Two teams of Queen’s students have recently been named winners of the 2024 Mayor’s Innovation Challenge. This annual competition hosted by the City of Kingston calls on post-secondary students in town to develop proposals for projects that would help improve the lives of people in the local community. The teams with the most promising projects are then invited to take part in a pitch competition at Kingston City Hall, where they present their idea to a panel of six judges composed of local leaders and experts, including representatives from Queen’s.

This year's two winning teams set out to achieve ambitious goals with their projects. Baobab, who won the Dunin-Deshpande Smart Kingston Stream, have created a platform to help connect people with resources they need by facilitating donations. And Seegull, winner of the Public Sector Innovation Stream, have developed an app that aims to help blind and visually impaired people navigate the world with their phones.

“Students from Queen’s, St. Lawrence College, and the Royal Military College of Canada show their strong community spirit and remarkable creativity each year during the Mayor’s Innovation Challenge,” says Jim McLellan, Academic Director and Co-Founder of the Dunin-Deshpande Queen’s Innovation Centre (DDQIC), who also served as a judge of the pitch competition. “This year’s winning teams inspired the judges with their novel and ambitious approaches to significant challenges facing members of our community. This was the seventh year of the Mayor’s Innovation Challenge, which is distinctive across Canada and reflects the close collaboration between the City of Kingston and the academic institutions in the region.”

Elspeth Murray, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy at Smith School of Business also served as a judge.

Baobab: redistributing resources

The three Queen’s students who make up the Baobab team are friends who wanted to address the rising cost of living people have been facing the past few years. Their app aims to help those in need access resources—everything from groceries to toiletries to clothing—by anonymously connecting them with others looking to make donations. Users can post to Baobab to say they are looking for a specific item or to let others know they have items they are seeking to donate.

“All of us on the team have felt so welcomed by the Kingston community since starting at Queen’s, and we wanted to give back by using what we’ve learned as students to try to help local people in need,” says Evan Ferreira, second-year commerce student and co-founder of Baobab. “We’re excited to work with mentors at the university and in the city to help us find ways to make Baobab viable and sustainable so that it can make as much difference as possible.”

As the winner of the Dunin-Deshpande Smart Kingston Stream, Baobab gains entry to the competitive QYourVenture program at DDQIC. Baobab also receives $5,000 of seed funding from the City of Kingston, which is distributed at different stages of the project’s development.

Going forward, the Baobab team aims to refine their app and make it available to the public in the near future.

Seegull: technology for the visually impaired

Ghaith Kalil, Yuchen Lin, and Antony Li standing with Mayor Paterson after being named winners of the Public Sector Innovation Stream for their project Seegull. Not photographed: Seegull member Owen Gimbel. (City of Kingston)

The team of Queen’s students behind Seegull is drawing on the latest artificial intelligence (AI) and voice-to-text technology for their app. Using Seegull, blind and visually impaired people will be able to have images captured on their phones described to them by AI powered by a large language model (LLM). Users can ask specific questions about the images and receive detailed answers almost instantaneously, ideally helping them learn about their surroundings in real time.

“Some cities and towns have more infrastructure to help the visually impaired than others,” says Antony Li, second-year computing student and co-founder of Seegull. “Our app aims to help people who need assistance access it no matter where they are. We hope it will help improve lives in Kingston and beyond.”

The Seegull team will now be working to enhance the speed of their app, conduct tests, and implement feedback from potential users before releasing it for download.

As the winners of the Public Sector Innovation Stream, the four Queen’s students behind Seegull will receive four-month paid internships with a municipal department in the City of Kingston, where they will build skills and gain experience by working on a variety of projects.

Learn more on the City of Kingston website.