By Zoe Elledge
At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, a group of five Georgia Tech students decided to apply what they had learned about data science in their classes to help those affected by the pandemic.
Undergraduate biomedical engineering students Davis White, Thomas Beckler, and Jaime Vera teamed with Ricardo Meizoso (ME), Leonardo Ricci (CS) and Nicolas Mirchandani (ID) to take a data science-focused approach to social distancing and pandemic regulations and created a transit car Automated Passenger Counter.
The team’s device tracks the number of people moving in and out of public transit cars and was inspired by pre-Covid-19 technology used on college campuses to track movement patterns across major buildings, such as libraries and dining halls. Their plans for the Automated Passenger Counter device led to enrolling in the MIT Covid-19 Challenge hackathon, winning their…