MIT Entrepreneurship and Maker Skills Integrator - MEMSI (2021)

During my undergraduate studies, I passed the highly selective screening process for the annual MIT Entrepreneurship and Maker Skills Integrator in 2021. I joined ~40 students from MIT and Hong Kong universities to participate in the prestigious and intense bootcamp.

We received workshops on design thinking, entrepreuneurship, and sharing sessions from established figures, many of whom generously stayed with us through the week providing valuable insight and guidance. I vividly recall Prof. de Neufville’s talk, where he illustrated entrepreneurship theory with his experiences in real-world business scenarios. His expertise and passion for the subject were evident, and he encouraged us to think creatively and embrace innovative approaches to problem-solving.

We also had the opportunity to work with Hong Kong International Airpot (HKIA) administration to ideate possible improvements to HKIA’s (already incredibly efficient) workflow. During the site visits, we got to see the inner workings of one of the worlds busiest airports, including customer-facing aspects such as retail and services, and also the logistic aspects such as luggage and cargo handling. Furthermore, we got to discuss our observation and thoughts in small-groups with HKIA’s top-level executives.

In the end, our team came with a small IoT device to help in detecting spills and accidents within the washrooms. It is a IOT sensor node, loaded with an acoustic deep-learning model (implemented in TFLite) to recognize specific audio events such as periodic water drips and slipping noises. To train the model, we recorded thousands samples of slipping and dripping to train our machine learning model. I also designed a rig to hold a ceramic tile, on which these sounds can be consistently collected.

MEMSI’s official website: https://hkinnovationnode.mit.edu/programs/memsi/