Samuel Solomon

As one of the co-founders of Vibrant Life, I am working to leverage available software and technology to connect individuals with disabilities to their neighborhoods more effectively to advocate for enhanced accessibility in local businesses. Nearly one fifth of all Americans have a physical, sensory or intellectual disability that makes it difficult for them to participate in their communities. Many local businesses feature sensory stimuli that can trigger episodic responses, but these are often not adequately documented, meaning that people with special needs are not alerted beforehand. To address this, I co-founded a website called Vibrant Life (MyViLi.com), which crowdsources reviews of restaurants and stores based on essential accessibility criteria, encompassing lighting, noise levels, color schemes, staff accommodations, and more.

Over the course of a year, I secured $5,000 in funding from MIT Sandbox and earning a nomination to pitch in front of venture capitalists as a finalist in the MIT 100K Pitch competition in November 2019. Vibrant Life aims to provide a standardized scoring system for each establishment, empowering individuals with special needs to navigate their communities confidently. While the project is currently in development, the potential impact is substantial. I invite you to explore our website at https://myvili.com/ and join us in our mission to enhance the lives of those who need it most.

Amidst the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, I recognized the pressing need to equip undergraduate students with up-to-date software that would enable them to effectively navigate their courses from home. At Caltech, class schedules often experienced rapid changes as professors worked to accommodate students now residing in different time zones. In response to this confusion, I developed a course calendar website fopr undergraduates and graduate students, accessible at Turtle-Pond.com. This application, coded in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, empowers students to check and report errors in class schedules, ensuring they have access to the most current and reliable information as they pursue their studies remotely. The class information (names, times, prerequisites, term offered, etc) was compiled with python's Selenium package and is accessed from a JSON database. Currently, I am the sole contributor to the code base, covering all domain and hosting fees as of October 2023.

The code for the website (Turtle-Pond.com) is written in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The class information (names, times, prerequisites, term offered, etc) was compiled with python's Selenium package and is accessed from a JSON database.

Education is a powerful tool to combat fear of nuclear power and train critical thinking minds to question broad based unscientific claims. The problem is that at some point if a student wants to study advanced works, material is scarce and not well explained (if at all) outside of scientific literature. To allow for greater reach, I am developing a website (www.MindNetwork.us) to explain upper level courses to the general public by creating visually stimulating material to guide the user through the mathmatical formulas. I have completed my course on quantum mechanics and developing further material for nuclear fusion and special relativity.

In developing this platform, I applied to and received $1000 from BetterMIT as well as $1000 from MIT’s Sandbox program. I additionally pursued further outreach by holding sessions at the MIT Campus Preview Weekend, MIT Innovation Initiative, and MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing opening to gain traction for the product among my local community.

As a part of an international competition in Zurich, Switzerland, I placed second collaborating with 4 MIT students to create a safer ambulance system using AI technology. Focusing on the medical side, I helped outline a workflow chart dictating the operations a computer should follow as a patient enters the ambulance. Following down the path, the system automatically evaluates key vital signs, sends them to the hospital, and provides advice to the medic on the status of the patient ("15% of the time the patient is drunk. You should check alcohol content“, "55% of the time the patient is having a stroke"). Founding our startup – Augmedic – we developed an integrative technology to improve the safety and efficiency of medical transport by combining artificial intelligence with biosensors to provide immediate feedback on minute patient fluctuations. Impressed with my leadership capacity, I was invited back the following year as the US facilitator for the competition.