Inside the Mind of: Jonathan Sanchez
Our “Inside the Mind of ” series features interviews from the top winners at our 2017 Fellows Hackathon and their ideas for the future of technology.
I’ve been thinking about how to help blind people be much more interactive and involved in society. We want to create technology that helps them navigate through spaces as far as inside, outside buildings, helping them understand where stairs and escalators are, and what the weather is for that day. Ultimately we want to help them become much more independent.
A friend and I are thinking of creating earbuds that would be connected to sensors that could detect things in your environment which is basically the same technology in autonomous vehicles. We also want to create sensors that can detect weather and altitude so that people know when they’re about to go up or down stairs. There’s a lot of machine learning involved.
I like technology because I can think of a million problems and everyone of those problems can be solved or at the very least made easier by technology. I’m the kind of person who loves giving back to communities so when I see a problem that I can fix I’m going to try to tackle it. I have many many ideas of how I’m going to help this world and that’s just one of them.
When I was in middle school I was a part of a computer program that my mother wanted me to do so I would get out of the house. It taught me how to build a computer and about all these different components of a computer. That experience was really wicked to me. Around this time all these affordable laptops started coming out and the internet started evolving to what we know it as today so I kept getting deeper into technology.
Mainly I got into programming because it made me feel really smart. Once I got to college I got introduced to data structures, data manipulation and pretty much how technology works in this world. I’ve had an internship every summer since 15 and this past summer as a Code2040 Fellow I interned at Intel doing software engineering for the first time.
