Voices

International students create free and open sourced application for controlling masks in closed spaces

By Fernando Jardim Sep 24, 2021

Developed in just 9 days by 4 international students who came to Lisbon just to learn data science, this app detect people without mask automatically

International students create free and open sourced application for controlling masks in closed spaces

Developed in just 9 days by 4 international students who mostly came to Lisbon just to learn data science and programming, the Awesome Mask Detector app is free and aims to help companies control masks indoors.

Conceived by the German Marc Higgins, and developed together with his compatriot Emanuel Müller, by the Brazilian Fernando Jardim and the Swiss Adriano Dupraz, as part of the Data Science course at Le Wagon, the application allows any company to receive alerts by email (with the photo) and a phone call when the camera detects an of someone without a mask in a certain environment.

According to Fernando Jardim: “We created this application in just 9 days as our final project, and we open sourced it so any other developers, companies and communities can improve it and adapt the artificial intelligence algorithm to their own needs. In addition, we also created an online interface so anyone can see the algorithm working”.

Nuno Loureiro, manager of the Le Wagon programming school also explains that more and more international students are looking to come to Lisbon to become programmers: “Our courses have received more and more international students from a wide variety of backgrounds aiming to transitioning to tech careers. The employment rates in these areas are quite high since there is a lack of qualified professionals. According to our report for Southern Europe, despite the adverse context, 89% of our students found employment in the first 6 months”.

In Portugal, as an example, according to data from INE, while the average salary in the country in 2020 was 15 thousand euros/year, the report “Tech Careers Report 2021” by Landing.Jobs states that the average salary in tech it is 32,500 euros/year, more than double the average salary in the whole country.

João Martins, manager at "Made of Lisboa", the Lisbon City Council project to develop the innovation ecosystem in the city points out that not only international students, but several tech companies are looking to establish their tech operations in Lisbon:

“More and more companies are looking to Lisbon to establish their technology development centers. Even with all the changes due to the pandemics, we not only see cases of new office openings like Salesforce or VTEX but also the expansion of companies that are already established in the city like Uber or Volskwagen Digital Solutions. In addition to offering an excellent quality of life, a large amount of specialized talent and being the second city that hosts the largest number of events in the world, we have a very active innovation ecosystem and large-scale projects, such as the Web Summit and Hub Criativo do Beato"

Tech companies, organized by sector, that have opened an office or research centre in Lisbon. Image: Lisbon City Council

If any company would like to use the application, they can just access the open source code in this Github repository for free and adapt it to your business needs or find out more about the project on this page.