Cooper Union Engineering Students Named Finalists at Mount Sinai Health Hackathon

POSTED ON: October 17, 2019

Image

For the third year in a row, students of the Albert Nerken School of Engineering have been selected as finalists in the annual Mount Sinai Health Hackathon, a transdisciplinary competition focused on creating novel technology solutions for problems in healthcare. Do Hyung Kwon EE'21 and Paulo Serodio ChE'21 will share a $2500 prize with the other members of their team who spent 48 hours developing “Deliberate,” a system designed to improve psychotherapy quality of care through confidential recording and analysis. Twenty teams participated, each made up of undergrads, grad students, Ph.Ds, MDs, and others currently in related industries.

This year the focus of the hackathon was, “Artificial Intelligence – Expanding the Limits of Human Performance.” Team Deliberate demonstrated that generative adversarial networks and variational autoencoder models, both classes of machine learning, can be used for video anonymization of a person without the loss of facial expressions. They also used Google cloud service related to natural language processing for auto-transcription and summarization to further improve work performance and client outcomes. In early 2020 the team, along with the other two finalist teams, will participate in the Mount Sinai Innovation Showcase where they will receive feedback from a panel of judges.

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.