Second-year MIMS student Gopal Vaswani and his teammates (Laura Schewel, a Ph.D. student in the Energy and Resources Group, and Pavel Borokhov, an undergraduate majoring in computer science) have been named as semifinalists for the prestigious MIT Clean Energy Prize for their project “Virtual Electrified Vehicle Company (VEVCo).”
The MIT Clean Energy Prize is a competition to encourage innovation in clean energy. The competition rewards student projects with the potential to make clean energy more practical and affordable through innovation and entrepreneurship.
The VEVCo project joins 23 other semifinalists from 14 colleges and universities; VEVCo. is one of five semifinalists in the deployment category. One finalist from each category will be invited back to compete for the $200,000 grand prize.
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.
Vaswani will be graduating in May 2010 with a MIMS degree; his focus areas are web-based systems deployment, user experience design, and information visualization. Before starting the master's program, Vaswani worked as a senior interaction designer at Honeywell labs in Bagalore, India, and at Rediff.com in Mumbai, India; during summer 2009 he interned at Inigral, Inc., a Facebook-funded social media start-up.
VEVCo and the other semifinalists will showcase their projects for the competition judges on May 3, 2010, in Boston, Massachusetts. The $200,000 grand prize for the most innovative clean energy solution will be awarded on May 11, 2010; the prize is provided by NSTAR and the United States Department of Energy.
