Based on "Connected Arms", a keynote talk at the O'Reilly AI Conference delivered by Joseph Sirosh, CTO for AI at Microsoft. There are over 1 million new amputees every year, i.e. one every 30 seconds – a truly shocking statistic. The World Health Organization estimates that between 30 to 100 million people around the world are living with limb loss today. Unfortunately, only 5-15% of this population has access to prosthetic devices. Although prostheses have been around since ancient times, their successful use has been severely limited for millennia by several factors, with cost being the major one.

"It's very easy to get intimidated," says Hamayal Choudhry, the robotics engineer who co-created the smartARM, a robotic hand prosthetic that uses a camera to analyze and manipulate objects. "You have this idea for a project, then think, I don't know a thing about this." Here's how Choudhry and his partner Samin Khan, who programmed the smartARM's machine learning algorithm, used code libraries, college assignments, and sponsored hackathons to find and execute a meaningful project at age 20. The smartARM works by integrating the two fields of machine learning and mechatronics (robotics). A camera in the palm detects objects, and an algorithm analyzes the video feed (this is called computer vision) and tells the robotic hand how to manipulate the objects.

A pair of Canadian students making a simple, inexpensive prosthetic arm have taken home the grand prize at Microsoft's Imagine Cup, a global startup competition the company holds yearly. SmartArm will receive $85,000, a mentoring session with CEO Satya Nadella, and some other Microsoft goodies. But they were far from the only worthy team from the dozens that came to Redmond to compete. The Imagine Cup is an event I personally look forward to, because it consists entirely of smart young students, usually engineers and designers themselves (not yet "serial entrepreneurs") and often aiming to solve real-world problems. In the semi-finals I attended, I saw a pair of young women from Pakistan looking to reduce stillbirth rates with a new pregnancy monitor, an automated eye-checking device that can be deployed anywhere and used by anyone, and an autonomous monitor for water tanks in drought-stricken areas.

I'm attending the Microsoft Imagine Cup, a global competition that empowers young computer science students to team up and use their creativity, passion and knowledge of technology and quantitative skills to create applications that improve the world in which we live. This year's event is the 16th annual event that includes 49 teams from around the world. Finalists will be vying for the chance to win up to $100K plus a mentoring session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. You can watch the winner being introduced live on July 25th at 9:00 am PT! I had the opportunity to talk with the finalists, watch their demonstrations and ask questions to better understand their knowledge of the space in which they are working.