Jacobs Institute Students Win Top Prize at MIT Grand Hack

David Hachuel and Akshay Jha, Technion-Cornell Dual Degrees in Health Tech and Connective Media ‘19 respectively, recently received the MIT Ideas^2 Prize at the MIT Grand Hack, part of the university’s Hacking Medicine Initiative.

Jha and Hachuel’s team won a spot in the 6-8 month incubator program at MIT for their AI algorithms that can characterize human stool samples based on visual input. This can help manage and prevent certain aspects of chronic digestive disorders like Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) that affect over 60 million Americans.

Hachuel and Jha’s technology has potential to scale beyond IBS and IBD given the product is purely software based. One application that shows promise is helping drug developers and researchers collect higher quality data that is less subjective to patient reports.

In the coming months, they will focus their efforts in perfecting the technology and polishing the business plan leveraging resources both from Cornell Tech and MIT.