motivational
He watched his grandparents. Then he built them a smarter crosswalk.
His grandparents kept missing the light. He was taking notes.
Jay Jung, an 18-year-old boarding school student in Massachusetts, built a crosswalk system that adjusts its timing to how fast a person actually walks. He calls it SmartBlink, and it won first place in Behavioral and Social Sciences at the 2026 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair, which drew over 1,700 finalists from 60 countries to Phoenix. The idea came from watching his grandparents in Daegu, South Korea. "Whenever I would go out with them, my grandparents, we would not even be halfway when the traffic light turned red," he told Nice News. Fixed signals assume a walking speed of 3.9 feet per second, though 96% of adults over 60 walk slower than that. Jung spent hours at a local crosswalk gathering data, then built a model that detects wheelchairs and crutches with 90 to 95% accuracy. His grandparents did not know he had been paying attention. They found out when he showed them the thing he made for them.