What's happening in PresUniv
With a mission to make the lives of people with disabilities easier through technology, Gilang Martadinata, a student of the Information Technology Study Program 2018, President University (PresUniv), developed an application called Teman Disabilitas (Disabled Friend ) (TeDi). This application is a capstone project for the Independent Program of the Independent Campus, Bangkit Academy 2022, organized by Google Indonesia. This application was developed with other team members, namely Najma and Julio Fahcrel (Padjadjaran University), Hazlan Muhammad Qodri (UPN Veterans Yogyakarta), Pratama Azmi Atmajaya (Telkom University), and Sang Bintang Putera Alam (Jember State Polytechnic). Of the 500 selected teams, TeDi qualified to become one of the top 15 teams moving forward to the incubation process.
The Bangkit Academy 2022 program began in February 2022 and graduation was held on Tuesday (6/9) at the Directorate General of Higher Education (Ditjen Dikti) Building. Gilang and Abraham Pardomuan Naiborhu, PresUniv students who also qualified for the Bangkit program, were included in 25 out of the 3,100 students invited to attend because they received the title of distinction graduates. During this program, Gilang admitted that he got a lot of insight from practitioners. “In Bangkit, every week there is a guest speaker session. The speakers are from Google, Gojek, to the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) from various companies, and the topics were always connected with young people," he said. In this program, Gilang and his team developed TeDi with four main features, namely Bahasa Isyarat Indonesia (Bisindo) or translator to translate sign language, Object Detection to detect objects in front of the user, Currency Detection to detect currency, and Text Detection to read a text. "In addition, we are also targeting two additional features, namely family health and color detection," he added.
In developing TeDi, Gilang and the team received guidance from two mentors, namely from Google USA and GoTo Financial. For the financing, Gilang said, "We got an incubation fund of US$10,000 with 50% from Google and 50% from the Directorate General of Higher Education." Gilang hopes that the TeDi application will be useful for people with disabilities. In addition, he also really wants other PresUniv students to become active in this kind of program, such as Bangkit. “Abraham and I hope to be pioneers so that in the future many Presuniv students will join this program. Because here the material is of international-standard and there are Google IT professional certifications courses, which are offered for free. In fact, outside this program, you have to pay, for the courses" he explained. According to him, in addition to getting experience building start-ups, the participants also learned other skills, such as machine learning, cloud computing, to mobile development. One of the features of TeDi he even uses as material for his thesis. (Silvia Desi Betrice, PR team. Photo: Gilang Martadinata)
