Greeley Senior Wins Prestigious Research Prize

CHAPPAQUA, NY — Isha Puri, a senior at Horace Greeley High School, has won a prestigious science research prize for building an eye-tracking system that not only tests for dyslexia but may have practical application for other medical conditions. She is among four students selected from among a pool of graduating high-schooler across the United States for the Cutler-Bell prize by the Association for Computing Machinery and the Computer Science Teachers Association.

Puri’s project focuses on the development of a system to detect the direction and frequency of gaze fixation to test for and diagnose dyslexia.

Realizing that the analysis could be performed on eye movement patterns directly, Puri developed six main steps to the process: take a video of a child reading a standard passage using a webcam, separate the video into frames, isolate right and left eyes from the image, develop a highly accurate eye tracker that uses a webcam, extract fixation frequency and duration features to predict dyslexia and test on real patients. Puri’s software automatically extracts the duration and frequency of reader fixations in a webcam stream with a combination of machine learning methods and then builds a data-driven prediction model to predict a high-risk of dyslexia.

This implementation provides a highly accurate and freely available eye tracking methodology for diagnosing a variety of medical conditions.

The Cutler-Bell Prize promotes the field of computer science and empowers students to pursue computing challenges beyond the traditional classroom environment. Each Cutler-Bell Prize winner received a $10,000 cash prize, which is sent to the financial aid office of the higher education institution the student will be attending next year, and is then put towards their tuition or disbursed.

Puri has been accepted at MIT and will be finalizing her college plans soon.

This year's Cutler-Bell prize winners will be formally recognized at the Computer Science Teacher's Association 2019 Annual Conference in Phoenix, AZ on July 7-10.