Verse-Atile

SHU engineering team builds camera with a poet’s soul

From the Winter 2024 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

In high school, Julia Piascik ’26 loved photography and the arts. Why would such a creative kid wind up studying computer engineering and computer science with a minor in mathematics at college? A life-changing STEM program she attended before her senior year of high school put her on a different track—one where she discovered that STEM and creativity are not mutually exclusive.

She arrived at Sacred Heart excited to combine her interests in photography, engineering and AI. Since then, she has built a drone and a robotic hand. For her most recent project, she teamed up with Richard Errico ’15 CERT, who is currently teaching at Fairchild Wheeler Interdistrict Multi-Magnet High School in Bridgeport. Errico had seen instructions online for building a poetry camera that uses artificial intelligence to create and print receipt-like poems about what the camera sees; the team thought it would be fun to build one of their own. Following in the footsteps of Ryan Mather and Kelin Carolyn Zhang—who collaborated to make the first poetry camera—and adding a few steps of their own, the pair built a camera they called Poet’s Lens.

It’s a complicated project. Beginning with a Polaroid camera, the team manipulated software to capture images and generate poetry using a camera and printer, set up the AI, ensured the process worked end-to-end and added a power circuit that restricts the camera from running for anything other than the poetry. That said, Piascik notes that all the materials they used can be found in the University’s IDEA Lab, so other students can replicate the project—or just use it as a jumping-off point.

The goal now is to get the camera to work beyond the lab, Piascik says. They also hope to add a monitor, so users can see what the camera sees, and they plan to work on a more advanced DSLR version of the camera. “We want it to look like something you would purchase in Best Buy," she says Best Buy,” she says, “not like a student project.

”In the meantime, the camera is already capable of amazing things. “The poetry camera works by treating the photo as input. The caption of the photo—along with the image—is analyzed through a poem prompt,” Piascik says. “For example, if I want a haiku, the camera captures a picture, and the AI model generates a caption from the image, which it then uses as input for the haiku prompt.

“I can ask it for anything. It can be funny, elegant or emotionally impactful. It can be a limerick, a sonnet, free verse, anything,” she adds. “It has to use high school English, but crafts poems at an MFA level.”

A photo of this writer holding a cat during our call led Piascik and Errico’s Poet’s Lens camera to create the following:

Beneath fingertips, a world
hums bright and blue
Across compact plains of
aluminum and keys.
She cradles the feline
heartbeat gentle in her arms,
Fur brushed against a
keyboard’s cold precision.
Her eyes weave narratives
from pixels threads
Escorting escapism’s sweet
seduction.
Purring, mark of a
house tiger content,
Both caught in the calm,
a languid dance.

“I like the idea of testing what AI can contribute to the arts. I don’t think it will ever replace the creativity of humans, but it’s interesting to see how technology—using several neural networks—can mimic aspects of the brain,” Piascik says.

She enjoys the playful creativity Sacred Heart continues to afford her and is currently working on a second prototype of her robotic hand.

“I’m so glad I decided to come to Sacred Heart and to tack engineering onto my studies,” Piascik says. “I would not have had nearly as much fun if I hadn’t gotten to work with SHU’s great engineering faculty. I’m really grateful to be here.”