Class project leads to start-up company

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Class project leads to start-up

A team project on sidewalk repair cost estimates during a required course for first-year CEE students inspired Brandon Yates (BS 21) to launch DeepWalk Research, a startup focused on automating civil engineering inspections. Now, four years and one bachelor’s degree later, Yates is beginning his professional career as his own employer.

DeepWalk tackles a challenge Yates learned about when he was introduced to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) during that freshman class: the sheer volume of sidewalk assessments that every municipality is required to perform in order to identify where their sidewalks are inaccessible to people with disabilities. These assessments must include curb ramp inspections, which can take an engineer up to 15 minutes each to perform.

According to Yates, who reached out to more than 100 city engineers, ADA coordinators and consultants for input, the project is an enormous – and expensive – challenge for many cities. Not only do these inspections require a significant investment of time and personnel – New York City alone has over 200,000 ramps, Seattle has over 40,000 ramps and even Champaign has over 13,000 ramps – but failure to meet ADA requirements can cost cities hundreds of millions of dollars in legal settlements. In the case of Los Angeles and New York, each city’s legal obligation exceeds $1 billion.

With this challenge still in mind at the conclusion of his class, Yates recruited a friend in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and they began to train a machine-learning model to identify sidewalk panels. Their efforts would eventually lead to development of DeepWalk, a mobile application that is able to turn a 30-second video of a curb ramp into a 3D model, check if it meets ADA requirements and automatically fill out an inspection report.

“With the DeepWalk app, a single intern will be able to perform over 200 in-

Brandon Yates

“DeepWalk is a product of the engineering and innovation culture here.”

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DeepWalk is a mobile application that is able to turn a 30-second video of a curb ramp into a 3D model, check if it meets ADA requirements and automatically fill out an inspection report.