Idea 1 (Intelligent Personal Assistant for Medicine):

I want to build a software (potentially mobile application) that acts as an intelligent personal assistant for medical purpose. The inspiration comes from modern programs like Siri, but instead of being a general purpose, I want it to have a narrower focus (i.e. medicine). While I am still working on the details, I envision that you can talk to the app about various things such as diseases, medicines, hospitals and so on. I want the communication style to be as human-like as possible. The app will also do other things like remind you to take your medicine, tell you when it’s time to go for a regular check-up and so on. I anticipate integrating other 3rd party web services to make some of these functionalities possible. I am also expecting to go through the works of CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) among other resources.

Idea 2 (Optimal Character Recognition):

The process of OCR of converting images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text has always been something I have been interested/curious about. I want to research on how this process is done and hopefully recreate the technology. For a more personalized experience, I will try to learn the particular user’s handwriting style better through the app and then hopefully have a higher degree of recognition accuracy.

Idea 3 (Dissecting/Adding functionality to a machine):

While this idea seems increasingly less likely, I thought I would make a note of this regardless. Having had some interest in working with hardware/circuits, I wanted to open up a machine, learn more about the internal components/circuits. Along with that, I also wanted to add some other piece of hardware and add functionality to the machine.