"As a kid, one of my hobbies was taking apart and building computers," says Lakehead-Georgian computer science student Omid Latifi.

One of Omid’s favourite pastimes is wrestling. “Wrestling and computers sound like polar opposites, but wrestling has given me the discipline, mental toughness, and confidence to pitch ideas and lead teams to success, whether it’s a hackathon or leading a team of developers as a project manager.”

Recently, his stellar performances in hackathons and competitions have been attracting national and international attention, even though until 2021, Omid had been planning to become a doctor.

"I switched career paths because I liked the idea of being able to change the world right from my living room. I think about problems in my community and try to come up with original ways to solve them," adds Omid, who grew up in Barrie. "Henry Ford said that if you asked people what they wanted, they would have said, 'Faster horses.' I always strive to build solutions with the same innovative mindset."

Omid develops many of his products through competitions. "I've been in hackathons and entrepreneurship contests at the University of Toronto, Waterloo, McMaster, and across Ontario, but in my opinion, Lakehead-Georgian hosts the most interesting and well-organized events."

Protecting Canada's Arctic Sovereignty

On September 20, Omid made waves with his technological prowess.

He won The Icebreaker Defence Tech Hackathon—Canada's first-ever military defense tech hackathon.

Pratik Das (left), Omid Latifi (centre), and Miran Qarachatani (right) teamed up to win The Icebreaker Defence Tech Hackathon for their Arctic Overwatch app. In 2024, Omid and his teammate Brandon Hann won first place in the Innov8 competition for DriveMind, which uses AI to fight traffic congestion.

Competitors were asked to create a maritime-surveillance system to help the Canadian Armed Forces detect dark vessels in Arctic waters. These are ships that engage in illegal activities such as unregulated fishing, smuggling, and human trafficking.

"We developed Arctic Overwatch," Omid says. "It's a multi-modal machine learning application featuring an interactive global real-time notification system and an AI-powered dark vessel detection dashboard. In addition, it has a custom vessel-fingerprint system that uses a ship's wake patterns to identify its model, engine, and dimensions."

Crushing the Competition

In 2025, Omid and his teammate Pratik Das created a smart capacity management app to track attendance at city recreation centres in real time. These facilities are often overcrowded, but Omid and Pratik's app addresses this challenge by using existing CCTV surveillance cameras and AI to do automatic headcounts.

"It also predicts future headcounts and has an AI receptionist available 24/7 to answer questions about occupancy levels and the availability of services."

Ahmed Abduljader (left) and Omid (right) won in the Best Use of Emerging Technology category in the TerraHacks 2025 competition for Arnold AI, a personal fitness and physical rehabilitation companion. Other recent competitions where Omid has excelled include the 2025 AutoHACK competition.

Omid and Pratik won first place in both the Bright Minds City of Orillia competition and the 2025 Innov8 competition, which is part of Georgian College's Research, Innovation, Scholarship and Entrepreneurship (RISE) symposium.

Omid won third place in the same Innov8 competition for another app—called Project Abel—making history by becoming the first-ever participant to win multiple awards in a single year.

From California to Outer Space

Project Abel is an international collaboration with Momchil Gavrilov, a research associate at the University of California (UC), Davis. "I met Momchil in grade 10 when we both tried out for our high school wrestling team. We've been great friends ever since."

Abel is an AI-powered legal assistant that will help ordinary people build legal cases—dramatically reducing their legal costs and increasing access to the justice system.

As part of the development of Project Abel, Omid and Momchil surveyed over 200 law professionals in California.

Abel was inspired by Momchil's frustrating attempts to get an international visa after he graduated from UC Davis and wanted to stay in the United States as a researcher.

After discovering that 92 per cent of legal issues faced by underrepresented groups went unresolved, the pair expanded Abel's capabilities. It will now encompass landlord disputes, contract misunderstandings, and basic human rights issues.

Project Abel made it to the third round of the Big Bang! competition at UC Davis, one of North America's top student entrepreneurship contests. "We're working with intellectual property lawyers at UC Davis to get it market-ready," Omid says.

In 2024, Omid had another breakthrough when he and fellow Lakehead-Georgian student Miran Qarachatani entered the NASA International Space Apps Challenge hosted on the Lakehead Orillia campus.

Their Project Orbit is an educational interactive 3D-web app, called an orrery, that shows how moons and planets revolve around the sun.

Watch the NASA International Space Apps Challenge presentation given by Omid (right) and his teammate Miran Qarachatani (left). 

It won the Innovation Award in the NASA Space Apps Challenge Orillia site pitch and was selected to move forward to the global competition, placing among the top 943 of all global projects submitted. "Out of the approximately 94,000 global competitors, there are only 10 winning teams," Omid explains.

Now, Omid is taking this year off from school to work as a product manager at SOTI—a Mississauga tech company. "I want to use the skills I'll learn there to give back to the community before finishing my final year at Lakehead-Georgian."

Congratulations to this rising tech star!