In November 2019, the Big Ideas Contest received a record 438 pre-proposal applications, representing over 1,200 students across 12 campuses. After a preliminary round, 43 teams were advanced to the final round. These teams will now compete for awards ranging from $5,000 to $20,000. Winners will be announced in early May 2020.
Social Impact Tracks
Art & Social Change
Earth Voices
School: UC Davis
The majority of American adults think global warming is happening, but almost half of American adults do not think it will affect their personal life. This is because of political bias and psychological distance to the consequences of climate change. Many projects, such as video-blogs, summer camps, and public outreach activities have been tackling these challenges to increase public engagement and desirable attitudes towards environmental problems. Earth Voices is an interactive podcast that guides listeners through an immersive experience, while walking a predetermined route in a city. Listeners would learn more about the different spheres of the Earth system and their relation with society through an embodied experience that will bring them closer to understanding the climate and the modern environmental problems society faces, as well as visualize themselves as part of the solution. Earth Voices will be available for free online and through main podcast platforms.
FakeNetAI
School: UC Berkeley
Over one billion hours of video are uploaded to the internet daily. Deepfakes, videos manipulated using deep learning techniques, represent a tiny fraction of those videos but are growing rapidly, doubling in the past nine months. Deepfake quality is improving to the point where the best are unidentifiable by human reviewers–and already have been used for nefarious purposes, including inserting a person into pornography or manipulating politics. As a result of the growing quality and ability to insert Deepfakes into a sea of uploaded content, the risk of their spreading and causing damage for content hosting companies is increasing. It is critical to be able to identify and react to Deepfakes by flagging or removing them. FakeNetAI’s Deepfake detection technology enables content hosting platforms to detect Deepfake content to counteract this growing threat. FakeNetAI’s technologies allow companies to respond to the threat even as Deepfakes continue to grow exponentially.
Impactify
School: UC Berkeley
Impactify addresses the disconnect between motivated and skilled individuals on the one side and under-resourced social projects on the other side. This inefficiency is an obstacle to positive social change in communities. By providing a platform for like-minded users and equipping users with useful skills and matching them to the most suitable engagement opportunities nearby, Impactify revolutionizes the way local problems are solved. When signing up for the application, users are asked to indicate which social causes they care about and which skills they already possess. Based on this information, users will be shown nearby events, open tasks, and ideas for social initiatives that have been posted by others. Users can easily swipe through those opportunities to indicate interest, add their own ideas or events to the platform, and invite friends to join. By creating such a virtual market place, Impactify aims to encourage, educate, and equip changemakers in their communities.
Mindset & Milestones
School: UC Los Angeles
While the battle for gender equity continues, girls have to be prepared to succeed in society as it stands. That requires the confidence to fight for a seat at existing tables and the confidence to create new ones. Plainly stated, girls need educational and engaging spaces. Mindset & Milestones seeks to address the problem of self-efficacy, confidence, and opportunity deficits for girls by introducing them to entrepreneurial learning curriculum. The primary delivery of the curriculum will be via the workbook “Mindset & Milestones: A Girl’s Guide to Thinking Like An Entrepreneur” and in-person workshops. Entrepreneurship is not only a powerful way to exercise problem-solving skills, but it also allows girls to find the value in their ideas and find a way to succeed in the face of adversity. In the end, the vision is for girls to leave programs feeling like they have the ability to create something from nothing and contribute to any environment.
Theater to Heighten Community Voices: Dharavi Slum
School: UC Davis
Dharavi slum in Mumbai, India, which boasts a unique economy and culture, is currently threatened with destruction due to the government’s plan for redevelopment. This project seeks to use theater as a means of uplifting community voices to preserve the neighborhood. Through a series of workshops, young participants will develop creative means of telling their personal stories about the positive aspects of their community, as well as the challenges they face. This will culminate in the creation of an original show, which will be performed for both slum residents and the greater Mumbai area, celebrating community voices and combating negative perceptions about the slum. The project also serves as a means of qualitative data collection in a severely under-researched area. This project seeks to promote a humanizing perspective of a particularly marginalized group of people with the hopes that the government and wider Mumbai society will learn about the wealth of culture Dharavi holds.
When You Were Young
School: UC Berkeley
When You Were Young represents a previously untold story about child sexual abuse and healing from the perspective of a black woman, through her own courageous emergence on screen. This impact campaign, accompanying the film, will be the first to address the needs and interests of the audience by focusing on black girls and women and creating a safe space for public conversations, specifically in black communities. The lack of such films has historically left communities of color feeling invisible, a feeling that is only compounded for a victim of child sexual abuse. The film follows Aqueila Lewis, an adult survivor of child sexual abuse, as she works to confront the generational cycle of child sexual abuse within her family. When You Were Young’s campaign will include a pre-viewing guide featuring support and resources for people directly impacted by child sexual abuse, as well as indirectly impacted allies, family members, and community.
Cities & Communities
The challenge for this track is to describe a novel solution to engage and enhance the wellbeing of communities, campuses, and cities. These innovations should stimulate new thinking to address key physical, social, or economic challenges facing geographic locales ranging from university settings to global metropolises. Solutions may focus on a wide range of areas, including but not limited to: improving the living conditions of urban environments, promoting civic engagement, sharing knowledge and information, making transportation options more accessible, and empowering individuals to improve their own well-being.
Mansa Taxi
School: Makerere University
One of Kampala’s main forms of transportation is the matatus (a 14-16 seater van/bus). These vehicles operate without strict regulation or organization, causing heavy traffic jams, congestion, and accidents that result in increased vehicle emissions and degraded ambient air quality. Mansa Taxi’s solution is a token-based system for matatu bookings and payments whereby passengers pre-purchase tokens that entitle them to a specific travel distance, and therefore a specific destination, accessible via phone smart and feature phones. Through Mansa Taxi, matatus are tracked in real-time to ensure that they follow proper driving guidelines, passengers don’t have to scuffle to get seats, and remittances from trips are wired to drivers. Mansa Taxi will lend order to a currently chaotic transport system and allow better planning for passengers, matatu operators, and owners, alleviating the heavy congestion caused by these matatus as well as their significant contribution to air pollution in the city.
Mushroom
School: UC Berkeley
Climate change is the single largest issue threatening a sustainable future for humanity. Mushroom is focused on addressing the intention-action gap, the difference between what people say they want to do and what they actually do, for individuals who are interested in contributing to the fight against climate change. Using behavioral economics to help users make sustainable lifestyle choices, Mushroom facilitates emissions reductions and builds community around protecting the environment. The application uses a diagnostic test to generate quests that align with user interests and commitment levels. These quests challenge users to make incremental steps toward establishing sustainable habits, using gaming elements like streaks and leaderboards to keep user motivation high and minimize attrition. Mushroom tracks these lifestyle changes and quantifies the emissions reductions associated with them, grouping similar users and fostering friendly competition between them. By showing users that others are also working towards similar goals, Mushroom creates a community around battling climate change.
Singe
School: UC Irvine
Over the past four years there have been approximately 34 million acres of land lost to wildfires in the U.S. The mission of Singe is to extinguish wildfires before they grow to a size that needs firefighter intervention, or slows down the fire until support is available. This increases response effectiveness and decreases yearly fire damage costs. The Singe modules are automated fire extinguishing units placed in an array and anchored in high risk fire zones. The units are temperature sensitive activating at close to 200 Fahrenheit and are filled with a biodegradable high expansion extinguishing foam, each able to cover an estimated 150 square feet. This modular system can be placed in forested areas and around at risk homes, aiming to be a life saver, cost reducer, and provide fire awareness. Singe aims to be a global product/service and be considered the go-to first line of defense for incoming fires during fire season
Strategic Wind Turbine Deployment to Reduce Wildfire Risks
School: UC Berkeley
California has been experiencing increasingly worsening forest fires that affect millions. The direct cause of many of these forest fires are from power lines being downed by high winds and winds spreading the fire. This model proposes to slow winds by 40 – 50% by deploying wind turbines along the path of the Santa Ana winds in mountain passes. Since the mass of air moving through an area can’t change, converting the kinetic energy of the wind results in a squared reduction in velocity. The solution reduces wind speeds while using the energy for green causes, like using it to power other green technology for on-site use, such as direct carbon capture. This can prevent fires that may result from storing or transporting the energy from the wind farms. By slowing winds, this model can quickly and effectively reduce the forest fires in California, and in the world, fighting the consequences of climate change.
The Mobius Project
School: UC Berkeley
These days, tech companies constantly have to admit that they are not fully equipped to deal with all of the ways bad actors can use their platforms or technologies to cause harm – and the ways their product can disproportionately harm particular groups of people. The Mobius Project is a knowledge and research platform that provides practical ways to incorporate abusability testing into existing product life cycles and teams, drawing from existing expertise from privacy, security, scholars, and digital activists. This platform is a multi-sided digital marketplace that includes three main features. It will provide abusability bug bounties that provide a forum where verified experts can discuss abusability risks and propose solutions. It will develop fundable tools and frameworks around abusability that can be implemented into various parts of the software development project life cycle. Finally, the Mobius Project will provide a searchable database of potential abuses for product teams in the planning stages.
Tiny Home in My Backyard: A Vehicle for Change
School: UC Berkeley
The magnitude of the Bay Area’s unsheltered homelessness population, underscored by an absence of temporary shelter options and an insufficient supply of supportive housing, makes the crisis one of the most visible in the nation. To combat the homelessness crisis, this project proposes the construction of solar-powered tiny homes. The homes have the potential to address and scale various components of decarbonized affordable housing units that, in partnership with community organizations and city governments, would serve local homeless populations in need of housing. Though several localities have employed similar interventions, it is imperative that new housing and construction be compliant with renewable energy innovations to mitigate their environmental impact, as building accounts for nearly 40% of global energy-related carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions. This project represents an opportunity for students from diverse departments to learn about sustainable design principles through hands-on experience in all phases of development, from design to construction to performance evaluation.
Vigillent Home Fire Protection System
School: UC Santa Barbara
The technology used to fight against wildfires has evolved, but the technology to reduce risks of structural damage has not. Vigillent Wildfire Protection Systems seeks to save lives, homes, and communities from wildfires by deploying automatically operated, self-contained, and easily installed fire protection systems that are designed to provide families with an affordable last line of fire defense. Vigillent’s systems apply an adequate protective blanket of class environmentally responsible fire retardant on a home’s roof, eaves, ventilation, outer walls, structural lining, and entire defensible space using a self-powered and remotely activated fluid delivery mechanism. Vigillent’s technology is designed through qualitative and quantitative research analysis from market validation interviews, while interpreting relationships between society and global climate change factors that contribute to wildfire tendencies. Vigillent’s technology protects families and their most valuable assets, is verbally supported by fire chiefs, for its ability to decrease risk without increasing liabilities, and provides insurance incentives for attaining Vigillent’s protection.
Walls to Bridges
School: UC Santa Cruz
Walls to Bridges is a pilot program in partnership with the Conflict Resolution Center of Santa Cruz (CRC) designed to address communication issues between incarcerated parents and their adult-age children in Santa Cruz. Using restorative justice practices and principles, the program will facilitate confidential dialogues regarding the impact of incarceration on relationships and planning for communication resolutions, such as letters, phone calls, and visits. The dialogues will take place between incarcerated parents and their adult-age children within a Santa Cruz County jail. The process focuses on the procedural aspect of healing, like what steps need to be taken to address the harm and reduce the adverse outcomes for families impacted by incarceration. A research aspect will inform for potential expansion with the CRC as well as replication for other restorative justice or criminal justice reform organizations. Walls To Bridges has the potential to inform the public of familial incarceration challenges and help make policy recommendations.
Education & Literacy
Green Teach App
School: UC Santa Barbara
The current environmental crisis has generated a spark of interest and demands by youth, who are demanding solutions as well as more applicable knowledge on how to be better environmental stewards. The Green Teach App will promote international sharing of environmental stewardship approaches designed by K-12 teachers and implemented in their classrooms. It will provide a digital, easy access, and affordable tool for educators interested in covering the academic content dictated by the standards specified by their school’s district or country, while educating students about pressing sustainability issues and current environmental challenges. Green Teach will provide K-12 teachers with a robust database of lesson plans categorized by country, language, grade, core subject, and environmental topic covered. Other tags will include the evaluation mechanisms used for the lesson, any outdoor or indoor hands-on activities or projects done in the lesson, as well as labels for lessons designed for instruction with students with learning disabilities.
Matica: A Social Mathematical Teaching Tool for Improving Learners’ Ability in Numeracy
School: Makerere University
Mathematics is vital in the development of elementary skills like creativity, problem solving, and innovation, yet many children go through school with little knowledge and skill in the subject. Understanding the subject of mathematics is necessary because it not only drives improved performance in STEM, but also improves general intelligence to solving everyday challenges. Matica is a novel, low-cost mathematics game that improves mathematical learning, critical thinking, and mental work among children in Uganda and other resource-limited countries without proper infrastructure and capital investments to use high-end technologies. Matica allows learners to have fun with mathematics, while they play and interact with their teachers, parents, and peers. It has been designed as an eccentric mathematical social learning tool for learners to improve basic skills in mathematics, arithmetic computations, competencies, and interests through social interaction and playing like other ordinary card games, employing Matica’s mission to provide every child the platform to love and succeed in Mathematics.
OutReach Assistant
School: UC Berkeley
Higher education in the United States has become less accessible to underserved ethnic minorities, immigrants, and those from more socio-economically distressed communities. While there are many factors that contribute to the cumulative disadvantages in equity within our country, education is among the most evident and consequential. For decades, community colleges have served as a feeder program for those who have aspired for higher education, but have neglected the needs of disadvantaged students due to a lack of effective communication. Today, OutReach Assistant by SIGMA is leveraging the latest technology in data analytics, machine learning, and software development to building and designing scalable and affordable technology that makes it possible for faculty and administrators to better connect with underprivileged students who are otherwise overlooked as well as students who are self starters. This software will set the standard for outreach and engagement across California community colleges as it continues to eliminate achievement gaps in education.
PIC.ME : Personalized Interactive Communication Made for Everyone
School: UC Santa Barbara
Approximately one third of people with autism are nonverbal, resulting in a rising need for a user-friendly, socio-culturally relevant means of assistive technology to help them communicate. PIC.ME: Personalized Interactive Communication Made for Everyone is an app that can be downloaded onto a personal smart device, such as a smartphone or tablet, for people with exceptional needs, such as autism, or other language disabilities. Users can personalize pictures used for picture exchange communication that are culturally and socially relevant to their lives, record vocalizations for words and sounds to match pictures, and practice language and social skills with games. This app will not be limited to people with autism, but will be accessible for any person living with a disability that causes a loss of the ability to effectively communicate. PIC.ME will not only make assistive technology more available to all, but it will make the right of communication more equitable for all.
University Climate Index
School: UC Berkeley
Underrepresented minority (URM) students, African-Americans, American Indians/Alaskan Natives, and Hispanics, as defined by the Council of Graduate Schools account for 15% of doctorates awarded by U.S. institutions in 2016. Yet URMs makeup more than 30% of the U.S population. This problem is not detached from our reality at UC Berkeley. This project will create a University Climate Index: a sustainable system for assessing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) at academic institutions, starting with UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering. The two key components of this idea include a UCI Math Model to interpret DEI data into index that representative departments’ (or institutions’) recruitment and retention of URM students and a UCI Framework that other academic institutions can use as a guide towards computing their own UCI with our Math Model. The goal is to use commonly available data sets that reflect an academic institution’s efforts towards DEI in their environment.
Energy & Resources
Five Leaf
School: UC San Diego
While reusing and recycling materials used by clothing brands and manufacturers is necessary to deal with the mass of clothes accumulating in aged inventories, it does not significantly improve environmental footprint. This is because the rate of clothing production and consumption is expected to accelerate. Ultimately, sustainable fashion means less fashion, which contradicts the mainstream business model of producing and consuming more. Five Leaf’s color-changing fabric enables fashion brands to reduce the volume of clothes produced while allowing consumers to reuse their clothes in ways that were previously not possible. This idea will reduce the risk of brands overproducing or overstocking their inventories by introducing a versatile color-changing fabric for the consumers to customize themselves, directly connecting supply with demand. By applying a customer acquisition model, Five Leaf’s clothes are designed to eventually become cost-competitive with fast fashion, while encouraging slower consumerism by extending the life of clothes.
HelioVap
School: UC Berkeley
Across the 2,700 islands of Indonesia, one in eight households lack clean water access. Traditional desalination technologies have too high energy requirements, costs, and brine discharges to be implemented in these coastal communities. As a result, households often purchase bottled water, which is both expensive and environmentally damaging. HelioVap is a floating, stand-alone desalination device that can provide reliable water access to coastal communities through an off-grid, zero-liquid discharge process that directly uses sunlight to separate seawater into its fundamental components. HelioVap is being designed to produce 75 L of water per day, which should be sufficient to meet the drinking and cooking requirements of five households through the utilization of alternative energy sources including sunlight, wind, and natural temperature gradients. This technology does not threaten biodiversity in the coastal ecosystems that over 50% of the population relies on for income, and the use of alternative energy sources reduces cost and carbon emissions of the process.
Wise Earthcare-Biodegradable Oral Healthcare Products Delivered
School: UC Los Angeles
Over 1.2 billion plastic toothbrushes are thrown away in the United States every year–enough to fill up 1,100 shipping containers. The problem is that 99% of those toothbrushes are made from plastic that is non-recyclable and they end up in landfills or the ocean, contributing to the increase of pollution. The solution is a toothbrush that is 100% biodegradable, clinically validated by the American Dental Association, which is delivered directly to the consumer via subscription, retail, and dental offices. These products will be both clinically effective and sustainable and will include an array of oral care products, including toothbrushes for adults and kids, electric toothbrush replacement heads, floss, floss picks, toothpaste, and mouthwash. With validation from the ADA and both dentists and consumers regarding the design, this product can ensure that patients/users are receiving the best possible oral healthcare products, while still playing a positive role in the sustainability movement.
Financial Inclusion
FairMed
School: UC San Diego
Due to the lack of transparency and the absence of price regulations in the U.S., medical supply and pharmaceutical companies are increasingly exploiting this imbalance of information and lack of regulations to jack up the prices for their products, making the cost for basic healthcare needs unaffordable for patients. FairMed is an internet platform that optimizes the supply chain for clinics to both obtain better pricing and streamline their restocking procedures. The platform uses an algorithm to determine the optimal way to form an aggregated order, while not violating products’ designated restock deadlines. This platform both reduces the cost of resupplying and the administration effort for the clinics. Using the profit and cash flow generated by the platform, FairMed reimburses patients a percentage of their medical bills when visiting FairMed associated clinics. Such practice brings in more customers and further incentivizes the clinics to use FairMed and thus creates a positive feedback loop.
Legacy
School: UC Berkeley
Modern-day student loans fail to align with the interests of the students and many people incurring their massive student debt are never going to be able to get out from under the weight of these bills. Having gained popularity only recently, Income Share Agreements (ISA) attempt to resolve this problem by tying the future earning potential of the student post-graduation to the people tasked with helping the student succeed. Legacy, is a peer-to-peer lending platform, where an investor called a “legatus” can enter into ISAs called with their “legacies.” Named after the Roman practice of providing philanthropic opportunities to their high achieving youth, Legacy will help foster talent that otherwise would’ve gone overlooked. Legacy aims to broaden the reach of ISAs to more people by providing a peer-to-peer platform where industry professionals can connect and support younger versions of themselves from their alma mater.
Lyzapay
School: Makerere University
Youth in Uganda start business ventures with little or no knowledge of financial management or good business practices and with limited access to capital. About 50% of this population has little or no assets to put up for collateral for loans and they do not come from rich families to get capital. Without these resources, businesses are bound to fail, resulting in a vicious cycle of youth unemployment, food insecurity, and under performance of the economy. Lyzapay is a mobile application platform that gives both financial literacy and access to capital to business owners in Uganda. The application analyzes the entrepreneur’s personal data, business financial records, assets, and financial literacy to compute a credit score. This is integrated with a financial advisory platform that has a series of customized training modules and tools tailored to suit the Ugandan setting. Lyzapay will enhance the local entrepreneurs’ knowledge of financial management and good business practices.
RoboCash
School: UC Irvine
Data shows that anti-spam laws and apps have not slowed the increasing trend of spam calls. This is because these anti-spam attempts are addressing the symptoms (spam techniques) and not the cause (financial incentives). RoboCash’s vision is to end all robocalls and spam, by addressing the economic incentives that drive every scam call. RoboCash’s proprietary method places “cash-back” options on both sides of a phone call and works in a user-friendly way by rejecting all unknown numbers unless they leave a five cent “NanoDeposit.” Unknown callers get the NanoDeposit back if their call lasts more than 25 seconds or if the user doesn’t pick up. Otherwise, if the user hears the usual scam language and hangs up before 25 seconds, they collect their NanoDeposit. RoboCash’s vision is to provide value to telemarketers and users as a middleman with a disruptive business model that distributes the profits amongst everybody involved.
Food & Agriculture
BioMilitus
School: UC Davis
Agricultural co-products and other food wastes are used as feedstock for insects, which are later harvested for biomass, rich in proteins and fats valued as animal feed ingredient. Consequently, the bioconverted food waste is transformed into a microbially active insect compost known as frass, which may be used as a soil amendment for crops. Given that 3 million tons of organic waste are generated each year from California alone, this resource represents a significant opportunity for insect bioconversion. BioMilitus leverages the bioconversion potential of black soldier fly larvae (BSFL) as a solution for bridging the gap between the increasing global food demand and abundant organic waste. In order to realize the idea’s full potential, BioMilitus has further innovated this process through the engineering of growing conditions, specialized blends of wastes used as feed stock, and specially bred lines of insect larvae targeted for more efficient bioconversion of waste.
EatLink
School: UC Irvine
Currently, over a third of all food produced in Africa is lost post-harvest, approximately enough to feed a total of 48 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, leading to greater imports of food that cripple local farmers. While some companies try to combat this loss by providing more storage units, their efforts are too slow and too costly to scale around Africa. EatLink serves to tackle this issue with a monitoring device that detects when and where food spoils. The location data can pinpoint the locations during food transport and discover where the cracks in the harvest-to-store pipeline occur to prevent future losses in the same places. The device itself is cost effective and easy to operate and install, allowing unprecedented growth and results over a brief period of time during its initial implementation. Through the use of big data analytics, EatLink serves to preserve food lost in transport and revitalize the African agricultural economy.
Faba Friends
School: UC Davis
Chickpeas have become a popular source of plant-based protein, reflected by an increased focus on sustainability and veganism. Despite chickpeas being a more sustainable source of protein compared to meat, it leaves behind a valuable functional ingredient: aquafaba, which is the water that remains after cooking chickpeas. While aquafaba is perceived as a waste stream by most of the food industry, this wastewater can be upcycled into unique products. Faba Friends is a frozen dessert bar filled with a creamy, aquafaba “ice cream” and coated in chocolate. Similar to a chocolate bar, Faba Friends can be broken into smaller bite-sized pieces and shared among friends and family. The frozen dessert bar can be consumed as is, or blended to create a protein packed smoothie. This is the first frozen dessert that utilizes upcycled aquafaba as its primary ingredient. By turning a waste stream into a value-added product, Faba Friends offers a delicious, sustainable, protein-packed frozen treat.
FootMo Kit
School: Makerere University
Sub-Saharan Africa has one of the world’s fastest growing human populations. The expansion of the livestock population is necessary to address this population growth, however the output depends critically on livestock productivity, which is generally poor across the region’s various production systems. Currently, 25% of livestock in sub-Saharan Africa die due to highly contagious and viral Foot and Mouth disease and 65% of this livestock in Uganda is predominantly cattle. FootMo Kit is a hand-held device that detects Foot and Mouth Disease in livestock in hard-to-reach and under-served areas through early disease detection. The kit is simple to use and is a low-cost device that is put in the mouths of a cattle that detects the disease against the antigen content in the saliva. FootMo Kit addresses poverty, well-being, and sustainable development, as well as empowers farmers to detect diseases without relying on the veterinary doctors.
Sundial Foods, Inc.
School: UC Berkeley
Meat consumption in the United States has risen in recent years, and despite a variety of activism efforts, the trend shows little sign of slowing down. The alternative meats industry seeks to provide sustainable alternatives to meat in order to provide the experience of meat consumption without the environmental cost; however, current products are expensive, highly processed, and rarely healthy. Sundial Foods’ mission is to alleviate the global environmental and public health burden of concentrated animal agriculture. Sundial Foods is revolutionizing the alternative meat industry by developing a new method for the creation of these products that relies upon a biological approach to meat structure in order to inform the creation of a product that looks, cooks, and tastes like animal chicken. The processing method in development is significantly more efficient than the methods currently used in the alternative meat industry, and makes use of whole plant ingredients rather than micronutrient-depleted protein isolates.
Suppression of Evaporation and Percolation Water Losses with Novel Infiltration Insert Method to Improve Plant Yield Utilizing Carbon Sequestration
School: UC Santa Barbara
Increasing global population requires 70% more food production by 2050, predominantly cultivated in developing countries and areas with an arid climate. Irrigation consumes more than 80% of the world’s fresh water. Traditional irrigation practices suffer from evaporation and percolation loss of freshwater and existing efficient technologies are very expensive and not economically viable for developing world. The purpose of this innovation is to develop and implement an economically viable technique and devices to reduce irrigation water loss and apply them to micro-irrigation to help small farm owners in the developing world. The proposed infiltration system inserts under drip emitters mimic SDI and delivers water to the root zone. Then engineered perlite/peat-moss topsoil beds suppresses evaporation loss by locking water in the pores and a percolation control layer at the root zone uses charcoal amendment to retain water and improve root health/plant yield, ultimately working to reduce the water footprint of agriculture in arid regions.
Global Health
AIDS-Tech: A point of care test for HIV drug resistance testing
School: Makerere University
The broader access to antiretroviral drugs has led not only to considerable reductions in morbidity and mortality but, unfortunately, has increased the risk of virologic failure due to emergence and potential transmission of drug-resistant viruses. AIDS-tech will be a portable point of care diagnostic test that detects HIV drug resistance mutations in patient blood samples within 120 minutes, with an estimated sensitivity of 80-90% at an estimated cost of $50. A rechargeable battery (8-hour half-life) will be fitted to support a full day’s testing to use in field settings where access to electricity is limited. Results will be interpreted with a naked eye (observing color change on the strips), hence eliminating the need for computers and software. This will aid timely acquisition of resistance results and guide clinicians on which regime to start the patient and thus improve treatment outcome. It will also aid in the World Health Organization’s target to limit the number of patients with HIV.
ChemCath: A Real-time Intravascular Chemical Monitor
School: UC Berkeley
Real-time, continuous monitoring of patient health is of utmost importance to detect life-threatening problems in a timely manner. Currently doctors rely on patient symptoms or blood draws to detect physiological imbalances organ injury. However, these imbalances and injuries can occur quickly and failing to respond to these in a timely manner can lead to significant deterioration of a patient’s health. ChemCath is a sensor-embedded modification of a current catheter that will enable early identification of these deleterious events by continuously collecting physiologic and chemical data. Leveraging recent advances in micro- and nano-science, ChemCath’s biosensors will quickly detect changes in pH to start, but future work will facilitate measurement of other important biomarkers such as sodium, potassium, and glucose. ChemCath will also pave the way for close at-home monitoring of patients on home health, preferentially benefiting the elderly, disabled, and those in rural communities who have a more difficult finding access to healthcare facilities.
Gastro-Bag Project
School: Makerere University
The mortality rate for neonates in Uganda with Gastroschisis is 98% compared to high-income countries with less than 4%. Gastroschisis is a congenital anomaly birth defect in which abdominal organs protrude through a small opening right of the umbilical cord. The difference in the survival rate between low-income countries and high-income countries is largely caused by failure to keep the neonates hydrated, nourished, and infection-free while their bowel is outside the abdomen. This is because silo-bags used to put the bowel back into the baby’s abdomen cost approximately $240 which is 140% of the average monthly income in Uganda. The Gastro-Bag Project has developed and tested a low-cost silo-bag for treatment and management of Gastroschisis using locally available materials in Uganda at a cost of less than $5. The Gastro-Bag Project intends to demonstrate feasibility and improvements in quality, efficacy, operability, costs, and accessibility of Gastroschisis to improve human health.
Mabinju Borehole Project
School: UC Davis
In the community of Mabinju, Kenya, 3,500 people have limited access to clean water for agriculture and basic needs. Lake Victoria, the main water source in Siaya county where Mabinju is located, is infested with water hyacinth and contaminated with fluoride and traces of copper (II) and zinc (III), which cause rapid spread of disease throughout the region. The Mabingu Borehole Project will address the lack of accessible clean water in the region by installing a borehole that uses a solar-powered pump to extract groundwater. The project aims to provide enough potable water for the community’s needs. With this accessibility, the residents will no longer have to rely on polluted, stagnant water from Lake Victoria. The rate of water-borne illnesses, such as cholera and dysentery, will decrease and the community’s income and food, which relies substantially on their agriculture, will further thrive with an abundance of clean and accessible water.
Mobile Based Stroke Rehabilitation: NeoMotion AI
School: UC Berkeley
Stroke rehabilitation is often inaccessible, expensive, and requires a lot of scarce, highly trained professionals. By harnessing the processing power of smartphones in combination with recent advances in artificial intelligence, NeoMotion AI will be able to improve rehabilitation at a worldwide scale. NeoMotion AI is run on AI-based pose estimation algorithms and it optimizes them for usage on smartphones without internet connection. Using a smartphone camera and this software, the solution involves tracking the coordinates of every joint of the upper and lower limbs, proving patients, rehabilitation specialists, and physicians with a tool to track patient’s rehabilitation progress over time. At a later stage, performing rehabilitation exercises in front of a smartphone would allow patients to receive personalized exercise corrections or new and adaptive exercises suggestions. NeoMotion AI can provide an engaging rehabilitation experience for stroke patients through a social platform, creating a sense of community, and a more integrated management system for physical therapists or physicians.
Smoke reducing Clay 3-D Printed Stove
School: UC Berkeley
According to the World Health Program, more than three billion of the world’s population do not have access to clean cooking facilities and still rely on solid fuels such as wood, animal dung, charcoal, crop wastes, and coal for cooking and heating. These fuels are burned in extremely inefficient and highly polluting stoves and one of the world’s greatest environmental health risk factors is exposure to the emissions from these cooking stoves. This project proposes a new mechanism of self-generated air flow that boosts combustion and helps neutralize smoke. The proposed 3D printed clay stove is a doubly walled enclosure with a hollow in between, incorporating built-in apertures at the base of the exterior wall and at the top of the interior wall. The stove could be manufactured locally on-site using clay that is almost free and available anywhere. The stove capitalizes on additive manufacturing technology to leverage local material into high performing micro-infrastructure that offsets environmental and economic costs.
The Automated Ambu Bag System, AABS
School: Makerere University
There is a dire need to invest in intermediate care bridging from the resuscitative efforts in the Emergency Units and the supportive care offered by the intensive care units in Uganda. This leads to a high prevalence of missed opportunities for patients requiring advanced ventilatory support at Emergency Units. This is due to there being only 33 Intensive Care beds with Mechanical Ventilators for the whole population of Uganda. The Automated Ambu BagSystem (AABS) is automated and designed to provide controlled ventilatory support to patients with respiratory failure. The project is aimed at utilising the existing and relatively affordable bagging technology proving vital features of an Advanced Ventilatory Support System. The principle of the bag is through the compression of the Ambu Bag, which uses a piston run by a mortar. The device is light and of medium size, which allows it to be easily moved to different bed stations without it being stolen.
The Rescue Cot
School: Makerere University
According to Uganda Road Sector Support Initiative, Uganda has the second highest rate of road traffic accidents in Africa and the world after Ethiopia. The transportation and rescue services at the accident scenes are inadequate and inappropriate and the Uganda Police, which is the main emergency rescue team in the country, often lacks assistive devices at accident scenes. This means that emergency responders have to lift and carry the victims by hand to their vehicles. A big gap thus remains for evacuation of casualties from scenes of accidents on Ugandan roads. The Rescue Cot will contribute to improving patient safety through reduction of body movements and detecting the patient’s critical condition. This low-cost stretcher will be 3-folded portable pole evacuation resource that includes metallic rods with two hinge joints, cloth, straps, caster wheels, and a pulse-oximeter, which can measure the patient’s critical condition by detecting the heart rate and oxygen saturation of the patient.
Workforce Development
Riverside Studios Entertainment Innovation Incubator
School: UC Riverside
The Entertainment industry is rapidly changing due to the emergence of new technologies, creating a need for skilled labor in areas such as marketing, data analytics, software engineering, and VR/AR development. Despite this technology shift, students have traditionally lacked the training and skills crucial for entering the entertainment industry, creating a larger gap in entertainment workforce development, and thus, economic growth. The Riverside Studios Entertainment Innovation Incubator provides a large space that includes recording studios, film studios, work rooms, equipment, and performance stages. This would be coupled with educational training opportunities, mentorship, project development, marketing, events, and funding to help propel student ideas into tangible products or services. This incubator program solves a major issue in workforce development and education for the Entertainment industry and provides new opportunities for students to succeed in the entertainment world
Signum
School: UC Berkeley
Unemployment and underemployment are problems that affect roughly 70% of all Americans with hearing impairments. Signum is a video chat platform created to solve this problem. Designed as a workforce development tool, Signum utilizes a machine learning model to translate video of ASL gestures to text, easing communication for people with hearing and speech impairments who can only communicate in ASL. Although several other startups are currently developing similar technologies, Signum distinguishes a gap in the market due to its emphasis on providing an inexpensive and non-intrusive means of communication targeted towards removing barriers in the workplace. Signum’s current target market is “functionally deaf” ASL users in the workforce between 18- and 35-years old. In the long term, Signum will be used in conjunction with popular workforce video chat platforms such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Cisco WebEx to expand to a broader audience and impact millions of lives.
Sike Insights
School: UC Los Angeles
The world is clearly moving towards increasingly remote employment, especially since housing costs continue to rise in large cities. Remote work is clearly a part of the future of work, but there are still major hurdles to be overcome before remote work can replace in-person work. Remote teams are often less effective, because teammates don’t have strong working relationships with each other. Sike Insights aims to eliminate the difference between remote and in-person work. Its solution is an AI-powered Slackbot that helps remote teams work better together by improving communication. This bot, named Kona, uses deep learning to analyze the way each team member communicates within Slack. It then smartly delivers actionable insights about how remote team members should interact with each other. This will help teams communicate effectively, work through conflicts, and feel more engaged with the team, ultimately improving how teams communicate while working remotely.