FORMER Cairns student Marita Cheng is one of the city’s best and brightest – now she is helping the world’s blind and visually impaired “see” using computer vision.
The entrepreneurial St Mary’s Catholic College dux and 2012 Young Australian of the Year has been recruited by Singularity University in California to create technology that can “impact a billion lives within the next 10 years”.
Ms Cheng (left) has joined other future leaders, entrepreneurs and technologists from around the world for an intensive 10 weeks at NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley, funded by Google. Together with Italian futurist Alberto Rizzoli, she has co-founded an app, Aipoly, using artificial intelligence to help visually impaired explore their surroundings.
“We have enabled blind people to experience the world through descriptions,” says the Melbourne-based robotics engineer.
The app allows users to take a photo on their smartphone, which is uploaded to Aipoly servers, analysed, sent back and read out using text-to-speech.
“All of that takes place within a few seconds,” Ms Cheng said.
The app allows people to see what their children are wearing, recognise street signs, find objects and shop by themselves.
She said the app had been tested at the Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired in San Francisco and by Steve Mahan – the first person to use Google’s self-driving car.
“After they tried out the Aipoly technology, they were ecstatic,” she said.
“They couldn’t believe that something like this is possible.”
Ms Cheng said going to Singularity University had “changed my perspective”.
“Now when I hear about an idea, I can see it through a lens of how can we scale it to impact a billion people,” she said.
“SU has encouraged me to think and act ahead of the technology curve.”
She will pitch the product at SU’s Demo Day today before university founder and blind technology pioneer Ray Kurzweil.
“This complements the work that Ray Kurzweil has done,” Ms Cheng said
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