Meet the winners of AT&T’s HBCU Innovation Challenge

The results are in from network giant AT&T’s annual HBCU Innovation Challenge for students. And in 2022, DC students won big.

This year, 13 teams from eight Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) competed in the challenge, and students from DC’s Howard University nabbed two of the top prizes. The challenge asks students to create an innovative solution that addresses a problem in their community, with the focus areas including climate change, bridging the digital divide and connecting teachers and students.

Teams of three to five, plus a faculty rep and AT&T mentors, had to create a 10-12 minute presentation and develop a prototype of their solution (coding wasn’t required). Solutions needed to focus on creating a real-world benefit in the focus area with a tech component, according to the challenge rules.

Here are the winning teams from this year’s event:

• First Place — Levels from Howard University, $75,000
  • Ikechi Anyanwu, business and finance, senior
  • Lauren Guthrie, computer science, sophomore
  • Murad Abdi, computer science, sophomore
  • Niles Stubbs, finance, senior
• Second Place — Meta Bears from Morgan State University, $15,000
  • Abigail Dina, computer science, junior
  • Dimitri Watat, finance, junior
  • Makyha Wilridge, computer science, senior
  • Martin Adu-Boahene, information systems, junior
• Third Place — Mecca Minds from Howard University, $10,000
  • Asha Abdullah, finance, sophomore
  • Brielle Mitchell, business management, sophomore
  • Elise Gentry, marketing, sophomore
  • Noelle Smith, international business, sophomore

Murad Abdi, a sophomore computer science major from the Levels team, actually competed in the challenge last year as well. He chose to participate then (and again this year) because, as a student starting in the pandemic, he was looking to connect with some of the peers he only saw virtually.

He and his team initially set off to create a project that could scout areas that might be in danger of a wildfire starting, but ultimately went a different direction on the sustainability route. The Levels project is a smart trashcan that automatically sorts out trash and recycling.

The team created the project, Abdi said, after realizing that few students properly disposed of their trash.

“No one is really using the trash bins for their intended purpose,” Abdi told Technical.ly. “No one is really using the recycling bins for their intended purpose. And so we said, ‘Okay, we’re seeing a problem here, it’s kind of anecdotal, can we look into this further?'”

Their prototype, which is approximately 54 inches tall and 28 inches in diameter with a stainless steel shell, is designed to look like a regular trashcan and use solar power. Pedestrians would drop an item inside — an action detected by a motion sensor — and a camera and additional sensors underneath would capture an image, plus a few other properties of the item. That information would then get sent to a cloud server, and the team designed a software framework that would use machine learning to detect if it was trash or recycling. From there, an instruction would be sent back to the can that told it to tilt the lid left or right, depending on if the item had to go into recycling or trash.

From there, Abdi said, it would find its way into a half-can of trash or recycling, removing the need for humans to decide where to dispose of their items.

“We realized that we could have a greater impact on the problem by addressing that at its root,” Abdi said. “If trash was better sorted at its root, and recyclables were better sorted at their root, landfills would gradually become smaller over time and recycling plants would be able to process more.”

Brielle Mitchell, a sophomore business management student from the Mecca Minds team, said that her group opted to pursue the sustainability challenge as well because it was something they weren’t too familiar with. The team thought it was a great chance to get their feet wet in a new area, she said, which led them to create the framework for an app that would track users’ carbon footprints.

“When it comes to sustainability, as a world, we often look at it from a global standpoint of, ‘What can corporations do, what can countries do as a whole?'” Mitchell said. “But we never really take it down to personal accountability of what we can do, individually, to make sure that we are being sustainable.”

The Mecca team didn’t actually build the app, and instead presented a prototype on some of the consumer interface and experience. But the overall goal was to educate users about CO2 filters and their different uses, while also providing information on emission levels in the area.

Although she didn’t take home first place this year, Mitchell said she’d definitely like to participate again next year. In fact, she believes all companies should be part of competitions like this one.

“When we look at innovation and when we look at advancing as a world, it’s gonna take more than the small communities of people that we already have in the business world,” Mitchell said. “There’s so much talent out there. … And I think that there are a lot of ideas out there that we need to tap into, a lot of great minds out there that we need to tap into.”

Abdi —who will be interning with Walt Disney Animation Studios this summer — doesn’t think he’ll be participating next year (although he said he might like to come back in future years to provide mentorship). The success of his team’s project, though, has him confident in his pursuit of a career in computer vision, and he thinks the competition is a great chance to provide more opportunities to HBCU students.

“Especially for HBCU students, these are spaces that weren’t always available to us,” Abdi said. “AT&T is making the sincere effort to give us opportunities to compete and to really push ourselves. It’s something that I am grateful for, and it’s something that I’m happy AT&T recognizes and is willing to invest in.”