The SmartMelonDrone project will use low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to help manage both the quantity and quality of melon produce. The platform, capable of multispectral imaging, together with image post-analysis software, will support field management, including nitrogen stress detection, water stress detection, pest monitoring, yield estimation, small animal activities, etc. Firstly, real-time imagery with high spatial resolution (centimeters) can be acquired for growing melon by RGB, near infrared (NIR) and thermal infrared (TIR) cameras. Based on this analysis tool, information about nitrogen stress, water stress, and status of crop, weed, insect and disease can be extracted for optimized fertilizer, irrigation, precision application of insecticide, fungicide and herbicide, respectively. Meanwhile, grazing animals are also monitored to prevent introducing pathogenic bacteria into the soil. In addition, pre-harvest and harvest yield estimations will be determined for production decisions.
Awards: 3rd Place
Special Lessons in Neuroscience
To address the inequality in educational opportunities provided to children of lower income areas and school districts, this project is designed to harness the potential of young minds, and provide resources to inspire and encourage pursuit of further education and the largest ambitions of these students. Through its student organization, the Cognitive Science Student Association, the team has developed and piloted an engaging neuroscience course designed for elementary and middle school students. The lesson is entitled “Feel Real Brains” and lasts approximately one hour in length. At each lesson, a hand full of UC Berkeley students will come into a classroom, and give an interactive lesson on what it means to study neuroscience, and all the ways the brain affects health, thoughts, and daily life. This project proposes to expand the existing program. In addition to coordinating and facilitating its outreach efforts between schools, the team seeks to design a website through which teachers, students, or parents can submit requests for lessons to visit their school.
Hombres Verdaderos
This project will improve women’s health outcomes by stopping domestic violence (DV) before it starts. Leveraging behavioral tools, the program engages young, at-risk adolescent boys, ages 11 to 14 years old, from poor districts in Barranquilla, Colombia. Through workshops and youth-driven media campaigns, the boys will learn about DV prevention and become advocates for change. Participants will undertake a month-long series of play-based workshops on relevant themes, including power, oppression and the effects of gender expectations. The project will enlist older adolescent volunteers to help lead the workshops and create positive role models for the boys. The campaigns will be designed by the students with the help of the volunteers, and will be disseminated to each participant’s online social circle. If this pilot program is successful, it could be scaled-up regionally by the Ministry for Women and Gender Equality in the Atlantic region of Colombia.
USeeData
As a field, environmental science has not yet had the impact it needs to have on the general public, mostly due to limited amount of exposure to information. A powerful visualization tool would help bring all types environmental causes to the forefront and help the general population understand how the environment influences their day to day lives. This project seeks to achieve that goal by creating an open source environmental data visualization suite for researchers and data scientists. The tool set will be especially tailored toward geographical and energy related data; however, the end project will create a much more versatile set of abilities. This tool would make it incredibly simple for researchers to submit any kind of geographic data and create meaningful visualizations of that data, without the need for much technical knowledge on the part of the researchers.
Equa
In times of drought, reducing water use is crucial. The product, Equa, will raise awareness by collecting and displaying real-time data during showers to inform users of their water consumption. Easily attached to a shower wall, Equa displays real-time user data including temperature, liters of water used, and carbon dioxide emissions that are based off of how much energy is being used to heat the water so that the person in the shower will know how much water and energy he or she is using. By visualizing the resources being consumed, the user will change his or her behavior in order to reduce his or her environmental impact. This simple investment will thus pay for itself over time and increase awareness of users’ impact on the environment.
Padhne.De
While many developing countries have come a long way in increasing literacy rates, certain populations, like children in rural India, are still struggling with low literacy rates. By leveraging the power of local experiences and knowledge, Padhne.De aims to increase literacy rates through a peer-based mobile platform. Padhne.De takes an existing interactive voice response model for community communication and allows older students to record short readings and micro-lesson plans. This learning system enhances children’s reading capabilities by complementing children’s existing modes of instruction, like teachers, tutors, and textbooks. Not only will households benefit by having a program flexible with their time schedule, but they will also appreciate receiving lessons more relevant to their native tongue. Building on team-members’ existing research projects in rural India, Padhne.De seeks to implement a pilot project over the course of the Indian academic year.
(Note: This project originally won in the Big Ideas “Mobiles for Reading” category)
Transcense – Seamless Deaf/Hearing Conversations
Transcense makes group conversations possible for 360 million people with hearing loss. With Transcense they can freely communicate with their hearing peers again. Current solutions are unreliable, unaffordable and not adaptable to situations where multiple people are talking in professional or personal gatherings. By connecting smartphones in a room through a mobile app, and using cloud-based speech recognition and speaker identification technologies, Transcense is able to show to the hard-of-hearing person in less than a second, who says what.
Smart Diaphragm
Vaginal infections in pregnant women pose two major health risks for the unborn child: preterm birth and vertical transmission of infection. Currently, there are limited options that accurately monitor vaginal conditions. The Smart Diaphragm team, collaborating with clinicians and scientists at UCSF, plans to incorporate pH and temperature sensors to ascertain vaginal health and incorporates wireless technology for real-time physician monitoring. The team will develop a prototype that it will test utilizing a bench top lab model of the intra-vaginal environment within over the next year. Its long-term goal is to transition the device to a wireless system so patients can eventually connect to physicians without visiting the clinic.
Emmunify: A Simple Tool to Save Lives with Vaccination
Globally, millions of children die from vaccine preventable diseases because they are not fully immunized. In North India, fewer than 50% of children are fully immunized; Emmunify uses communications technology to help vaccinate more infants so they can live longer and healthier, perform better in school, and escape poverty. Emmunify effectively and efficiently tracks the status of each child, reminds clients of where and when vaccines are available, facilitates logistics and supply by aggregating utilization and supply data, and eliminates paper records. It is an innovative low cost, focused portable electronic medical record (EMR) that digitizes and replaces the frequently lost or mutilated paper immunization record. It holds multiple copies of each patient’s vaccination record to ensure the data is not lost – in the cloud-based database and stored on an RFID sticker placed on the family’s mobile phone, an item that is always carried with the patient.