Dylan Pallickara, 17, is a student at Poudre High School in Fort Collins, Colorado. In 2023 he was listed as a National Merit Semifinalist.

 

His work in computer science mostly centers around translation and image recognition. In summer of 2023 he attended the Yale Young Global Scholars Innovations in Science and Technology program where he researched connotational loss in text based translation. As part of his  research project on computer-assisted recognition of ASL, he has designed a novel approach using wireframes detect ASL signs in ways that are robust to skin tone and texture. He has expanded this work to compute joint angles and also use a model as a teaching aid for ASL learners.  His research was selected as a student research poster and will appear in the proceedings of the prestigious 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence that will be held in Vancouver, Canada in February 2024. In August of 2023, he placed 992nd in the international ASL Fingerspelling Competition hosted by Google. His finish earned him the rank of Contributor on Googles dataset and competition platform Kaggle. All code relating to his computer science activities have been made freely available via GitHub, he has also released both his wireframe and joint angles datasets for ASL via Kaggle.

 

Dylan's work in poetry has appeared in The American Anthology of High School Poetry and The Dungeness Press. Alumnus of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, his writing has been recognized by the American Prize for High School Poetry and has been named a second round finalist for the International Bridport Poetry Prize. 

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