Talking with 17-year-old Dhanush Eashwar is a sure-fire way to feel confident about the future, as Nice News happily learned during a recent telephone interview with the inspiring computer science wiz.
Eashwar is one of the 2024 winners of Apple’s Swift Student Challenge, which tasks young creators with developing apps that solve real-world problems. His submission, Finger Dance, is geared toward facilitating better communication between the Deaf and hearing communities. Using machine learning and augmented reality, it recognizes users’ hand poses and classifies them as American Sign Language letters, helping beginners learn ASL.
“That’s the thing I love so much about computer science — it’s not a theoretical thing,” Eashwar shared. “It’s a very hands-on, practical, problem-solving system that you can use to help others.”
Developed in Bothell, Washington, where Eashwar lives with his parents and 13-year-old sister, the winning program was created specifically for the challenge and isn’t in app stores. But the high school senior is hard at work on an even more ambitious project he says will be available to download in the future: an app that translates ASL hand signs to English in real-time — “like a Google Translate for visual languages,” he explained.
Screenshots of Finger Dance
“I felt that there was a need for technology to actually bridge the gap between both of the communities,” explained Eashwar, who isn’t deaf himself but took ASL in high school. After attending some deaf events around the region, he realized he had an opportunity. “There was definitely a lot of technology, and machine learning is being used in so many different fields, but something that everyone has is their phone, and that’s in their pocket.”
As one of 50 young people who were named “distinguished winners” in the challenge, Eashwar got to attend Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June — and meet the tech company’s head honcho, Tim Cook.
“That whole experience was really surreal. It was truly a mind-blowing experience, and it was so insightful,” said Eashwar. “And after that experience, I feel more motivated than ever to actually contribute to the technology community and actually do more.”
Eashwar and Apple CEO Tim Cook
Eashwar has been coding since he was around 6 or 7 years old; the first app he ever built was a simple tic-tac-toe game. “It was really fun because me and my sister were playing that all the time,” he shared. Next, he developed a nifty program that tracks pressure cooker whistles.
“That was my first machine learning app. It’ll detect how many whistles are actually emitted from a pressure cooker, and then it’ll send a notification to the entire house, so someone will go down and turn it off right before the rice gets burnt,” he explained.
In addition to his prowess as a coder, he’s also a talented violinist, studying classical Indian music under Grammy winner Ganesh Rajagopalan.
Eashwar at the 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference
“[It’s] a great way to connect with my culture,” Eashwar said. “And it’s also a great way to spend my free time and de-stress a little bit.”
The STEM star is clearly passionate about the tangible and wide-reaching solutions that coding and app development can offer the world. While he hasn’t begun his college application process quite yet, he’s looking forward to pursuing a computer science major next year.
“You can build solutions that, if they work for you, if they’re solving a problem in your life — someone else is gonna be having that same problem as you are,” Eashwar shared, adding: “That’s really what inspired me to get into the field, that high-impact social innovation that you can bring to the world with computer science and machine learning.”
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