Ravi Kandoi (Washkewicz College of Engineering) and Mrunal Bhatt (Monte Ahuja College of Business) have come together as graduate students and developed two innovative technological projects: Gesture Recognition and “Smart Home”. Kandoi and Bhatt presented an interactive display (of these projects) at TEDx Cleveland State University, which drew a diverse crowd of spectators to the sold-out event, held October 16, 2015 in Waetjen Auditorium. 

Ravi Kandoi (Washkewicz College of Engineering) and Mrunal Bhatt (Monte Ahuja College of Business) have come together as graduate students and developed two innovative technological projects: Gesture Recognition and “Smart Home”. Kandoi and Bhatt presented an interactive display (of these projects) at TEDx Cleveland State University, which drew a diverse crowd of spectators to the sold-out event, held October 16, 2015 in Waetjen Auditorium.

By the end of 2014, inspired by science fiction, Ravi and Mrunal had an idea to build software to make a computer understand specific human gestures, such as commands. Hence, the Gesture Recognition project. “Currently, this system works in 2-D on the principle of image processing, color recognition, and coordinate measurements. Our goal is to build a highly efficient software/hardware system that works in 3-dimensions, which can be used on different platforms, including Android and Apple products;” shared Kandoi and Mrunal.

“Currently, our smart home system has smart lights, fans, door, camera monitoring. A smart home is where you can control your home and devices with your voice;” said Ravi.  A smart home understands and talks back with you when you ask it something. “Our goal is to design a complete smart and secure home automation system which understand voice commends, and is also interactive;” said Mrunal.

Ravi Kandoi is currently pursuing his Master degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering at Cleveland State University. He holds an MBA from Cleveland State University. After completing his Bachelor in Technology in Electrical & Electronics Engineering in July 2010, Ravi worked for two and half years as a Business Developer and Market Representative in two Indian firms. Ravi worked on designing a 5MW solar energy based power plant in India. He also worked on several projects including “Sustainable Supply Chain” with Victoria Avi, to create a toolkit specialized for use by SMEs in the northeast Ohio region. He is currently working on projects such as Gesture Recognition and a Health Monitoring System.

Mrunal Bhatt has professional experience in field of embedded systems, robotics, automation and software development. He has worked with a national award winner super computer scientist, Dr. Vijay Bhatkar, for his company ETH Ltd from 2011 to 2013. He was admitted to CSU fall semester 2013, as a student of the Computer Information Science department. He is currently working on his master’s thesis under the title “Intelligent Voice Activated Home Control” - IVAHC for short. For the thesis, he has also developed the hardware and Android app which can control home appliances using natural language voice processing. He has worked on various individual research projects in a wide variety of fields such as Gesture Recognition, Robotics, Automation, web designing and Android app development.