Seven I School students are among the finalists in the 2010 CITRIS Big Ideas competition. The competition recognizes the best student ideas using information technology to address a major societal challenge; $30,000 in cash prizes will be distributed to the contest winners.
Several of the projects originated in the School of Information's "Social Enterprise using ICTs for International Development" course last Fall, which trained students to create social enterprises for rural developing regions, using information and communication technologies.
The finalists include initiatives to provide real-time information to regions with intermittent and unreliable water systems, to gather and analyze geospatial information using an innovative new "smart paper", and to protect mothers and newborns using solar power.
WE CARE Solar promotes safe motherhood and reduces maternal mortality in developing regions by providing health workers with reliable lighting, mobile communication, and blood bank refrigeration using solar electricity. The WE CARE Solar team includes I School doctoral student Melissa Ho, along with students students in public health, business, and the Energy Resources Group.
NextDrop addresses the challenge of unreliable piped water in developing countries. When water arrives intermittently and unpredictably, households lose hours waiting by the tap for the water to arrive. NextDrop is a social enterprise to provide households with reliable, near real-time information about water arrival via the mobile phone infrastructure. In addition, NextDrop will generate water delivery data for utilities to improve services and efficiency. The NextDrop team includes I School master's students Thejo Kote and Niranjan Krishnamurthi, along with teammates from public policy, engineering, and business. They are advised by assistant professor Tapan Parikh.
Local Ground combines the best of paper and pixels by using paper maps to capture rich qualitative data, creating digital versions of the hand-drawn annotations, then importing the annotations to a digital map. Using paper maps instead of GIS devices makes the data collection process cheap, portable, and, most importantly, easy to learn. Local Ground is developed by master's students K. Joyce Tsai and Sarah Van Wart, also advised by Tapan Parikh.
Taaza! brings mobile real-time information-sharing to communities in rural India. It provides a space for exchanging locally relevant news regarding market prices, bus timings, festival celebrations, and more, taking advantage of the increasing rural penetration of the mobile phone. The team includes Neha Kumar, a second-year Ph.D. student at the I School (also advised by Tapan Parikh), and Abhishek Das, a Ph.D. from Stanford University.
Virtual Electrified Vehicle Company (VEVCo) aims to help solve one of the largest problems confronting the scale-up of electrified vehicles: citizen education. Test drives are too expensive, so the team has created a “virtual test drive.” VEVCo’s virtual test drive offers a unique, customized, and fun solution using mobile location-based apps and online social networking. The virtual test drive provides customized predictions for individual drivers and acts as a neutral broker of information about about electrified vehicles. The VEVCo team includes I School master's student Gopal Vaswani and is advised by dean AnnaLee Saxenian.
All finalists will present their ideas at a poster session on April 22 in the Kvamme Atrium, on the 3rd floor of Sutardja Dai Hall.
The "Big Ideas" competition is sponsored by CITRIS, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society.
