
- How to present accessibly & sample pitch presentation (also on Zoom)
Monday
- Presentations to judges (also on Zoom)
- Judges deliberation
- Announcements, prizes, and closing keynote (also on Zoom)
Judges
- Laura Dorsey, Director of Licensing, Copyright & Software, UW CoMotion
- Richard Ladner, Professor Emeritus, University of Washington
- Devin Myers, Client Advocate, Hearing, Speech and Deaf Center
- Anisa Proda, Accessibility and Inclusion Manager at T-Mobile through PK Global, T-Mobile
Speakers
Workshops
Brainstorming ideas
Relevant topics will be driven by community needs to increase access to technology, and to the world through technology. These topics could include, for example:
- AI’s use for generating plain language summaries of rights
- Accessibility of AI tools and interfaces
- Using AI to increase the accessibility of written and visual content
- Robotic control for access
- Tools for designing accessible physical objects
- Using AI to get feedback on the accessibility of things you’re making
- AI for embodied agent interactions
- AI applications for health and wellbeing
- Modalities for human/generative AI interactions such as voice or touch
- Guidelines or ideas around agents that that may be used for accessibility
- What disability simulation might look like in the age of AI agents
- Best practices and pitfalls