Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University (PMU) President Dr. Issa bin Hassan Al-Ansari received the student team behind BlindLine, winners of the OXAGON Hackathon, in his office on 10 October 2022. The team, students Khaled Al-Najidi and Ghada Al-Habib with project supervisor Dr. Ghazanfar Latif, won with a smart device for learning Braille, competing against 65 projects from Saudi universities and the private and public sectors at the Industrial Innovation Leadership Hackathon organized by the Ministry of Education with NEOM’s OXAGON.
The President congratulated the team and praised the project’s potential to help people with visual impairments. He announced that the university would support registering the project with the U.S. patent office through PMU’s patent office, and would back it fully through the Prince Turki bin Mohammad bin Fahd Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, with the aim of turning it into a commercial product for its target users. The ceremony was attended by the Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dr. Faisal bin Yousef Al-Anazi, the Associate Vice President for Student Affairs, Omar bin Jawdat Al-Mousa, and other university leaders.
The BlindLine work grew out of AIRL Director Dr. Latif’s AI-powered Braille learning research, which also underlies his granted U.S. patent for a Braille reader.