Safety-themed Make-a-thon

Each year, Chevron sponsors a safety-themed Make-a-thon at UT -- it's like a one-day hackathon focused more on physical prototypes. The prompt this year was to 'design something to improve workplace security'.

I was in a team with four other engineering undergraduates (three electrical engineering majors and one chemical engineering major). We identified problems relating to workplace security and decided to focus on the risk of compromised data and property due to employees leaving their workplaces insecure (ie, not locking their computers and/or desk drawers). To that end, our team successfully created a working prototype of a system that only allows access to a user's computer and desk drawer when the (correct) user is detected to be present in a workspace.

We created and delivered a presentation to a panel of judges at the end of the day, and won first place among 10 or so teams for our idea, design, prototype and presentation.