Essay Topic: Cornell Engineering celebrates innovative problem solving that helps people, communities…the world. Consider your ideas and aspirations and describe how a Cornell Engineering education would allow you to leverage technological problem-solving to improve the world we live in.
If given an eye test with the standard Snellen Eye chart (y’know, the one with all the letters on it) you will be asked to stand 20 ft away, cover one eye and read off the letters from the chart as they get increasingly smaller. If you can read up to the lines marked “20” at 20 feet away, you have normal 20/20 vision and your eyes can separate contours that are 1.75 mm apart. Knowing visual acuity is important because it helps diagnose vision problems.
But the challenge? Usually people have to go into eye doctors and get an eye test to determine their acuity. However, since more than 40% of Americans don’t go to an eye doctor on a regular basis and access to eye care is extremely rare and usually unavailable in third world countries, many people who need glasses don’t know it and live with blurred vision.
To tackle this problem, I’ve spent 50 hours a week for the last four months at the Schepens Institute at Harvard University working on an individual project supervised by Harvard Medical School professors Eli Peli and Gang Luo. I’m coding a program that not only measures visual acuity, but can determine what glasses prescription someone would need. The program works by changing the size of letters on screen to adapt to the user. My ultimate goal is to configure this into an iPhone and Android app so that it’s easy for someone to determine if he or she needs glasses. Through Cornell’s CS Department, I hope to continue this vision (pun intended) and use my programming skills to make the benefits of cutting edge research more accessible to the average person.
My project at Harvard has given me a strong foundation in MatLab, but numerical computing languages like MatLab must be used in conjunction with more high-performing languages to construct usable applications. Courses like CS 2049 Intermediate iPhone Development in the CS Department will help me improve my understanding of more dynamic languages like Javascript and Swift and develop more successful mobile and web applications.
The synergy that Cornell promotes between the different schools cultivates a diverse learning environment that would allow me to continue doing the research that combines different fields of study. Specifically, Cornell’s Student Project Teams would allow me to get hands on experience collaborating with other types of engineers. Current efforts by the Engineering World Health team to create a vaccine cooling refrigeration device connect strongly with my belief that the collaboration between mechanical, biological, chemical, and computer engineers is crucial to yielding fruitful results. Being in an environment where this synergy is encouraged is what creates solutions that address real world problems.
I’m also excited to continue the kind of research I’ve been doing over the past six months at Harvard. In particular, the research of Geri Gay, director of Cornell’s Interaction Design Lab, fascinates me. Her Nutriphone project, which provides dietary recommendations based on photos users take of their food, is similar to my current project in that they both aim to utilize mobile applications in order to make medical care more accessible to the average person. The help of expert advisors like Geri will allow me to finish the project I’ve started here at Harvard by developing applications that can help improve the health and wellness in a more useable and practical format.
Vast sums of money are spent on research annually, but unfortunately this research rarely makes it into the hands of the public. If this technology isn’t accessible to society, we’re doing a disservice to humanity. The skills, experience, and network I will build at the computer science department at Cornell will help me devise solutions to problems and bring the benefits of cutting edge research to the public.