ECE Junior Austin Negron Wins HackHarvard Hackathon
ECE junior, Austin Negron (ECE ‘21), with the help of his peer, Rishab Nayak (CAS ‘21), and two Northeastern students, developed an app that can take down the language barrier for non-native English speakers when filling out forms. The app emerged from the challenge at the annual HackHarvard’s Hackathon, where this year’s theme was to push for progress in society with technology. Negron took this year’s theme and ran with it.
Seeing his grandmother, a native Spanish speaker, struggle to fill out forms, Negron sought to create a solution for those who deal with the same issue. In fact, “there are 45 million people in America who don’t speak English”, Negron says (Lakowski, BU Today). The result – Phillina.space, an app that lets the user upload a document and translate it into their native language using Google Translate. Once the form has been completed, it is then translated back into English. While the app is still in the development stage, its potential is far-reaching. To learn more about Negron’s story, you can read about it on BU Today.