SANTA CRUZ — For CruzHacks winner Tejas Shah, creating a product at the UC Santa Cruz annual hackathon was a testament to his grandmother.
Shah was part of a team of five young adults that created Iris, an artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant that helps individuals with Alzheimer’s or dementia counter memory loss through facial recognition. Members of the project were Egypt Amaru, Stewart Delaney, Torin Foss, Andrew Zhu and Shah.
Shah said his grandmother has dementia and not being tech savvy, he wanted something easy for her to use.
The team presented Iris at the Santa Cruz New Tech MeetUp Wednesday at Cruzio Internet. Santa Cruz New Tech MeetUp was founded in February 2008 and has more than 4,300 members. Ten CruzHacks teams, as well as Santa Cruz startups PitchHub and Kahzum, displayed their products at the meetup event.
Iris won the Google Services category at CruzHacks, UC Santa Cruz’s annual hackathon held Jan. 18-20 at UC Santa Cruz. A hackathon is a three-day event in which students and others form teams, come up with an idea for a product and present it.
“If you can’t pitch, if you can’t present, even if your product’s great, it’s not gonna sell,” said Santa Cruz resident and CruzHacks judge Emma McLaren.
The team’s future goal is to develop an app for mobile devices and put the hardware for the program into a smaller device, such as glasses and an earpiece, according to the CruzHacks website.
Period Helper was another team that spoke at the meetup event. Period Helper took first place in the Amazon’s Alexa Challenge at CruzHacks. The invention is an Alexa Skill, or an Alexa app that helps users accomplish a task that she isn’t initially built to do. The skill helps women complete daily surveys in menstrual cycle tracking apps such as Flo and Clue.
“We want to make that communication easier,” the Period Helper team said. The team members, Keerthana Routhu, Leah George, Sriya Lingampalli and Disha Mevada, are all second-year students at UCSC.
The team said that one feature they are working on is to have Period Helper send messages to the doctor about physical discomfort and/or a health report.
Lingampalli said the skill is open to a larger audience because users can communicate through voice interface and not just an app.
Doug Erickson, founder of Santa Cruz New Tech MeetUp, started a monthly survey in 2018 for meetup members seeking their input on local issues. He said about 30 percent of active members participate in the survey.
The surveys show that there is a gap between who understands the issues at hand and who isn’t informed enough to have an opinion.
According to a Santa Cruz New Tech MeetUp survey that ran from the December 2018 to Jan. 15, 27 percent of survey participants did not know about the Mixed Use Library Project.
“I don’t think it’s an age thing,” Erickson said. “I think it’s a lack of knowledge of what’s going on with these issues.”
Erickson said people don’t have enough time to read about or attend city events, such as city council meetings. One solution he presented was to have an ambassador or representative from the meetup go to council meetings to speak for, learn and then inform meetup members about local affairs.
The next Santa Cruz New Tech MeetUp event will be at 6:30 p.m. March 6 at Dream Inn Santa Cruz, 175 W. Cliff Drive. Guy Kawasaki will speak and present his book, “Wise Guy.” The meetup’s February local issues survey is available at docs.google.com and is open until 5 p.m. Feb. 28. Information: visit meetup.com/santacruznewtech or the New Tech MeetUp Facebook page.
