Good afternoon, how are you? I want to ask you a question.
Have you ever tried to look differently at your handwriting? Like looking at it upside down
Have you ever written something and felt that yourhandwriting has a message foryou?
Have you ever felt that your letters shapes are trying tell you something? Do they speak to you?
Do they have sounds that you can't understand? Do you know that your handwriting talks to you?
It could even tell you something about yourself that you don't know
We can try this together now using the papers and pens you have.
Okay, now try writing this sentence.
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" This sentence contains all the English alphabet
It also has every possible hand movement that can be done while writing.
If we look now at each other's handwritings We will find out that all our handwritings are different
All our hand movements are different as well
Ok! Let's try.
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
Everyone, Look at the letter (y) you've written And now check whether it looks like one of these
If your (y) looks like the first one here, it means that you tend to be lonely.
On the contrary, if your (y) looks like the last one it means that you're a socially selective person.
However, if your (y) looks like the middle one
it means that you tend to be lonely but if someone gives you a push you'll be sociable eventually.
Here comes another trick.
Now everybody check out your (i) letter and spot the position of the superscript dot.
If your dot gets to be a hollow circle, it means that you're a visionary childlike person.
But if your dot is highly over the (i), it means that you have a great imagination.
Again if your dot is right over the (i), it means that you tend to analyze things.
And once your dot becomes a slash, it means that you are overly self-critical.
Do you know "Walt Disney"?
If we take a look at his signature, we'll find that it tends to have a cartoonish style because he was a cartoonist.
What about Mark , the Facebook creator?
Mark in his signature writes only two letters from his name, which means that he tends to be mysterious.
He has a really cloak & dagger attitude.
Bill Gates, his initials are capital which means he takes care of his actions and decisions.
Steve Jobs, It's obvious from his signature that he had a humble nature; he writes his initials in small not capital letters.
If you consider the differences between these signatures and look at your & the others' handwriting
You'll understand what your handwriting is telling you.
It speaks to you to tell you that it is your personality.
Your handwriting tells you your personality type, your ambitions & your hopes.
It tells you if you're ambitious, if you need to work on yourself, also tells you about your experience and background.
It has been proven from the handwritings that all these people have different backgrounds.
What Iam talking about here is called Graphology or the science of handwriting analysis.
This science was established in France.
It was first used for personality analysis as we've done moments ago.
It was widely sweeping across America, Europe & all over the world after WWI
At that time its use wasn't limited to just normal personality analysis
Thus it was used to analyze the personalities and interrogate spies after the WWII
Also being used with convicts in courthouse.
Do you know that if you apply for a job in the USA
First they will analyze your handwriting To know whether you are the fitted person for that job or no
Graphology is widely spread and used in the USA especially in recruitment field
In Europe there are more and more researches about it annually
Whenever you visit a psychiatrist, he asks you to write something to analyze your character
It enables him to know things you don't know about yourself
From this analysis he can follow the progression of the disease
and also determine if there is any development in the patient's condition or not
If you go through your writings from primary school to secondary or high school and the words you've just written
And you analyze them you'll have a review of your personality profile from childhood till now
You'll see the progress in your character by the years
As we agreed handwriting analysis science is used in all these fields to analyze personalities.
Graphology can diagnose three diseases as well!
This means that from your handwriting I can tell if you have cardiac problems, Cancer or Alzheimer.
Simply the infected cells either by Cancer or Alzheimer affect the nervous system which in turn affects this part of your hand
and thus affects your handwriting
As a result some odd features will appear
Features not supposed to be in the handwriting of a sound person These features indicate that the disease exists
Ok, as there is a science for handwriting analysis which could diagnose 3 diseases
why didn't we hear about it? We didn't we use it?
Simply because all doctors who deal in Graphology diagnosing by sight are very few and the process itself takes much time and is highly costly
In addition to that these experts aren't based in Egypt or in Africa that's why we didn't learn about till recently.
Even in the USA and Europe most people don't know about it because it's not that common
From here came the inception of the idea
while studying at high school
I tried to figure out why we didn't transfer this science from a theoretical one to an applicable one
How can I make people in Egypt know about it? Not only that but also use it
So, I formed a team of Abdurrahman , myself and Omar Obaied 3 high school students
We decided to create a computer program
This program will recognize whether you have cancer or not by inputting and analyzing your scanned handwriting
To make something like that work We had to jointly follow two paths
The first one was to let the computer analyze the handwriting but actually it wont
So, it was necessary to make a program with codes which will search for Cancer features and analyze them
But it won't do that by itself, so it was necessary to introduce the functions that will enable it to recognize these features
To prove from your handwriting that you are Cancer diseased Your handwriting must have these 19 features
Most prominent of these is leaving unnecessary spaces between two letters
Also instead of smoothly writing your letters will take the forms of triangles, pyramidsand squares
Or like placing dots in odd positions when you're supposed to continue writing, these dots are called "the unnecessary dots"
If we take a look at this sample, the first one writes smoothly while the second one writes triangles and squares
which means that he has a handwriting disorder
Yet for this sample By looking to these green circles, we will find unnecessary spaces between letters
Alternatively, the red circles here indicate the unnecessary dots he made when he stopped
To find a program and input codes with cancer features on it, and make it know how to search for these features was our first step
But inputting the features wasn't enough for the program
So the second step was to acquaint the program with samples
By asking people to write the sentence you wrote earlier and ask their permission to input it on the computer
Obviously we had to bring two kinds of samples, diseased people's samples and normal samples to teach the program how to differentiate between them
So we started to collect samples from many hospitals most commonly from 57357 hospital
We collected samples from healthy students at schools too
Ok now we have samples and a program But this isn't enough yet
Let's suppose you have samples of children with cancer and samples of children without
You start to take half of these samples and half of the others
And input them to the computer and let it determine the given features of diseased samples
And you tell it that the other samples are the ones without cancer, so you won't find those features
The second step was to test the program, to test how your codes work on the samples
that the computer doesn't already know whether they are of diseased people or not , unlike the first step
Our first testing trial unfortunately failed But we didn't freak out, we are just students after all
Although the program didn't run the first time but on the second attempt it showed about 30% result accuracy
The accuracy of the program was going up and down with several trials and attempts
We started to modify the codes and change the classifiers
A classifier is responsible for differentiating between samples
We modified those classifiers then We input the samples again and the program succeeded with an 80% accuracy
Which means we succeeded by approximately 100%
Because when doctors and experts analyze handwriting by sight its conventional that there is about 20% error to know whether this person has cancer or not
This means that a computer program gives the same diagnosis accuracy as a doctor's
And also means that such a program can be available at hospitals and schools
This is a big leap in the use of handwriting analysis science in cancer diagnosis.
So as I said before the idea came up in order to make this science an applicable one
Accordingly, it would've been incredible to create such a program and not use it in the end
So, we joined "Intel-ISEF" competition for young inventors in the US
But to enter this competition first you have to qualify through your regional local competition and rank amongst the top 3
Thankfully we managed to join the "Intel-ISEF" under the computer sciences category after we had ranked first in the local qualifications.
This was our looks at the arbitration day as we proceed to the finals
There were noble-laureate professors in chemistry, physics & medicine
Professors from Harvard, MIT & Yale among the judges
Professors that are top notch at researches on the same field of our participation
However, their acceptance to you as a humble high school student with an invention in their own fields of expertise will be scientifically judged and assessed
One of the judges couldn't believe that a group of 3 Egyptian students were able to transform this science to an applicable program.
He asked to write a sentence to test the program on himself
So, we let him write the sentence, and the program started analyzing his sample
And the result was -for our shock- positive!
Of course we started arguing about who will drop this thunderbolt on him
Because first, if he doesn't have cancer we'll just make him panic and may leave to check up himself immediately
Second, if he's sure that he doesn't have cancer this means that our program failed and all our efforts have gone in vain
The third possibility was that he knew he had cancer and was simply testing the program!
Finally we decided to confront him with the shocking result.
Omar and Abdurrahman chose me to drop the news on him
So, I told him " Sir, we've explained the features to you, how we created the program,
how we got the samples and how the program runs"
" and unfortunately the program says that you have cancer"
In that moment we held our breaths, he freaked out, turned white as a blank sheet, stepped back and suddenly started clapping!
Then he said "I am with leukemia, I didn't believe that the program was actually working"
"when you came up to tell me the result was positive I couldn't believe it"
He saw us while we were staring to each other,
and he said that he couldn't believe that 3 Egyptian students could make a new project which will work on totally anonymous samples
Our assessment has ended
and we got back without knowing for certain whether he really had cancer or was it just an act of encouragement for our efforts
On when we came to the finalist
The best students from all over the world were waiting to hear their names in their categories
And when it came to computer science they called our names for the fourth place prize.
We won fourth place at an international competition.
At that moment I remembered when I had the inception of this idea, when it was just a dream.
I remembered the first thing I had thought about
All the passed time, collecting samples for the project,
even our professors in Egypt when they told me that this will seldom succeed
My parents while supporting me and raising my morale
Then I found myself standing on the stage of the biggest competition in the world
and receiving fourth place prize for my category
Then, There the dream came true
Not only a true working program, but a globally ranked one in no time
There I tasted the sweetness of success for the first time
although I had participated in "Intel-ISEF" before once and in the local competition since 2010
I dreamed to win at "Intel-ISEF" when I was at the preparatory school and I achieved it as a high school senior
All these memories kept flashing in my mind while trying to realize that the dream finally came true
The dream kept growing The project itself was growing up day by day at the 57357 hospital
and at schools. We started telling students at schools about our new idea, about our story
And asking them to write to take their samples to run the program
While they were writing the dream was growing up inside both us and them
The dream was completely achieved when we won the competition on that day
Now it's your turn to dream,
Dream because dreams are beautiful Dream because you deserve to dream
Dream and work because one day your dream shall come true
Thank you