Neil Kumar has been identified to depart a water bottle or a jacket at college or the fitness center, marking himself among the many thousands and thousands of Individuals whose forgotten belongings find yourself in a lost-and-found field or a landfill yearly.
Now Kumar is the founding father of FindIt, an app designed to offer an AI-powered resolution to recovering what’s been misplaced.
The 15-year-old freshman at Bellevue (Wash.) Excessive College was lately chosen as one among 4 innovators to take part within the metropolis’s Civic Innovation Problem, an initiative searching for know-how options to municipal challenges.
FindIt will likely be used on a pilot foundation at Bellevue Faculty to check the app’s usability and effectiveness amongst college students, workers and guests and consider its potential for broader deployment.
“I’ve all the time been desirous about how know-how can remedy our actual world issues,” Kumar advised GeekWire.
In response to statistics cited by the web site Lostings, over 400 million gadgets are misplaced and located yearly within the U.S. The estimated worth of misplaced gadgets is over $5 billion per yr.
Kumar desires his creation to assist handle the financial facet of all of that loss, and likewise the sustainability concern. His tagline is “Purchase much less, lose even much less.”
Out there on iOS, FindIt works when somebody answerable for a lost-and-found system, at a faculty as an illustration, takes a photograph of a recovered merchandise and uploads that photograph. The picture is processed by synthetic intelligence, which generates an outline, resembling “blue water bottle with pink sticker and white high.”
A pupil in search of a misplaced merchandise sorts an outline into FindIt, and the app’s AI scans uploaded listings to search out one of the best matches.
Kumar mentioned the straightforward means of looking through a cell app eclipses conventional programs that require an individual to bodily return to a spot the place they might have left one thing.
He began engaged on the challenge a yr in the past and FindIt was amongst 23 aggressive candidates reviewed and judged within the civic problem. The three different firms and concepts that have been accepted are:
- Certivo, a Seattle firm with an AI-driven platform that gives visibility into vendor compliance throughout procurement and cybersecurity.
- Legislaide, a Denver firm utilizing AI to investigate municipal codes, legislative historical past and state statutes, permitting workers to run plain English searches throughout agendas, minutes, ordinances, resolutions, studies and extra.
- Juganu, an Israeli firm with a sensible lighting resolution to light up curbside exercise whereas monitoring real-time utilization patterns to assist metropolis and Bellevue Faculty transportation and public security initiatives.
FindIt was additionally chosen for the Thermo Fisher Junior Innovators Challenge, and Kumar mentioned he was acknowledged within the high 300 junior innovators within the U.S. this yr.
The app is presently deployed at Odle Center College in Bellevue. Kumar envisions the device sometime being accessible to extra faculties in addition to airports, workplaces, public transit companies and elsewhere.
Kumar, who has labored with Sustainability Ambassadors, a program that helps develop pupil management abilities, thinks FindIt is simply the beginning, and he’d prefer to be an entrepreneur sooner or later.
“I like to resolve issues utilizing know-how, and assist folks utilizing these options,” he mentioned.
