A USC Viterbi School of Engineering computer science graduate student has mobilized classmates to work as volunteer programmers who write software to help people with medical problems.

One leading project is a system that eventually, it is hoped, will enable a paralyzed patient like the protagonist of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly to communicate more easily than by using the eyeblink code seen in the Academy Award-nominated film.

The effort, called Project: Possibility, went into high gear in November and has continued to build momentum, gain corporate support and attract industry mentors. It also has led to the work of 25 students in the midst of developing five projects this semester.

A Web site, which can be visited at http://www.projectpossibility.org, recently marked its first year.

Christopher Leung, a young idealist from Contra Costa County, Calif., who earned his Bachelor of Science at UCLA in 2004 and will add a Master of Science degree from USC Viterbi this May, is the catalyst for the work, which has attracted support from a lineup of institutions such as the Mozilla Foundation and Microsoft.

“I have a passion for software,” Leung said. “I looked around and found that there’s a lack of free – or any other software – for the many needs of disabled persons.”

Leung’s first step was to form a group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he works in Pasadena. The subsequent developments were chronicled in detail on the news section of the project’s Web site.

A key meeting took place last June, with the directors of Knowbility, an Austin, Texas-based nonprofit organization formed in 1999 “to make the Internet and other technology accessible to all people.”

At the meeting, plans took shape for a so-called code-a-thon in which programmers would spend 24 hours crash-developing new applications. The event, “SS12, Code for a Cause," took place Nov. 17-18, with participation by 30 graduates and undergrads organized into six teams.

Projects included a system for the blind to recognize currency, video games that respond to simple yes/no controls, systems to help make existing Web sites more accessible to the disabled and systems to allow the tuning of musical instruments through simplified, accessible digital interfaces.

Industry judges reviewed the entries and gave $200 cash prizes to each member of the four-person team that created Word Predictor, a distant relative of the word processing programs that correct or complete words as they are typed.

In early February, Leung and his collaborators announced the Semester Project. Companies contributed hardware and software such as SunSPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) software from Sun Microsystems and EyeTech TM3 eye-gaze tracking hardware from EyeTech.

On March 12, teams held a general meeting at USC to discuss their problems and launch their efforts.

At the conclusion of the two-day event, Leung said, “we awarded prizes to four teams for their efforts in the categories of best overall performance, best wiki page, most enthusiastic and most improved.”

Five teams are now working on projects that include:

• an assistive technology search engine to help individuals locate specific technology that will address specific disabilities (currently no good search engine exists)
• a mobile currency reader, which recognizes the value of currency after taking a picture of it
• gesture recognition framework, using donated hardware from Sun Microsystems to capture movements or “gestures” from a user that will ultimately activate some action on a PC or elsewhere
• web captioning, creating a universal closed-captioning system for videos on the Internet

“We are planning to meet with educators to talk about getting this type of work into the university curriculum at USC and beyond,” Leung said, “so that university students can not only receive credit for doing this type of work but gain awareness so they can make technology more accessible to disabled persons once they’re actually working in industry.”

After graduating in May, Leung will move to Shanghai, China, where he said he will work “to create awareness about accessibility and assistive technology while continuing my contributions to Project: Possibility."

He will remain on the board of directors and contribute as a software developer for the organization.

Carolyn Suckow, director of Student Affairs for USC Viterbi Master’s and Professional Programs, said, “I am very impressed at what Chris has achieved. Project: Possibility is an outstanding example of engineering shaping society. It would not be a success without his unifying efforts among students, faculty, and professional organizations.”