National recognition for AI concept
Microsoft Imagine Cup Junior
Year 10 IST students Alysia Rostirolla and Apostoleia Moulos placed in the top 10 entries in the country for the Microsoft Imagine Cup Junior Competition 2022.
With over 500 entries from across Australia the girls wowed Microsoft with their idea for an Artificial Intelligence system that would improve communication between hospitals and patients’ families, hoping to deliver and interpret medical results in a timely manner using layman’s terminology.
Alysia and Apostoleia describe what it was like to participate in the competition:
The Imagine Cup Junior is a competition run by Microsoft for students aged 13-18 years to learn about Artificial Intelligence and how it can be used to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges. In the challenge, we were tasked with creating a concept that uses Artificial Intelligence for good in the world. As a group, we chose to focus on the area of health and how we could help combat the shortage of medical professionals in hospitals and the misinformation gap between patients’ families and medical professionals.
In the last three years our hospitals have been overtaken by COVID-19 and as a result, there has been a significant strain on the medical field with the normal number of hospitalisations plus all the COVID-19 patients. This has caused a shortage of medical professionals in hospitals and has also meant that they don’t have as much time to spend with families of patients. We created an Artificial intelligence concept called ‘CONNECTo’ that collects and uses data within the hospitals’ database and interprets that data to terminology that the patient and their family can easily understand, which is done by using problem solving and linguistic Artificial Intelligence. For example, if a family member is in the hospital and has had a blood test taken, a nurse will log the blood test results into the hospital’s database. The AI in our software will take the blood test results, and will interpret them into simple terms, then explain the blood test results and decipher whether certain levels are higher or lower than others. A family member of the patient will be able to log into the app, view the blood test results, and the explanation of those results.
We are both incredibly grateful to have been given the opportunity to participate in this competition and have found this competition not only challenging, but it has enabled us to master a range of new skills while utilising new technologies to solve real world problems.
Alysia Rostirolla & Apostoleia Moulos
Year 10 IST
