Sophomore Zeyneb Kaya was recently announced as one of the 335 winners of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge, a competition where middle and high school students submit original apps to be judged by local members of Congress. 

Kaya placed first within Congressional District CA-18, represented by local Congresswoman Anna Eshoo. All of the winning apps will be put on display in the U.S. Capitol building for one year. 

Kaya’s app, Cultive, helps farmers and home gardeners identify, manage and track diseases in their plants, as well as prevent and treat plant diseases. It is available on the App Store.

Kaya distinctly remembers caring for plants in her family garden when she was younger. Her curiosity about disease prevention began when her plants started dying. 

“I found out that this is a bigger problem because diseases in plants result in a big loss of production, which impacts food availability and food waste,” she said. 

Creating Cultive allowed Kaya to address this issue, leveraging skills she learned from a young age. 

Before  Cultive, Kaya began coding through the summer program LaunchX. Through the program, she learned how to grow a business from the ground up and co-developed an app called Foodi, which allows users to see what products fit their diet by scanning the barcode on the food label. 

“I didn’t really know how much I could do with coding until I started high school,” Kaya said. “When the pandemic hit, I started looking into AI and how simple calculations and algorithms could do complex tasks.” 

It took Kaya four months to build Cultive. She programmed most of the app using Swift, a coding language for iOS apps. The AI was written using Python, a coding language. Additionally, Kaya manually entered information on steps to manage and treat a disease based on her research. 

To use the app, the user holds their device over a plant, and the app uses AI to scan the plant for any diseases using the phone’s camera. If any diseases are found, the app provides the next steps for the user to manage or treat the specific disease. 

Building the app wasn’t easy;  Kaya experienced many technical challenges, with one of the biggest being compiling enough data and images for each disease. 

“It’s hard to find enough images of plant leaves for the app to be able to predict what diseases are in a plant accurately,” Kaya said. She worked to get over 40,000 images of plant leaves in order to obtain the most accurate results in identifying a plant disease. Kaya also used image augmentation to increase the amount of data. 

Another trying task was making the app usable on mobile devices by converting one coding language to another. 

While there are other existing apps that provide information on plant diseases, Kaya believes that Cultive is more in-depth, accurate and affordable. 

“Similar apps give little information, are costly, or have inaccurate technology,” she said. “Cultive offers more than simply recognizing a disease. It provides in-depth resources for prevention to control illnesses’ spread.” 

Kaya said the Congressional App Challenge provided the perfect opportunity to share her creation with a bigger audience. Upon deciding to enter, she made some modifications to her app to better fit the competition’s criteria. To her surprise, her dedication paid off and she was one of the winners. 

“I was so excited when my work on Cultive was recognized and that I would get the chance to reach more people.” Kaya said. “I want to continue to improve the app and learn more from experiences like this one.”