Stony Brook Student Wins First Place in National Computing Competition for Designing Web Browser for the Blind

STONY BROOK, N.Y. – Computer Science PhD student, Yevgen (Eugene) Borodin, won First Place in the Graduate Category of the 2007 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Student Research Competition for his work on the HearSay system, a non-visual web browser.

The system enables visually impaired and blind users to browse the web more efficiently. It features context-directed browsing, which allows users to browse the most relevant section rather that listen to web pages from the beginning, thus being able to skip banners, ads, menus and quickly identifying relevant information in web pages.

“I am very proud of the award and even more so because of the social impact of this application,” said Eugene Borodin.

“This is an outstanding achievement by a computer science graduate student and I am very pleased that ACM has recognized the importance of this innovation,” says Dr. I.V. Ramakrishnan, Professor and Graduate Program Director of Computer Science at Stony Brook.”

Hearsay was developed at Stony Brook in collaboration with Helen Keller Services for the Blind in Hempstead, NY. The program is supported by funding from the National Sciences Foundation and Stony Brook’s Center for Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology. Hearsay is a free system, now downloadable from www.cs.sunysb.edu/~hearsay.

ACM is the world's oldest and largest educational and scientific computing society. The ACM Student Research Competition offers a unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present original research before a panel of judges and attendees. Borodin was honored with a cash award of $500 at the ACM awards banquet on June 9 in San Diego.