Easily, one of the greatest parts (and privileges) of being a professor is working with, mentoring, and learning from gifted students. But it is exceedingly rare to find* someone as talented, passionate, and skilled as our high school intern, John O'Meara. To quickly summarize his accomplishments, John:

• Became one of the top open source contributors of all time (ranked 8th of 77) on our Project Sidewalk repo where he also took on major technical issues—many of which were tried and failed by others, including college undergrads!
• John also led the way in designing and implementing long-planned AI features into Project Sidewalk, including auto-validations and auto-labeling. This is incredible stuff; see our release notes for v9.2.0
• As if that weren't enough, John also proposed and led his own research project, called RampNet, that provides a new state-of-the-art AI model and dataset for curb ramp detection. See our LinkedIn news post for more.
• And he also significantly contributed to two other research projects, including our ICCV'25 workshop paper on geovisual AI agents and a forthcoming CHI'26 submission.

Put simply, this is an astonishing track record that only partially captures John's achievements in his short time in our group. Moreover, John is a thoughtful, humble collaborator and a joy to work with. We were exceedingly fortunate to have him in our research group. And I was happy to host him for lunch at Google to celebrate his time with us.

Thanks to Mikey Saugstad and Jared Hwang for helping mentor John.

*Well, actually John found us. As he tells it, he saw on the Makeability Lab webpage that we (sometimes) work with high school interns. He figured the best way to show his interest and skill was to start contributing to one of our open source projects, which is what he did on Project Sidewalk—and he knocked our socks off from the beginning.