Android Developers for Movue Mobile
Georgia Tech graduate students Sven Blaese and Dhawal Shah, along with second year undergraduate Computer Science major Joy Buolamwini, were among 20 finalists in the Travel section of Google’s Android Developers Challenge II. Their entry, Movue, allows you to use the camera on your Android phone to point to anything around you and identify where you are, find restaurants and sporting events and “Focus Your World.” The app can be downloaded from the Android market and has been download thousands of times. Team Movue competed in ADC2 for $100,000 in best of category among ten categories and for another $150,000 for best overall. Total prize money awarded was about $2M. The final winner of best in category and best overall was Sweet Dreams whose team walked away with $250,000 in winnings!
Joy Buolamwini – Georgia Tech Stamps President’s Scholar
Buolamwini turned down Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Cornell, Duke and Rhodes to attend Georgia Tech as a Stamps President’s Scholar on a full-ride, merit based scholarship considered the most prestigious academic scholarship awarded by Georgia Tech, thanks to the generosity of Penny and E. Roe Stamps, IV.
Movue Mobile Technology
Since arriving at Georgia Tech, Buolamwini has been involved in undergraduate research including the Google Android Health Project which is how she met Shah and became interested in mobile development. After winning the Convergence Innovation Competition 2009, Blaese and Shah teamed up with Inventure Prize finalist Buolamwini to tackle ADC2. By integrating compass orientation sensors, GPS, and the on-board camera, the team created an application that enhances the user’s vision by transforming an android phone into an augmented reality device.
Buolamwini – A Rising Star
Since starting at Tech, Buolamwini has attended the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference in April in Portland, OR and the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) of Women in Computing Conference in Tuscon, AZ which celebrates women in computing (and where she won an XBOX 360 courtesy of Microsoft!) With a perfect 4.0 GPA, she most recently was awarded a Google IMPACT Scholarship to kickoff 2010.
Buolamwini is seriously focused. She’s had a freelance graphic and web design firm since high school, JovialDesigns, is an undergraduate Research Assistant for a Google/GT project in the GVU at Tech, is chief Web developer for the Tech College of Computing Firewall, founded a web-based platform to help students with college admissions, Admissions Conquered for Inventure Prize, coded games/Flash development, and worked in the GT Robotics & Intelligent Machines Lab.
Buolamwini Considered a Prodigy in High School
2008 Salutatorian at Cordova High School, a city school in Memphis, TN, Buolamwini was a top student with an extraordinary talent for computer programming. She received the William H. Sweet Award for Academic Excellence three years in a row, was an AP Scholar with Distinction and was selected to attend the Governor’s School for Engineering. She received Gold Medals on the National Latin Exams I and II, a First Place in Statistics at the Brownsville Regional Math Competition and was named a National Achievement Merit Scholar for Tennessee.
In her “spare time” she was on the basketball, track and cross country teams where she excelled in pole vaulting. She developed a website for a non-profit, volunteered at Life Church, Special Olympics, and worked with “Back to School Bash” to help underprivileged children.
As for her plans after Georgia Tech, Buolamwini is considering graduate school or a career in business. Southern VC Greg Foster and I both agree Joy Buolamwini is a gifted, disciplined, entrepreneurial star from the South, someone to watch, mentor and invest in when she’s ready!
