2025 ISEF Competition - May Lynn and Ryan Xu Wins

Posted on May 21st, 2025 Dr. Meng and our students attended ISEF, the most prestigious competition for high school students.

May Lynn Espinola clutched the 2nd place prize alongside the honor of having a small planet named after her. Her project tackles a critical communication barrier between the Deaf and non-signers with a real-time, scalable American Sign Language (ASL) recognition system. Using MediaPipe for hand tracking and a lightweight MobileViT transformer architecture, her system captures both static and dynamic sign features with high accuracy and over 30 FPS performance. It translates sign language into text or speech in real time, integrating facial expressions and body posture for full-context understanding, bridging the gap between signers and non-signers. Check out her video here!

May Lynn began as a student in ArcGen Academy and has since grown into a teaching assistant and assistant teacher in the 101 and 203 courses, solidifying her presence as an fun, encouraging, and informative educator. 

This year at ISEF 2025, Ryan Xu stood out among thousands of brilliant young minds with his groundbreaking project: the Generative Artificial Intelligence Vision System (GIVS). Designed to aid the visually impaired, GIVS combines cutting-edge multimodal generative AI with affordable hardware to provide real-time, human-like visual assistance.

Recognizing the limitations and high costs of current electronic travel aids, Ryan developed a wearable eyeglass prototype equipped with dual cameras, LiDAR, GPS, and an inertial measurement unit—all for under $90. The system uses an innovative AI model that translates visual input into vivid, natural-language descriptions and speech, effectively functioning like a virtual human assistant. Users can interact with the system via voice commands on a smartphone, which also triggers text recognition and navigation features. Check out his video here!