Announcing the First Act Fund Summer 2020 Grantees

These 15 grantees have innovative ideas that will change the world

Chris Kuang
Coding it Forward

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This summer, the United States experienced a societal reckoning over police brutality and systemic racism and injustice, while the country and the wider world continued to suffer the consequences of a global pandemic.

Our team at Coding it Forward is cognizant that for too long, technology has not been a neutral tool and has been used — directly and indirectly — to uphold and sustain unjust systems. The First Act Fund was designed to empower young technologists to channel their problem-solving and entrepreneurial skills into creating products, tools, and services that actively contribute to creating a better world, and our most recent funding cycle could not have come at a more pivotal time.

We believe that this round of grantees — 15 in total, each led by a young person aged 24 or younger — offers hope in today’s world. With their skills and driven by their lived experiences, these grantees are addressing some of our greatest challenges and working to close longstanding gaps in criminal justice, education, economic opportunity, healthcare, and the environment.

Split into two tracks, each grantee is receiving no-strings-attached grant funding between $1,250 and $10,000 and support from the Coding it Forward and Schmidt Futures teams to help turn their ideas into reality. Earlier-stage grantees in the Blueprint Track will also participate in and benefit from four product development workshops about defining the problem, user research, prototyping, and iterating a solution.

Read about each of our 15 grantees below. Over the coming weeks, we will be sharing more from each grantee, in their own words—stay tuned to our social media (Twitter, Facebook)!

Blueprint — Track I

Solo

Standardized exams should not be the deciding factor in a student’s admission to a university or graduate program, but for first-generation and minority students, it often is. While the class of 2019 recorded more SATs taken than ever before, even more Black and Latinx students failed to reach the SAT benchmarks for college readiness. This isn’t for a lack of potential or intellectual capacity, but rather a lack of support and knowledge on how to properly prepare for these exams.

Solo is a mobile and web service designed to bridge this gap that exists for first-generation and minority students. Designed and developed by students of color, our app helps students navigate the free resources that are already on the market while providing premium features that don’t come at premium costs. By suggesting study plans specific to a student’s goals and timeline, Solo helps students study confidently while motivating them to make progress every day.

EarlyByrd

The creators of EarlyByrd are a group of graduate and undergraduate students studying Mathematics and Engineering at Florida Institute of Technology. They grew up in East and West Africa and were able to identify a severe shortage of medical imaging systems in their home countries. Existing MRI and CT scan-based solutions are extremely expensive and most citizens in developing nations simply cannot afford the costs. In many situations, cancer patients find out about their ailments when it’s too late. Early diagnosis at low cost can add at least five years to a patient’s life.

EarlyByrd is a biomedical device that relies on accurate imaging technology for early-stage detection of breast cancer. EarlyByrd’s defining features are its low cost and its ability to image the human body without radiation exposure. The device will interface with an elegant mobile app that allows medical staff to view the bioscans. Due to its radiation-free nature, the device can allow patients to undergo dynamic monitoring, which is something MRI and CT scans do not offer.

Invasive Species Detector

Kathleen Esfahany is solving invasive species detection and treatment. Growing up on Long Island, New York, she witnessed the devastating effects of invasive species on her local ecosystems and farms. Although early detection of these species is critical to mitigating their impact, there are not yet scalable and easily-accessible methods for early detection and reporting of invasive species. Kathleen is building a system equipped with automated invasive species identification, treatment information, and reporting mechanisms. Building upon neural networks that can identify invasive species from photos, her system aims to enable everyone, not just experts, to identify invasive species and start eradication efforts as early as possible.

Valencia

Valencia is a financial dashboard and literacy platform to help first-generation college students achieve financial independence. In a system where personal financial knowledge and infrastructure is often inherited from one’s parents, we’re hoping to bridge that gap for first-time account holders and bring greater transparency to the secret topic of money.

Valencia is led by Jackie Ennis, a recent graduate of Stanford University with a background in data science and environmental advocacy.

Algoright

Algoright is a holistic algorithmic audit, built by bias researchers. We aim to build fairness, accountability, and transparency back into algorithms. Algorithms are ubiquitously used in a variety of decision-making contexts from hiring to criminal justice but are known to produce biased outcomes. We’ve observed that regulatory mandates are emerging, demanding explainability in algorithms in the EU and US, which will soon develop into a global standard. Companies are not equipped with the tools to build Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency into their algorithms to meet regulatory demands. Algoright employs multidisciplinary techniques, such as ethical reviews and quantitative analyses, to test and mitigate biases that are contextualized to the industry.

Our team is passionate about reducing biases in algorithms to produce fairer decisions. Algoright is led by Priscilla Guo, Anirudh Suresh, Hannah Rose Kirk, and Linda Sarfo-Gyamfi, who collectively bring extensive research experience on algorithmic bias topics as well as expertise in product, business, and policy.

Normaliz

Normaliz is an AI startup launched to address the racial and gendered biases that exist in technology. Nico Addai and Jennifer Otiono are Wellesley College alums driven by the story of a young, black Wellesley sibling who recently died due to COVID complications after she was turned away multiple times from receiving treatment. Normaliz seeks to ensure that vulnerable populations are not left behind by the AI tech revolution, starting with Melanomix, a telemedicine app that allows darker-skinned patients to access their skin’s health in the palms of their hands.

LifelinePi

LifelinePi is a team of motivated undergraduate students from Georgia Tech, Case Western Reserve, Rose-Hulman, and Olin College of Engineering. We specialize in engineering, healthcare, computer science, and entrepreneurship. At LifelinePi, we have built a device that will give older adults access to the growing field of telehealth by deliberately removing technological barriers to use. Our ultimate objective is to enable telehealth for anyone lacking full access to healthcare due to technological barriers. The LifelinePi device can save millions of dollars for health systems and ensure millions are not left behind by the rise of telehealth.

Build — Track II

JusticeText

Devshi Mehrotra and Leslie Jones-Dove are technologists of color who care deeply about leveraging their technical background to advance criminal justice reform. They founded JusticeText in 2019 while studying at the University of Chicago as undergraduate computer science students. In building JusticeText, they seek to strengthen the ability of public defenders to serve low-income criminal defendants through video evidence management software. Their product leverages AI to process body-worn camera footage, interrogation videos, jail calls, and more. JusticeText is currently piloting their software with Alameda County (CA), Harris County (TX), and the State of Minnesota.

Admit Guru

Admit Guru aims to provide college consulting services at a fraction of the cost. We do this by leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to create systemized and scalable solutions for some of the easily duplicated aspects of the process. This includes SAT/ACT prep, resume reviews, essay writing, and high school planning.

This is an underserved market: college consultants are only affordable to high socioeconomic status students leaving over 70% of the students applying to college unaddressed. Creating low-cost, technology-backed solutions will create a more accessible and affordable education for all.

QueuePals

Alex Chen, Isabelle Zhou, and Kimberly Te are Yale and Stanford students working on QueuePals, which improves safety and mitigates risk of infection in how patients queue for check-ins. As society adapts to the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, QueuePals serves as a solution to help patients safely navigate their healthcare visitation journey. In response to the increased risk of infection through person-to-person contact in waiting rooms, QueuePals offers a virtual waiting room system that allows patients to safely check-in and communicate with their healthcare clinics while minimizing in-person contact. QueuePals has already launched in two clinics, seamlessly checked in over 100 patients, and now seeks to actively expand nationwide.

Worksense

Worksense is a platform that empowers people leaders to seamlessly track and mitigate unfair biases in employee compensation and promotion decisions at scale. Through integrations with enterprise standard HR software, the Worksense platform consolidates relevant people data from tools such as Workday, Bamboo, and ADP. We then provide people leaders at tech companies with a dashboard that shows analyses of this consolidated data in a manner that helps them to detect and respond to unfair biases in employee compensation and promotion decisions and further supports people leaders by streamlining workflows for dealing with identified unfairness through automated raise allocation and promotion recommendation processes. The Worksense team is led by CEO Timi Dayo-Kayode and CTO Kevin Destin, both 2020 graduates of Tufts University.

EasyGov

EasyGov was founded by Son Do, Sharon Lin, Victor Hua, and Max Land, all undergraduates from Princeton and MIT, to address the lack of support for filing government forms in languages other than English. We’ve developed a platform that features unemployment applications, absentee ballot applications, food stamp applications, and more. We’ve partnered with national nonprofits like ACRS and United Way to scale our impact and reach those who need EasyGov the most.

Khushi Baby

Khushi Baby, founded in 2014, is a non-profit organization based in Rajasthan, India that aims to monitor and improve primary health, especially maternal and child health, at the last mile. The Khushi Baby solution is a novel mobile health platform for frontline health workers to ensure accountable, longitudinal tracking of community health. The platform’s key features include offline authentication of provider-beneficiary interaction (via use of Near Field Communication (NFC), offline biometrics and GPS), decentralized health records (via use of NFC), prioritized beneficiary due lists, clinical decision-making assistance, automated, dialect-specific awareness voice calls, and dashboard analytics. The Khushi Baby team oversees the end-to-end process of design, development, deployment, monitoring and evaluation, and stakeholder engagement required to drive granular impact. Our 40 member team, stationed in Udaipur and Jaipur, represent various disciplines: public health, medicine, public policy, data science, software development, design, and social work. Our partners include UNICEF, GAVI, JHPIEGO, Johnson & Johnson, MIT Solve, and Google AI.

GUAQ

Globally Unified Air Quality (GUAQ) makes a powerful, low-cost, moderate to high resolution air quality monitoring device meant to empower individuals, researchers, and enterprises alike with the ability to detect and and measure an array of environmental hazards. The device and supporting software ecosystem solves the numerous problems with existing low-cost solutions and provides a platform for continually supporting and developing the product, as well as integrating with the global effort to measure and combat environmental afflictions. Providing the ability to collect data, along with resources to educate, is our first step in creating policy and social change in the context of air pollution. GUAQ’s team includes Georgetown University undergraduates studying computer science and business, all united by the impact of air pollution on each of their own lives.

Mobius

Mobius is dedicated to standardising abusability testing and combating platform abuse. We help product teams understand how the technologies they are building can, intentionally or unintentionally, be used in ways that cause societal, community, or individual harms. Our team — Avi Zajac, Ji Su Yoo, and Nicole Chi — created PlatformAbuse.org, a centralised knowledge base that helps product teams check their features for lurking harms and offers mitigations and fixes. Additionally, we are currently working on an abusability testing framework.

You can learn more about the First Act Fund on our website. Discover the stories of our grantees, past and present, on our blog.

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