Cutler-Bell recipient, now an alumna, receives commendation from City of San Jose

Amy Jin ’18 drew a fine accolade from the City of San Jose via Councilmember Chappie Jones, who, along with Mayor Sam Liccardo, presented her with a commendation yesterday.

The midday meeting, held in council chambers, celebrated Jin for being named one of five students nationwide to receive the Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing from the Computer Science Teachers Association in March.

Jones, who represents the city council district in which Harker resides, noted,  “Amy Jin just graduated from high school and she is already proving to be such an accomplished young person. I was honored to present Amy with a commendation at City Council for being 1 of 5 students in the nation to win the Cutler-Bell Prize in High School Computing.”

In describing her work, Jin said, “Every year, 7 million patients suffer surgical complications, many of which are caused by poor operative skill due to lack of individualized training and feedback. Improving these surgical outcomes means evaluating surgeon performance, a time-consuming process requiring expert supervision. Thus, I developed a deep-learning approach to automatically assess operative technique, functioning as a ‘coach’ for surgeons.

“I leveraged a convolutional neural network to teach computers to classify and localize surgical instruments in videos in real time. Increasing accuracy for tool presence detection by 28 percent and tracking instrument locations, my approach enabled rich analysis of surgical performance. It expedites surgical skill assessment through automated extraction of visual and quantitative metrics, such as tool usage patterns and trajectories, movement range and motion economy. My results have been validated by surgeons, setting the stage for building a context-aware system that can assist surgeons during procedures and provide targeted feedback.”

Jin’s other recognition includes a best paper award at the 2017 Machine Learning for Health Workshop at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, and being named a Regeneron Science Talent Search Scholar. Jin is also a John Near Endowment recipient and a National Merit Scholarship awardee. She plays classical violin and has performed at Carnegie Hall. Read more in this Harker News story. https://news.harker.org/senior-amy-jin-one-of-five-in-the-country-to-win-cutler-bell-prize-in-high-school-computing/