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The 2013-2014 Big Ideas@Berkeley competition launched in November 2013 when 187 teams representing 600 students from 75 majors submitted pre-proposals. After a preliminary review, 56 teams of finalists were invited to submit full proposals to compete in the final round. Finalists were paired with mentors and given two months to fine-tune their proposals. Congratulations to the 40 award winning projects listed below!
Categories

• “Scaling Up” Big Ideas
• Information Technology For Society
• Creative Expression for Social Justice
• Global Poverty Alleviation
• Improving Student Life
• Financial Capability
• Open Data
• Promoting Human Rights
• Clean & Sustainable Energy Alternatives

“Scaling Up” Big Ideas

Sponsor: The Blum Center for Developing Economies
Description of the Challenge: Prizes are awarded to student-led initiatives that have previously won the Big Ideas contest, and who have since generated excellent results that position them to make even greater progress.
Ekialo Kiona Youth Radio Initiative: (1st Place)
Team Members: Charles Salmen
EKR is Africa’s first wind- and solar-powered radio station, reaching 200,000 listeners across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania within the first year of broadcasting. In 2014-15, the second full year of station operations, EKR intends to “scale-up” the programming by integrating interactive radio technology, starting a Creative Expression for Youth Initiative and expanding community engagement efforts. By scaling the youth-led platform to engage more listeners into EKR’s programming, OHR intends to have significant impact in communities along the shores of Lake Victoria. Among EKR’s goals are: 1.Provide youth with a pathway to sustainable employment; 2. Expand ICT services for secondary school youth; 3. Create networking opportunities for young people to build mentorships with ICT experts; 4. Slow the degradation of traditional knowledge by using radio broadcast and social media create dialogue about the Suba culture; 5. Inspire excitement of technological literacy and its links to creative expression through broadcasting student-produced audio projects across Lake Victoria.
ReMaterials: (2nd Place)
Team Members: Pablo Rosado, Hasit Ganatra
With more than 1 billion people already living in slums worldwide, concerns for a safe and habitable shelter are growing rapidly. A good roofing system is essential for adequate shelter, but unfortunately it is highly neglected, largely owing to insufficient options in the market.
The team’s solution consists of two parts: (a) a unique material mix from recycled and natural materials; and (b) a self-developed manufacturing process to convert the mix to roofing panels. While these have been successfully developed at the prototype scale, the challenge lies in scaling up the manufacturing process while keeping the roof panels at low cost. To make the product available to families living in inadequate housing, the team needs to design a new method to streamline the manufacturing process and develop a marketing and sales strategy that will attract customers, investors and key partners.
Inserting Innovation into Vision: UC Vision Project in Cambodia: (3rd Place)
Team Members: Moon Parks, Silvina Bae
The project will deliver vision correction to the poor in Cambodia, using self-adjustable glasses that allow the user to self-diagnose their own prescription. Once individuals determine their own prescriptions, they will be able to choose from standardized eyeglasses that fit a range of prescriptions. This approach allows a reduction in the cost of vision correction in several ways: first, it bypasses the high cost of customized prescriptions by using self-adjustable eyeglasses to diagnose and standardized eyeglasses to wear. Second, standardized eyeglasses allow customers to exchange or return the eyeglasses if they are not satisfied, which is impossible with customized eyeglasses. Third, by applying self-refraction technology and standardized eyeglasses for vision correction, an affordable eyeglasses supply chain can be established with the end price to the consumer being as low as $2.50 USD. Finally, since the process itself of self-diagnosis allows people to experience better vision first-hand even before purchasing, the self-refraction approach can increase their willingness to pay for vision correction compared to the conventional approaches, which merely allow for the optometrist to diagnose without the patient actually experiencing better vision.
The Pachamama Project: (3rd Place)
Team Members: Rebecca Peters
The lack of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) programs that take into account menstrual hygiene and management (MHM) creates asymmetrical negative impacts on women and girls. The Pachamama Project is the first MHM initiative of its kind in Mexico and Bolivia and builds on the successes and challenges encountered during its initial fieldwork and on previous health focused research efforts on MHM. MHM will not become a priority for gender, water, and rights concerns unless researchers and practitioners make deliberate efforts to mainstream MHM into human rights and WASH based initiatives. By framing MHM as a human rights issue, the Pachamama Project taps into larger discourses of justice and gender equality instead of sidelining MHM from the global water, sanitation, and hygiene development agenda. By fostering community discussion, education, and participation in MHM activities, the Pachamama Project will enable structural change on the communities’ terms, while broadening understandings of the human rights connection to water, sanitation, and gender equity.
Near Zero: Mechanical Flywheel Battery: (Honorary Mention)
Team Members: Andrew Sabelhaus, Sina Akhbari, Eduardo Wiputra
The Near Zero flywheel battery consists of a magnetically-levitated flywheel, combined with a motor, that can store and output energy like a traditional electrochemical cell. However, this design has almost no frictional losses, uses very little power in the magnetic levitation of the flywheel, and combined with high efficiency electronics, drastically outperforms chemical batteries in many ways. This flywheel battery is envisioned to replace inefficient and environmentally unsound use of “peaker plants” – power plants that only run when there is high demand for electricity.

Information Technology for Society

Sponsor: The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS)
Description of the Challenge: The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) is interested in stimulating new thinking on a broad range of social benefits of information technology in areas such as: energy and the environment, health, education and life-long learning, democratic governance, response to natural and man-made disasters, transportation, delivery of government services, quality of life for people with disabilities, economic opportunity for low-income communities, arts and culture, and the effectiveness of non-profit organizations. The challenge of this contest is to describe a multidisciplinary research project that demonstrates the capacity of IT to help address a major societal challenge.
Glucose ENOSE: (1st Place)
Team Members: Patrick Lyon, Benson Fan, Yayun Chen, Ray Chiu
In 2011, the CDC reported diabetes afflicted 25.8 million people in the United States. This disease can be controlled by strict blood serum glucose level monitoring, but the gold standard fingerstick test is painful and must be done multiple times every day. The team is developing a colorimetric sensor that could provide an inexpensive, non-invasive test for determining the level of glucose in the patient’s blood, providing a painless alternative to the fingerstick testing method. By developing a novel phage matrix material and smartphone sensor analyzer, the team hopes to create a non-invasive point-of-care sensor that can identify the concentration of these compounds on the patient’s breath and accurately report the patient’s blood glucose levels.
Dropsense: (2nd Place)
Team Members: Jeremy Fiance, Steve Yadlowsky, Vikram Iyer
Dropsense is developing a convenient, affordable hypoglycemia alert system to help diabetics better monitor their glucose levels. The technology comprises a sensor patch, mobile application, and machine learning analytics platform. The non-invasive Dropsense sensor sends data wirelessly to a smartphone, where a mobile app continuously processes the data with the machine learning algorithm to accurately identify hypoglycemic events. The app alerts users with an alarm or emergency phone call upon detecting low glucose levels so it can be treated before it becomes dangerous.
Remote Cleft Therapy for Young Children through a Mobile Game: (2nd Place)
Team Members: Zak Rubin
Speech therapy is not fun for children. It consists of frequent doctor visits and boring repetitive homework. Outside of the office, the therapist has no idea if the child performs the exercises correctly or at all. Modern speech recognition is capable of accurately detecting speech impediments, and the speed of current mobile devices makes it possible to use this in a game that reacts and responds to speech in real time. A tool like this on a mobile device will motivate children to practice their therapy exercises while also providing critical feedback and information to the therapist about how the child progresses outside of the office. This tool enables speech therapists to continue aiding children remotely, providing better care and enabling organizations to make an even bigger impact in a child’s life.
Sahay: (3rd Place)
Team Members: Priya Iyer, Seema Puthyapurayil, Eric Zan, Timothy Meyers, Ajeeta Dhole
Sahay is an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) platform connecting workers in the household informal sector (e.g. domestic help, cooks, drivers, security guards, etc.) in India with employment opportunities. Using the web page, Short Message Service (SMS) system, or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) interface, rural and migrant workers can search for jobs posted on Sahay’s platform by urban households. The solution will allow workers to search for jobs beyond their geographically restricted network. The platform will support technically literate job posters through a web interface, and will support workers in the informal sector through a mobile interface and IVR system.
Aeolus: Detecting Narcotics-Induced Respiratory Depression: (Honorable Mention)
Team Members: Vinayak Viswanadham, Brian Dick, Yumi Suh, Adrian Tabula
In order to sleep comfortably while recovering from surgery, hospital patients are often given narcotics for pain relief. However, this can cause respiratory depression, where the patients’ ability to breathe is hindered. This can lead to apnea (blockage of airways), respiratory and cardiac arrest, and death. Current approaches to early detection of NIRD chiefly involve detecting the blood saturation of oxygen and carbon dioxide. These strategies, however, provide imprecise information on patient respiration and often run into logistical difficulties. This project uses a detection system that employs visual, infrared, and ultrasonic surveillance of patient breathing, bodily changes, and positioning within the room. Software will also be built to integrate multiple sensory channels to construct a holistic portrait of patient respiratory status and NIRD risk levels over an extended period of time. This solution will hopefully change how medical staff intervene in cases of NIRD and also shift the paradigm of monitoring unpredictable and lethal postoperative situations.
Sign UP: (Honorable Mention)
Team Members: Thibault Duchemin, Achal Pandey, Pieter Doevendans, Justin Harnoss
Today, a deaf person cannot reliably connect with 99% of the people around him or her. The few interactions between deaf and hearing people are usually limited by the difficulty for the deaf person to understand the hearing person and to talk in an intelligible way. Sign UP wants to break this barrier of communication that stands between deaf people and the rest of the world. Sign language is the natural way of communication for most deaf people and a fundamental part of their culture. The solution is two smart gloves that will translate Sign Language in real time and enable deaf people to interact freely and seamlessly with the rest of the world. The S-Gloves will also provide speech-to-text support to facilitate a proper conversation.

Creative Expression for Social Justice

Sponsors: Committee on Student Fees; The Arts Research Center; The Townsend Center for the Humanities
Description of the Challenge: The Arts and Humanities provide many meaningful ways to draw attention and contribute to discourse, advocacy, and positive action related to poverty and inequality. The Creative Expression for Social Justice category invited proposals related to creating art, music, photography, written and spoken word, film, dance, new media, other forms of expression, or activities to facilitate such expression to address issues of poverty alleviation and social justice.
Heart Connection: An Interactive Multimedia Website for Adults with Complex Congenital Heart Disease to Empower, Connect, Advocate & Educate: (1st Place)
Team Member: Kaitlin Kimmel
In the 1980s, newborns with complex congenital heart disease (CCHD) began to survive past one year for the first time due to advances in cardiothoracic surgery and cardiovascular medicine. “Heart Connection” will be a website exploring what survivors of this condition experience daily, leaving evidence of how CCHD adults have been forced to reinvent and reimagine new ways of navigating the world with their tired bodies and busy minds, while creating meaning in their lives for the generations succeeding them. The project envisions three main pages. One page is for the artwork of adults with CCHD documenting their lives through audio, video, creative writing and photography. A second page is committed to inspiring and bringing hope to parents who have children with CCHD. A third page is dedicated for resources needed by CCHD adults and children to live meaningful and productive lives.
Addressing the Empathy Blind Spot of the Cal Community: (2nd Place)
Team Members: Esther Chung, Justin Kong, Emily Truax, Taryn Erhadt, James Huynh
Using a three-pronged approach, the project will address UC Berkeley’s empathy blind spot on homelessness by connecting the stories and voices of those who identify with homelessness and poverty and the experiences of the student community with these populations. The first prong, the visual campaign, will include posters displayed on campus about homeless and low-income individual’s stories and perceptions. The second prong, the visual project, will include a film depicting homeless and low-income individuals’ journeys as well as students’ experiences working and interacting with these underserved communities. Finally, the third prong, the education series, will include a sequence of seminars on these issues and a working partnership with varying student organizations on framing and speaking about these issues.
Documentary Movie about Adopted Kids: (3rd Place)
Team Member: Irina Lozhkina
The project strives to establish a communication between the United States and Russia that will discuss issues through authentic and open dialogue using social media. As a first step, the team will make a movie showing how Russian adopted kids have been raised in America. It will be a way to demonstrate that a recent politically-motivated ban of adoptions in Russia by American citizens hurts thousands of innocent kids.

Global Poverty Alleviation

Sponsor: United States Agency for International Development (USAID) The Blum Center for Developing Economics
Description of the Challenge: USAID and the Blum Center for Developing Economies support innovative approaches to poverty alleviation. Through its commitment to multi-disciplinary research and teaching, and emphasis on novel technologies and approaches, the Blum Center fosters student projects that tie UC Berkeley expertise to real-world problems. For this category, describe an action-oriented, inter-disciplinary project that would help alleviate poverty.
ElectroSan: Recovering Nitrogen from Urine in Nairobi, Kenya: (1st Place)
Team Members: William Tarpeh
4.6 billion people across the developing world lack adequate treatment of their feces and urine. ElectroSan will apply electrochemical cells that recover nitrogen from human urine. This product will be used to disinfect human feces and produce income as a fertilizer, making sanitation affordable in low-income communities like Mukuru, an urban Nairobi slum. This intervention can catalytically improve public health and environmental quality by treating and creating value-added products from waste.
Promoting Yogurt to Improve Child Nutrition in Far-Western Nepal: (2nd Place)
Team Members: Wenjuan Chen, Stacy McCoy, Sruthi Narayanan, Damarius Fleming
The causes of child stunting, a nutritional status indicator defined as poor height for weight, include inadequate caloric intake, low protein consumption (particularly of animal source protein), frequent diarrheal illness, and poor nutrient absorption in the gut due to chronic latent infection. Probiotic supplements, paired with an adequate diet, are a promising strategy for addressing child stunting. This project aims to promote the feeding of safely prepared yogurt to children between 6 months and 5 years of age in households throughout Bajura. Local women’s expertise in dahi production and child feeding will determine the best methods of efficiently and safely producing high quality yogurt, and prepare it with locally available fruits so that children enjoy the taste. These “best practices” will then be disseminated throughout the district at the monthly mother’s group meetings.
Spot-It!: (2nd Place)
Team Members: Shreya Condamoor, Annsea Park, Geunwon Jung
Anti-malarial pills are among the most highly counterfeited drugs in Africa. Malaria kills between 1 and 3 million people every year, with 90% of those deaths in Africa. This reduces productivity in Africa by $12 billion and devastates local economies. The project aims to identify counterfeit anti-malarial drugs by developing a new technique to detect the concentration of artemisinin (the active ingredient) in these pills. Due to the prevalence of counterfeit drugs that have minimal amounts of this active ingredient, identifying its concentration in a pill has become important. The innovative aspect of this technique Spot-It!, is that it achieves the challenging task of measuring the concentration of active ingredient by combining two elementary methods, Thin Layer Chromatography (TLC) and a simple chemical reaction.
Mosquitoes Suck! Malarial Hotspots and the Opportunity for LAMP to Identify Asymptomatic Patients: (3rd Place)
Team Members: Laila Soudi, Carmen Conroy, Justin Abraham, Priyanka Athavale, Oscar Vazquez, Neve Keshav, Shannon Younessi, Anshal Gupta
The eradication of malaria is hampered by the ability of current diagnostic tools to detect very low density infections in asymptomatic patients. In response to this, the aim is to employ loop mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP), an innovative and novel technique to test for asymptomatic malaria. This low-cost technique is faster and more accurate compared to currently employed diagnostic tests. In Kenya, the aim is to (1) conduct a hotspot identification campaign using LAMP techniques to detect the malaria parasite, and (2) build capacity to ensure sustainability and local participation in the hotspot identification campaign. Results of this hotspot identification campaign will become an essential tool in future anti-malaria interventions.
Uniting Mother and Child: A Battle Against Postpartum Hemorrhage: (3rd Place)
Team Members: Sandeep Prabhu
In developing countries, maternal mortality rates are shockingly high in comparison to the rates in developed countries. The most common cause of maternal mortality is postpartum hemorrhage (PPH). This devastating condition is easily treated in the developed world, where mortality rates due to PPH are close to nil. In the developing world, however, these treatments may take too much time and/or money to obtain or may require skilled workers to perform. Thus, women with PPH are instead treated with an anti-shock garment. This garment applies pressure to the suffering women in order to combat the effects of PPH, yet it has no pressure detecting or reporting capabilities. The project aims to reduce the overwhelming rates of maternal mortality associated with PPH in developing countries by creating a pressure detecting and reporting device, specific to the anti-shock garment.
AgroMarketDay: (Honorary Mention)
Team Members: Lisa Katusiime, Isaac Omiat
The increasing ubiquity of mobiles in Uganda presents both opportunities and challenges, especially for critical sectors such as agriculture. In their various designs and capabilities, mobile phones can be found in the pockets of the wealthy and poor alike. Even in rural areas of Uganda, mobiles are growing in number and sophistication. The increase in mobile phone use should make developing a market for agricultural products easier, but in many districts farmers lack access to potential customers. AgroMarketDay, a mobile application, will share farmers’ information with potential customers so that they are be able to check out market days in the different districts and which products will be sold in the different markets.
PowerTower: Empowering Global Communities: (Honorary Mention)
Team Members: Jacqueline Nguyen
PowerTower is an all-in-one compact energy harvesting unit that will provide communities around the world with pasteurized water, electricity for small devices, and instant flowing hot water. Much of the third world is currently living without many of the necessities taken for granted such as running hot water, electricity, or safe water. PowerTower will allow people living in rural communities to do things as crucial as charge cell phones and have clean water. The technology will be delivered through a cross subsidization model based on a domestically profitable product using the same technology called the PowerShower. This technology is inexpensive, not susceptible to weather conditions, and makes use of an energy source already widely utilized in the third world.

Improving Student Life

Sponsors: Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC)
Description of the Challenge: UC Berkeley is a rich and diverse milieu of student life and initiative. Proposals for this competition focused on new policy programs, initiatives or services that are aligned with the strategic priorities in the Division of Student Affairs: access, service, and engagement. Proposals included implementation plans that, among other things, outlined the specific roles of individual and/or groups of students, staff, faculty, and external collaborators in executing the idea.
LuxWalk: (1st Place)
Team Members: Jennifer Fei, Corbin Halliwill
The three main functions of the LuxWalk application are as follows. First, students can input their origin and destination on an app built into the application to find the safest route to walk, produced through an analysis of past crime data and the degree of street lighting. Second, students can also track the Night Safety shuttle and campus-funded Community Service Officers through the BearWalk program to gain estimates on when and where they can plan to dispatch a shuttle or officer. Third, students can connect to the application through their Facebook accounts, to see which friends are checked in at their location and are walking to the same geographical area. Ultimately, LuxWalk serves to connect students with information about Berkeley neighborhoods, campus-facilitated night safety programs, and fellow students in their community who can facilitate safety in numbers while traveling at night.
CloudCreations: (2nd Place)
Team Members: Adam Eastman, Andrew Kooker, Kaavya Reddy
CloudCreations will be the platform through which innovative and effective educational tools can work together simultaneously and seamlessly. This platform is for students to collaborate, create, and compete. The collaboration will occur inside and outside the classroom and will be customized for students depending on whether or not they are in class and what they are specifically collaborating on with their friends and classmates. The creation will occur mostly outside the classroom where students will be able to vote on the most useful resources submitted by students. The platform will allow students to create videos, infographics, example problems, helpful scenarios, problem solution walkthroughs, etc.
Berkcycle: (3rd Place)
Team Members: Hunjoo Kim, Hyun-Ho Jung, Woo Yong Choi
The Berkcycle system will consist of bicycles and bicycle racks that will be designed and manufactured by the Berkcycle team to fit the need of the students of University of California, Berkeley campus. The bicycle will have one-size-fits-all design that will allow all students to comfortably ride the bicycle anywhere on campus. It will also be fitted with an electric generator and lithium polymer battery so that bicycle can produce electricity, which will be used by the bicycle and the rack as their only energy source, making the system completely self-sustainable in terms of energy. It will be a “smart” rack that will be operated by microprocessors to make renting out and returning bicycle as simple as scanning Cal ID. Combining all these components together, the Berkcycle will be the ideal bike rental system for Cal students, addressing most of the problems that currently exist in using bicycle as transportation today.
Project-Based Learning: (Honorary Mention)
Team Members: Robert Chen, Michael Fuerte, Animesh Mehrota-Hajela, William Juang, Helen Park, Zach Zeleznick, Matt Zhang
Berkeley Engineers and Mentors (BEAM) is planning a program to develop, test, and implement project-based learning (PBL) curriculum in local schools. PBL is a nation-wide educational movement that aims to expose students to real-world challenges while emphasizing teamwork, communication of ideas, self-discovery, student-initiated learning, and creative approaches to problems. BEAM wants to join this movement by first pioneering a classroom curriculum model for PBL teaching that BEAM can implement in its own sites and then ultimately compile into an easily-utilized “BEAM Box” for broader use.
The Phoenix Scholars: (Honorary Mention)
Team Members: Aiden Nguyen, Kelly Yu, Daniel Dinh, Sean Sun, Leanza Tupfer, Bryan Lao
Due to state budget cuts, many California public high schools have cut their college counseling programs. As a result, many high school students have limited access to information regarding college admissions. This is most prevalent in underserved and impoverished areas of the state. There are many bright and talented students who are capable of succeeding at top universities but lack information and guidance. The Phoenix Scholars aims to fill that gap. The program will provide one-on-one mentorship between UC Berkeley students and high school seniors throughout the State of California to provide them with personalized help. Aside from guidance over college admissions and scholarship applications, The Phoenix Scholars will strive to provide a constant source of support for mentees through the whirlwind that is the college application process.

Financial Capability

Sponsors: The Charles Schwab Foundation; The Haas School of Business; The Blum Center for Developing Economies
Description of Challenge: Projects should seek to help ensure young adults, particularly those from low-income communities, have access to the tools, education, and resources necessary to manage money with confidence. Proposals submitted to this category should a) demonstrate an understanding of financial challenges faced by students and/or low-income populations, and b) develop a system, plan, or technology that allows individuals to effectively take control of their financial futures.
The Employment and Life Skills Academic Competition: (1st Place)
Team Members: Michael Signorotti
The Employment and Life Skills Academic Competition is a program that teaches teenagers resume writing, job interview and oral presentation skills, and financial literacy. The objective is to prepare high school students for life after graduation by not only making them competitive for the workforce but also teaching them information about managing their finances. The student participants prepare for the Academic Competition through an enriching afterschool program. A Resource Guide, which serves as an outline of the various skills and financial concepts to be mastered, is then distributed to all student participants. The Academic Competition includes four categories in which students will be evaluated as individuals or part of their high school team. The categories include an oral presentation, a mock job interview, a written essay focusing on financial literacy, and an objective section where the high school teams compete to answer financial-based questions in a game-show format.
InversionParaTodos.com.ar: (2nd Place)
Team Members: Luciano Colos, Alejandro Castillejo
InversionParaTodos.com.ar is a web based educational platform that will provide a set of tools that help individuals to manage debt, savings, public benefits, investments and other money related issues more effectively. The platform will target four million individuals from Argentina, between the ages of 20 and 40, who come from a low and middle class background, and who have access to the internet. These educational resources will take a holistic approach, including interactive graphs, tables, video lessons, and even live lessons with an instructor via the Skype API. The easy to use interactive platform will allow users to discover how inflation affects their personal assets and exposes them to liabilities. The main tool will allow users to enter their financial information, overlay different projections, and recommend an adequate course of action. The overall goal is to help people improve their personal finance knowledge and protect their savings against inflation. As a result, they will improve their economic status in the long term.

Open Data

Sponsors: USAID; AidData The Data and Democracy Initiative
Description of the Challenge: This category challenges students to develop a plan that leverages publicly available datasets to innovate solutions and address important social challenges. Projects may focus on several areas, including but not limited to mapping visualizations, transparency and accountability feedback loops, crowd-sourcing tools, monitoring and evaluation applications and spatial analysis. Strong consideration will be given to projects that can demonstrate broad impact, sustainability, and scalability to different countries or underserved areas.
Mapping Waterways: (1st Place)
Team Members: Rachel Gottfried, Winston Huang, Gabriel Schwartzman
Mapping Waterways will create a participatory mapping system that involves all aspects of the mapping process: from data collection, to map input, to visualization and organization. The mapping project will incorporate government and community-collected data to bridge current water mapping endeavors. This meets the need to integrate data analysis with community participation and improves access to water-quality information, which communities can then use for political projects. The project will require a collaborative process to implement participatory mapping, and to generate the necessary data to launch the online organizational interface. The team will visit three communities in the summer of 2014 to train and pilot the community data collection process. The data will then be uploaded to a web interface to add local context and community control to the mapping process. This will provide community groups with information on water quality and its impact on local areas that otherwise might require funding for specialists. This web interface stands to save groups in underserved areas funding and time in their efforts secure water rights.
Open Data for Developing Communities: (2nd Place)
Team Members: Carleigh Snead, Anson Rosenthal, Sara Rock
The project’s goal is to create a collaborative platform to promote open data literacy. This platform will provide a curriculum that is focused on making open data more accessible and usable to students, policymakers, civil society organizations, journalists, and researchers. The team will distribute these materials to a network of partners who already have boots on the ground, who can teach the material while also implementing their own mapping projects, and who have a focus on development and developing countries. In addition, the curriculum will be hosted on an interactive online platform offering content, data, tools, and learning materials for public access. A goal of the project is to increase the availability of this data on mobile devices, since their far exceeds that of personal computers in developing countries.
Transparent Living: Using Data to Bring Transparency to the Competitive Housing Market: (2nd Place)
Team Members: Anil Jindia, Vanessa Cordero
The goal is to build an intuitive website that will use public and crowd sourced data to depict the real willingness to pay for housing by city/street/zip and in real time. The system will allow property owners to electronically collect short profiles of prospective renters, including their monthly income, credit score, references and willingness to pay. Once a property owner has accepted a submission, the remaining submissions would receive a summarized feedback loop of how their submission varied and an eventual recommendation of where to focus their search based on overall area trends.
Sight 4 Everyone (e-Liiso): (3rd Place)
Team Members: Rurangwa Moses, Kirigwajjo Anatoli, Kiruyi Edward
Doctors and optometrists using e-liiso will be able to check patients’ abilities by just taking a flash picture from a phone camera to see color, test for long and short-sightedness, and also detect the presence of cataracts and other eye conditions. The app uses smartphones’ cameras, flashlights and display to check how the eyes react to stimuli, while doctors can also track the progress of individual patients and easily keep a record of their geo-location.

Promoting Human Rights

Sponsors: USAID; The Blum Center for Developing Economies; The Human Rights Center;
Description of the Challenge: The challenge for this competition is to develop a proposal that will, in some way, combat the causes or consequences of corruption and thus directly or indirectly foster the rule of law. Alternately, a proposal might focus more generally on preserving or promoting the protection of individuals’ essential human rights. Examples of some focus areas could include, but are not limited to: issues such as genocide or mass atrocities including physical and mental cruelty, corruption, gender inequality, slavery and trafficking, political oppression, civil rights abuses, or forcible relocations.
Youth Empowerment Centers for Marginalized Mexican Communities: (1st Place)
Team Members: Cristian De Leon, Jose Flores, Sergio Garcia
The Adelante youth empowerment center will work with at-risk teens from Mexico who are academically demotivated or who have few resources available to them. It will motivate and empower them, supporting young professionals to be agents of change in their communities. The summer program centers will provide teens and communities with a safe haven dedicated to the professional advancement of youth and the development of Mexican communities. The franchise method of providing these centers throughout Mexico will identify local community youth and Mexican college students to lead the center in subsequent years, while the work on the expansion of Adelante youth centers across Mexico continues.
Maji Yaja Kwanza: (2nd Place)
Team Members: Ashley Miller, Rebecca “Becky” Mashaido
Vision 2030 is Kenya’s national planning strategy for “becoming a middle-income country by 2030.” Despite economic advancements, roughly 17 million of Kenya’s 41 million people lack sufficient access to safe drinking water, and 28 million are without adequate sanitation. Maji Huja Kwanza (Water Comes First in Kiswahili) aims to bring lasting inclusiveness, representation, and opportunity to the people of the coastal province of Kenya. The project aims to bring piped water and sewage access to public primary schools in the coast, beginning in Kaloleni with Kizurini Primary and Twinkle Star Primary, serving roughly 1000 children. The goal is to improve WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) practices in the coast and enable children, particularly girls, to participate in school successfully and to avoid unnecessary illness such as cholera and typhoid. Long-term plans include a technical training program for plumbing and maintenance skills, and expansion to serve orphans’ homes, adult schools, and private homes. This will contribute to sustainable growth and the livelihood of this region.
Reach! Leadership Camp for Tibetan Girls: (2nd Place)
Team Members: Krista Chan
Reach! is a summer leadership camp for Tibetan teenage girls to empower them to become the first female graduates of high school and college in their communities. The plan is to train top Chinese university students to serve as camp counselors for teenage girls from the Tibetan plateau. In the process, they will gain exposure to Tibetan cultural education in order to bridge the deeply polarized Han Chinese and Tibetan communities. This also establishes a valuable network of leaders for Tibetan girls to have access to in the process of pursuing their education.
The Recreation House: (3rd Place)
Team Members: Elena van den Berg, David Lee
The Recreation House will be a center for the development of teenagers and orphans in Vidin, Bulgaria. Located in an accessible location near the center of the city, a previously identified facility will be developed as multi-recreational and educational facility open to teenagers throughout the city, providing them with an environment where they have a chance to pursue their dreams and be encouraged in the process. The second aspect of the Recreation House fills a different need in the community. While the teenagers are at school during the day, the plan is to bring in children from the local orphanage and provide them a place 5 days a week where they can work on their developmental skills. Those skills include playing, reading, and writing, so that by the time they are moved on to the next facility at the age of eight, they will have the basic skills everyone should have a right to.
East Bay Youth Against Trafficking: (Honorable Mention)
Team Members: Katharine Hinman, Sarah Singh, Chloe Gregori, Joshua Ho, Karem Hererra
The Berkeley Anti-Trafficking Coalition (BATC) will expand upon Not For Sale’s (NFS) education outreach program. NFS visits local high schools to give educational presentations about human trafficking, in which they challenge students to use their own skills and passions to take action in the anti-trafficking movement. The presentation includes videos, information on sex and labor trafficking, stories of survivors in the Bay Area, and examples of local action being done to combat human trafficking. BATC seeks to revamp the curriculum, increase the number of classrooms visited, build a larger team of Berkeley students through a formalized training program, and provide the necessary resources and assistance for students to start their own BATC high school chapters. A strong student network for the abolitionist cause, with the BATC as a resource for high school students, will inspire future leaders in the anti-trafficking movement.

Clean & Sustainable Energy Alternatives

Sponsors: The Blum Center for Developing Economies; Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research
Description of the Challenge: The aim of this category is to encourage the adoption of clean energy alternatives that are sustainable and have the potential for broad impact. Proposals may focus on the design, development, or delivery of sustainable energy solutions and can be domestic or international in scope. However, all proposals should clearly demonstrate the relationship between the proposed intervention and its impact on the environment.
Solidge: An off-grid, solar-powered refrigerator: (1st Place)
Team Members: Rami Ariss, Othmane Benkirane
In developing countries, electricity is often a luxury. People living in off-grid communities are not able to have a refrigerator, even though it is often the appliance they want the most. By integrating energy generation, storage and use into the same appliance, Solidge, an off-grid, solar-powered refrigeration system, solves grid unreliability by simply not using the grid. Solidge users can safely store food, unsold crops and vaccines for longer periods of time. Solidge will directly increase off-grid communities’ health and overall lifestyle by providing them with an affordable refrigerator. Solidge will first deploy in Morocco, taking advantage of the region’s sun and accessibility, as well as gather user feedback and refine Solidge’s design. However, Solidge has a broader mission. Designed from the ground up to become a globally deployable unit, Solidge will provide off-grid refrigeration for developing and developed countries alike.
Graphene Supercapacitor: Graphene based energy storage solution: (2nd Place)
Team Members: Henry Chen, Louis Kang, Jian Zhao
Traditional lithium-ion batteries are produced at an increasing rate and each year at the end of their lives, they introduce over a hundred million pounds of chemical waste into the environment. The project’s main objectives are to develop a supercapacitor that serves as an energy storage alternative to traditional mobile device batteries and to create a paradigm shift in how people understand energy storage. The project aims to engineer an energy storage alternative that can be manufactured with little to no impact on the environment, produce a nominal amount of chemical waste, be fully charged in seconds and supply power for long periods of time.
The Food Bikery: (3rd Place)
Team Members: John Romankiewicz, Jason Trager, Laura Moreno, Pierce Gordon
The Food Bikery seeks to prove that food bikes are an economically viable, safe, and legal alternative to food trucks. In transitioning mobile food off of trucks and onto bicycles, the Food Bikery will: 1. Lower oil consumption; 2. Stimulate economic opportunities for low-income food entrepreneurs; 3. Increase physical well-being and health; 4. Foster awareness about the power of bicycles. The Food Bikery will harness the positive aspects that food trucks foster (economic opportunity, bringing fresh food into “food deserts” and community space), while minimizing their harmful environmental impacts. A prototype will be built of a scalable, turn-key food bike that can be used as a model to boost small business ownership among aspiring, environmentally conscious entrepreneurs, while shifting the current mobile food-business portfolio towards a low-carbon model.

In November 2013, nearly 200 student teams representing 600 students applied to the Big Ideas@Berkeley student innovation contest with their creative ideas to improve society.  Throughout the course of this academic year these teams have taken advantage of the numerous resources offered by the Big Ideas contest (information session, writing workshops, judging feedback, advising hours and an 8-week mentorship) in order to refine their ideas and transform them into viable projects with great potential for real-world impact.

Now, on May 5^th, six of the top teams from this year’s Big Ideas@Berkeley contest will pitch their projects to a panel of distinguished judges in the hope of receiving up to $5000 in additional seed funding for their initiatives. Big Ideas Grand Prize Pitch Day promises to be an inspiring and exciting event, involving a wide range of issues such as youth empowerment, campus safety, global health, sanitation and water rights.
The annual Pitch Day event will be held from 2-5pm in Blum Hall and is open to the public. Contestants will deliver a five-minute pitch followed by a question and answer session with the judges and audience members. Winners will be announced upon the conclusion of the pitches, followed by a reception with light refreshments.

Please join us for this inspiring event and root for your favorite Big Idea!Pitch Day Contestants:

ElectroSan — Recovering Nitrogen from Urine in Nairobi, Kenya: The team behind ElectroSan aims to improve global public health and environmental quality through the use of their product, which will make fertilizer out of human feces and apply electrochemical cells that recover nitrogen from human urine. The project aims to increase the affordability of sanitation in developing communities. ElectroSan is competing in the Global Poverty Alleviation category.

Heart Connection — An Interactive Multimedia Website for Adults with Complex Congenital Heart Disease to Empower, Connect, Advocate and Educate: This interdisciplinary team seeks to create a multimedia website for survivors of Complex Congenital Heart Disease (CCHD). The platform will include resources needed for CCHD adults and children, and an opportunity for adults with CCHD to share stories and experiences through audio, video, photography and creative writing. Heart Connection, a project competing in the Creative Expression for Social Justice category, aims to create a sense of belonging to the broader CCHD community.

LuxWalk: The undergraduate and interdisciplinary student team behind LuxWalk seeks to improve night safety on campus and in the Berkeley community by developing a crowd sourced mobile app. The app will allow students to find the safest route to walk, track the Night Safety Shuttle, and connect with others who are walking to the same area. LuxWalk will be representing the Improving Student Life category of Big Ideas at the pitch contest.

Mapping Waterways: This project seeks to create a participatory community mapping system of American waterways. The project will incorporate a collaborative process, bridging current water mapping endeavors by presenting government records and community-collected data on an easily accessible GIS platform and web interface. The team aims to improve the accessibility of information on water-quality that underserved communities can use to secure water rights. This is an Open Data category project.

Promoting Yogurt to Improve Child Nutrition in Far-Western Nepal: Competing in the Global Poverty Alleviation category, this team aims to reduce stunting and improve growth and wellbeing among children in Far-Western Nepal, a region that is rampant with child stunting. The project seeks to address this problem by promoting the feeding of locally made, safely prepared, protein and probiotic rich yogurt to children under 5 years of age. The project will draw on local expertise in yogurt production and child feeding to optimize efficiency and safety of yogurt production. The yogurt will be disseminated throughout Far-Western Nepal with the collaboration of local organizations, include Female Community Health Volunteers.

Youth Empowerment Centers for Marginalized Mexican Communities: This project, under the Promoting Human Rights category, seeks to motivate and empower at-risk teens from Aguascalientes, Mexico, and encourage them to be agents of change in their communities. The Adelante youth empowerment center hopes to heal a generation of Mexicans living in crime-ridden marginalized communities affected by the drug war. Adelante will offer summer programs to promote the professional advancement of youth and, in turn, the development of Mexican communities.

For additional information:
(510) 666-9120
bigideas@berkeley.edu

By: Abby Madan

As the eighth Big Ideas@Berkeley student innovation contest comes to a close, the 56 teams that qualified for the final round are abuzz with activity and anticipation of the upcoming Pitch Day and Awards Ceremony.

BigIdeas@Berkeley is community and annual competition that gives students the opportunity to express their passion for social change through working solutions. Finalist teams span 9 contest categories, from IT for Society to Creative Expression for Social Justice. These different categories allow contestants to address a large range of social challenges.

Over the last nine weeks, many teams have worked with a mentor to move forward with their visions, hone their plans, and develop their full proposals.

The different phases of the contest enable students to visualize the growth and transformation of their ideas. “The trajectory of the contest is very clear,” said Heather Lui, an undergraduate political economy major and member of LuxWalk, a team working to create a mobile application that will improve student safety on campus and in Berkeley neighborhoods. “It makes you think very deeply about the planning process so you can build an idea from the ground up and produce something tangible.”

But Big Ideas@Berkeley is more than just a competition and opportunity for funding – it is an entire community that helps empower students and nurture their skills.

“Learning how to pitch and write grants are really valuable tools for the future, and learning how to do them as an undergrad I think is really worthwhile,” said Taryn Erhardt and Esther Chung, both public health undergrads and part of the Big Ideas team entitled Addressing the Empathy Blind Spot of the Cal Community.

“There are so many opportunities for us to go in and get advice,” they added. “It really allows us to hone in on our ideas and gives us the confidence to move forward.”

Winners will be revealed by early May. Grand Prize Pitch Day is on May 5th – an opportunity for 6 selected teams to pitch their idea to a panel of distinguished judges in competition for an additional $5,000 in prize money. The Awards Ceremony is May 8th.

By: Andrea Guzman, 3rd Year Media Studies & Political Science Major

April 1, 2014 – Since its founding in 2006, the Big Ideas Contest has supported thousands of student-initiated ideas aimed at finding creative solutions that address important social challenges.

For many of these teams, Big Ideas provides not only the initial funding and support necessary to launch their projects, but also the validation and confidence needed to take their innovations to the field. The process of competing in and winning the Big Ideas Contest has led the development of many successful initiatives. Among these are Back to the Roots, the Suitcase Clinic, and WE CARE Solar—each of which has grown from a big idea into an inspiring and impactful social venture.

In 2009, during their final year at UC Berkeley, Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez listened to a lecture at the Haas School of Business by Professor Alan Ross, who noted that it was possible to grow mushrooms from re-used coffee grounds. Intrigued by this possibility, Arora and Velez began growing buckets of mushrooms in the kitchen of their fraternity house and developed an idea to turn one of the Bay Area’s largest waste streams—thousands of tons of coffee ground waste—into highly-demanded and nutritious food products. Arora and Velez submitted this idea to the Big Ideas contest, and after winning, put aside their consulting and investment banking job offers to launch a business they called Back to the Roots.

“Winning is what pushed us over the edge,” said Nikhil Arora. “We thought, let’s give this thing a shot, we have nothing to lose.”

Over the last few years, the company has expanded immensely. Back to the Roots and its grow-your-own mushroom kits have been featured on several media outlets including NBC’s TODAY Show, The Chew on ABC, and PBS. They recently added another product to their portfolio: a self-cleaning fish tank known as the AquaFarm that grows food like basil, wheat grass and parsley. Their products are now distributed nationally, and Arora says they are planning to expand even more in the upcoming year.

Similarly, Big Ideas assisted the Suitcase Clinic, a student organization that provides free healthcare services to homeless and low-income Bay Area residents, to expand its services to meet the needs of an increasing number of Bay Area homeless residents. In 2011 and 2013, the Suitcase Clinic competed in the Global Poverty Alleviation and Creative Expression for Social Justice categories. Winning Big Ideas allowed the Clinic not only to expand direct health services, but also to develop programs that take a more holistic view of healthcare. Among the new services offered to their clients are free dental services and support for smoking cessation.

“We were in a situation where we had to tell people that we could no longer afford the services, but we also wanted a holistic approach to address the problem,” said Brenna Alexander, who graduated in 2013 in Psychology and with a minor in Global Poverty and Practice. Alexander said that collaborating with the Blum Center for Developing Economies and competing in Big Ideas was instrumental in her understanding of the different factors that create poverty and the best approaches in which to address it.

Other winning Big Ideas projects are global in scale. In 2008, Dr. Laura Stachel (then a DrPH candidate at the School of Public Health) developed an idea to provide electricity to a Nigerian hospital after observing doctors and nurses struggling to conduct nighttime deliveries and emergency maternity care. She named her project “Women’s Emergency Communication and Reliable Electricity” (WE CARE Solar). The project evolved to bring compact solar electric kits called “solar suitcases” to rural medical clinics in need of lighting and essential power. Stachel submitted her ideas to the Big Ideas contest in both the 2008 and 2010 contests and won awards for WE CARE Solar in both years.

Participating in Big Ideas and partnering with the Blum Center gave WE CARE Solar the early validation and traction it needed to grow. Its efforts have now been recognized by several other organizations including the MacArthur Foundation and Saving Lives at Birth Grand Challenge. In addition, Stachel was recently named a CNN Top 10 Hero of 2013. Since its inception, WE CARE Solar has served an estimated 300,000 childbearing mothers and their infants.

“Big Ideas allowed us to bring a dream to fruition,” Stachel said. “We had no idea that what would start as a single project in one hospital, would lead to an award winning organization that has now brought light and essential power to over 600 health facilities in 27 countries!”

Students interested in participating should explore the Big Ideas website, where they can find a variety of resources and guidelines about the contest.

“You have nothing to lose, only so much to gain, and might even gain a career,” Arora said. “It’s a chance to spend some time and get creative and find what you want to do.”

By: Christina Yu

June 20, 2013 – Earlier this week, three teams of student innovators from UC Berkeley designed and coded apps and services for social good at the Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit. FlowBit, Free Ventures, and M3D, winners of the 2013 Big Ideas@Berkeley contest, stayed up all night working on their projects and prototypes as Bloomberg West live broadcasted the 36-hour Hackfest. The student teams were then invited to on stage to share their work with some of the most influential investors and entrepreneurs in the fields of technology, science, and data.

“The Bloomberg Hackfest was surreal,” said Sabrina Atienza of M3D.  “We never thought we’d be hacking in the luxurious Ritz of Half Moon Bay with extraordinary entrepreneurs being interviewed 10 feet away from us.”

The staff behind the Big Ideas@Berkeley student innovation contest saw the Hackfest as a unique opportunity for contest winners to take their projects to the next level.

“These teams are sculpting actionable solutions to some of the world’s most pressing issues. The Hackfest was a chance for team members to channel their energy into a tangible outcome and meet business leaders who can give them real-world professional guidance,” said Phillip Denny, Manager of the Big Ideas program at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. Big Ideas, which provides mentorship, resources, and funding to help student teams develop high-impact innovations, connected the three teams to the Hackfest.

Sabrina Atienza and George Ramonov, the students behind M3D (Mass Minable Medical Data), describe their project as “Google for Healthcare”—an intuitive and fast search engine for clinical and biomedical research. In the midst of building a functional visual programming language and interface, the team stepped away to pitch their Big Idea in Bloomberg’s Pitch Roulette. A panel of investors and mentors broke down their business model, revenue potential, and options for building their idea into a successful business.

“We’re elevating M3D to the next level by iterating on the judges’ feedback and connecting with potential stakeholders who approached us after the presentation,” Atienza shared. “Right now, we’re in discussion with leading academic hospitals in the Bay Area to determine the best fit for our clinical pilot.”

Noticing the increasing number of young entrepreneurs in the Berkeley area, Sam Kirschner and Jeremy Fiance set out to provide consulting, mentorship, and funding to student innovators. Their project, Free Ventures, is UC Berkeley’s first student-initiated non-profit startup accelerator. At the Hackfest, the team worked on a prototype platform for driverless car apps, and they’re looking to launch a small-scale pilot effort on campus.

“I don’t think enough people are really pushing the boundaries of innovation these days and asking the hard questions,” Kirschner said. “We’re trying to break down the barriers that stop students from building amazing stuff, like Flowbit, M3D, and various other teams on campus are working towards. We want to find a way to get students with the right skills more time, money, mentorship, and domain knowledge, so they can truly excel and tackle those big problems.” Free Ventures now plans to launch a pilot initiative with interested campus groups.

The final student team, FlowBit, seeks to enable water providers in the developing world to remotely monitor and control their water systems. Team members, led by Nick Lee, built an easy-to-use map platform at the Hackfest that displays data on remote water treatment systems’ performance. This product fits into FlowBit’s wider efforts to build a flexible and low-cost system that allows providers to control and monitor water supplies, while also providing valuable analytics to help them improve service and reduce costs to end-users. The team will now be working to install a prototype system on a water-dispensing kiosk in Mexico in collaboration with Mexican non-profit Fundacion Cantaro Azul and UC Berkeley researchers.

The Hackfest was part of the Bloomberg Next Big Thing Summit, a two-day invitation-only conference held at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay on June 17th and 18th that provided insight into the future of money, mobile, design, and the technologies that are reshaping industries. Speakers included Robert Lloyd, Co-President of Cisco; Michael Sippey, VP of Product at Twitter; and Jason Rattner, CTO of Intel Corporation.

“It’s so easy for kids to just come up with an idea, maybe play around with it for a bit, and then get distracted by school or other things and never come back to it,” added Kirschner. “A hackathon like this… is an awesome opportunity to forget school and other obligations for a bit, and focus on what excites you and drives your passion.”

Browse Bloomberg West coverage of the Hackfest and learn more about the Bloomberg Next Big Thing summit.

The 2013 Big Ideas@Berkeley competition launched in August 2012 when 160 teams, representing 555 students from 75 majors, submitted pre-proposals. After a preliminary review, 54 teams were invited to compete in the final round. These finalists were paired with mentors and worked for two months to fine tune their proposals. Congratulations to the 37 award winning projects listed below!

Categories

• “Scaling Up” Big Ideas
• Information Technology For Society
• Creative Expression for Social Justice
• Global Poverty Alleviation
• Improving Student Life
• Financial Literacy
• Maternal and Child Health
• Promoting Human Rights
• Clean & Sustainable Energy Alternatives

“Scaling Up” Big Ideas

Sponsor: The Blum Center for Developing Economies
Description of the Challenge: Prizes are awarded to student-led initiatives that have previously won the Big Ideas contest, and who have since generated excellent results that position them to make even greater progress.

Tekla Labs: Creating a global community of DIY makers and developing world scientists (1st Place)
Team Members: Todd Duncombe, Michael Kang, Bertram Koelsch, Kevin Lance, Kate Lovero, Javier Rosa, Julea Vlassakis
Tekla Labs strives to meet the unmet laboratory equipment needs of scientists and schools in resource-poor settings worldwide. Through the in-kind donation of a Dozuki platform, they have launched an interactive website that makes instructions for do-it-yourself (DIY) laboratory equipment available to scientists across the world. In an effort to expand the impact of Tekla Labs, they are now using their website to create a global community of DIY builders and scientists in the developing world, creating a sustainable source for innovation that empowers science anywhere. In addition to this, their upcoming competition, BuildMyLab, will invite designs for laboratory equipment from makers worldwide. Finally, Tekla Labs will advertise in popular maker magazines to reach a wide audience of potential contributors. They are collaborating with other initiatives to identify specific equipment needs of scientists in the developing world to improve science infrastructure worldwide.
GoodWheels (2nd Place)
Team Members: Nicholas de Raad, Christopher Ategeka, Alex Hayashi
GoodWheels will be a UC Berkeley student-run market where students can buy used bikes. Beginning in summer, they will offer a location for students to buy bikes at a lower cost and in a safer manner than they would be able to buy used bikes from strangers online. Student’s purchases from GoodWheels will have a social impact because all profits from bike sales will go to supporting CA Bikes in their work–constructing and donating custom bikes to orphans and paraplegics in Uganda.
Berkeley City College Service Community (2nd Place)
Team Members: Adena Ishii
The Berkeley City College Service Community (BCCSC) is a student-led program that assists community college students with the transfer process, provides them with enhanced leadership and service opportunities, and connects them to resources that will help them achieve their education and personal goals.
Extending a Helping Hand as Volunteer Tax Preparers: (2nd Place)
Team Members: Victoria Chu, Jorden Lam
In 2010, VITA@Berkeley, under the “Social Resources for a Healthy Community” project, successfully established its year-long program to assist students, community members, and community tax partners in collaborating around an effort to alleviate poverty through tax preparation. As a result, they helped secure $600,000 in tax refunds and credits to East Bay residents. “Extending a Helping Hand as Volunteer Tax Preparers” is an extension of this original project, with the added focus of targeting rural poverty areas outside the East Bay, such the Central Valley Region. In this project, Chu and Lam will partner with an existing financial service clinic, where volunteers can prepare taxes for local residents in a week-long service-learning opportunity, and enable them to dramatically scale up their service delivery. This project will further immerse students in the issues of poverty, and specifically rural poverty beyond the East Bay.
Fruitful Minds, Stage Two: Crossing County Lines (3rd place)
Team Members: Paulina Altshuler, Erin Dunn, Jessica Jew, Ann Kim, Samantha Louie, Lauren McAvoy, Daniela Santana, Lauren Tarver, Connie Tien
Fruitful Minds is determined to address the obesity epidemic by bringing nutrition education and guidance to students in elementary, middle, and high school. Operating the educational programs will also provide practical experience for college student ambassadors. In Stage One, they operated through one college (UC Berkeley) and served 10 local schools from 2010-2012. In Stage Two, they will be expanding to 12 schools (including 2 high schools), introduce a condensed curriculum for two new primary schools, and will partner with Saint Mary’s College outside of Alameda County. The ultimate goal of Fruitful Minds is to support partnerships nationwide and provide their unique program to any school with access to the college volunteers and resources necessary to replicate their model.

Information Technology for Society

Sponsor: The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS)
Description of the Challenge: The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) is interested in stimulating new thinking on a broad range of social benefits of information technology in areas such as: energy and the environment, health, education and life-long learning, democratic governance, response to natural and man-made disasters, transportation, delivery of government services, quality of life for people with disabilities, economic opportunity for low-income communities, arts and culture, and the effectiveness of non-profit organizations. The challenge of this contest is to describe a multidisciplinary research project that demonstrates the capacity of IT to help address a major societal challenge.

ParkExperienceMap (1st Place)
Team Members: Luis Aguilar, Colin MacArthur, Eric Zan
To survive, California’s National Parks must become relevant to people of diverse cultural backgrounds. But even as California’s population continues to diversify, people of culturally diverse backgrounds have been less likely to use National Parks and other public lands than others. If the percentage of African Americans and Hispanics who visit, volunteer, donate and lobby for parks does not increase, California’s parks could face substantial gaps in funding and support as its population becomes more diverse. Drawing on ten years of research describing what brings underserved populations into parks, this team proposes implementing ParkExperienceMap, an online participatory mapping system for creating custom visitor and staff-authored park maps, to be distributed both online and in print. ParkExperienceMap will harness crowd-sourcing and paper-based interfaces to provide park maps to underserved populations while simultaneously gathering their thoughts on the park experience. Working with the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, they will build and test whether this application can encourage visits by under-served minority groups.

Low-Cost Utility-Driven Guardian Robot for Older Persons Living Alone (1st Place)
Team Members: Peter Cottrell, Sebastian Hening
This team’s faculty advisors received CITRIS seed funding this year to investigate the activity patterns of older persons living alone, and simultaneously, the capabilities of various sensors such as cameras, temperature sensor, and a two-way microphone for remote monitoring by family members. The goal of this CITRIS funding is for family members or their surrogates to remotely control a robot system over the Internet when they suspect a problem or are unable to reach their loved ones by phone. The goal of this Big Ideas proposal is to make this system autonomous, enabling the robot to monitor activity by detecting utility pattern anomalies. This will allow the system to identify and indicate potential problems and then alert the family members, while heading towards the location of the last utility activity. This project will use a commercially available vacuum robot, “Roomba,” as the base, allow for two-way communication using a mounted tablet, integrate a thermal camera for health data, and analyze the data for the surrogate to inspect and take the appropriate actions.

Facilitating Independence for Photo Capturing, Browsing, and Sharing for Blind People (2nd Place)
Team Members: Dustin Adams, Susumu Harada, Caitlin Hernandez, Sri Kurniawan, Daisuke Sato
Both sighted and blind people value having a photographic memento of a moment, a place, or an event. However, due to the visually oriented nature of photography and the lack of non-visual cues to indicate the content of the photo, the photographs taken by blind people are often lacking, sometimes missing the photo subject entirely. This proposal draws on research from team members that investigated how blind smartphone users take, store, and retrieve photos, which found that blind people want to, but hesitate to share photos because it is impossible to identify the photos after they are taken. The advent and ubiquity of smartphones provide a customizable framework that can help blind people capture, organize, browse, and share photos. The overarching aim of this research is to facilitate independence for blind people in capturing, browsing, and sharing photos using a smartphone. As blind people have to rely on non-visual cues to retrieve or organize photos, we plan to test various aural representations of the photos. We also plan to help blind people organize their photos by providing an organization scheme that matches their mental models, which would vary by various characteristics.

Small, Low-Cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for CAL FIRE Reconnaissance (2nd Place)
Team Members: Luis Bernardo, Chase Heckman, Kevin Kirkpatrick, Mark Lazzaro, Alexander Martinez, Jorge Nunez, Kelsey Nze, Erik O’keefe, Angel Sepulveda
Wildfires are a major part of California’s ecology and take a large amount of resources to monitor, contain, and ultimately suppress. Cal Fire is the state entity that is responsible for suppressing wildfires in California. Operations help improve the ecology of the local habitats by protecting rare and/or unique ecological resources, as well as protecting human property. Air-fighting resources such as fixed and rotary winged aircrafts are often used in fire suppression efforts. However, these tools are expensive to utilize and sometimes pose safety concerns such as pilot fatigue and low visibility flight. The goal of this proposal is to reduce the use of full-scaled crew-carrying aircraft by using small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in fire monitoring operations. Their project will create an UAV that could provide 24-hour monitoring to reduce the cost and increase the safety of wildfire monitoring. This would allow for traditional aircrafts that monitor fires to be used for different missions (e.g. water drops, short hauls, or resupply).

m3d (Mass Minable Medical Data) (3rd Place)
Team Members: Sabrina Atienza, Georgy Ramonov
m3d is the “Google for Healthcare”—an intuitive and fast search engine for clinical and biomedical research. Existing technology uses outdated software to manage massive data sets, proves unintuitive with drag-and-drop interfaces, and demonstrates major issues in software architecture and scalability. The m3d software solution utilizes cutting-edge technology that ensures optimum performance analyzing Terabytes of data and ensures the most productive user experience. The end-users of m3d include hospitals, clinics, research centers, and pharmaceutical companies. m3d has partnered with UCSF to build a modern and full software solution built on the existing technology frameworks to provide healthcare with its much-needed intuitive and fast search engine for clinical and biomedical research.

Creative Expression for Social Justice

Sponsors: Committee on Student Fees; The Arts Research Center; The Townsend Center for the Humanities
Description of the Challenge: The Arts and Humanities provide many meaningful ways to draw attention and contribute to discourse, advocacy, and positive action related to poverty and inequality. The Creative Expression for Social Justice category invited proposals related to creating art, music, photography, written and spoken word, film, dance, new media, other forms of expression, or activities to facilitate such expression to address issues of poverty alleviation and social justice.

AMASS Media: Democratizing Access to Multimedia Services (1st Place)
Team Members: John Chang, Carolyn Kao, Dominick Ng, Yang Wang, Clayton Yan, Hannah Yang
AMASS Media’s mission is to democratize access to multimedia services to empower social impact organizations. Today, the increasing popularity of crowd funding and social media campaigns has heightened the importance of videos and short films as marketing materials. Videos are essential for an influential online presence, but professional videography services are usually expensive or otherwise inaccessible for nonprofits. Through surveys, interviews, and online research, AMASS has confirmed that a) social impact organizations have a great need for cheaper videography services; and b) amateur and early-career (A&E) videographers looking to build their portfolios can fulfill these needs. However, no reputable online platform currently exists to connect nonprofits with A&E videographers. By fundamentally transforming the video production landscape, AMASS Media’s services will 1) create a powerful way for A&E videographers and nonprofits to advance their agendas, and 2) lead to a growth of creative content and greater public awareness of social justice issues.

The Secret Life of Urban Animals (2nd Place)
Team Members: Rebecca Hui
Often overlooked in urbanization are relationships between people and animals. This project will reveal how changing human-animal relationships are related to the development of global cities through artistic maps. By understanding the secret lives of urban animals in developing cities, the project will offer insights into how to develop Zoopolis, or cities where both people and animals can coexist. Team member Rebecca Hui was struck by the resiliency of urban animals, noticing that a unique sense of place emerges as cows manifest self-awareness and personalities, a consequence grounded in India’s long traditions of reverence towards all life forms. But this form of coexistence is diminishing as cities are changing, and conflicts arise over possession and use of space. As cities urbanize, human-animal relationships change as crucial ecological corridors for many animals are destroyed. By following animals in a developing world urban context, “The Secret Life of Urban Animals” intends for these maps to help us empathize with the animals whose lives are increasingly affected by people, and highlight the importance of those beings with whom we share our world, no matter how familiar or alien.

Nossa Communidade, Nossa Historìa: Our Community, Our Story (2nd Place)
Team Members: Lorna Porter
“Nossa Communidade, Nossa Historìa” (“Our Community, Our Story”) will bring a program of artistic expression to the youth of Brazil’s Rocinha favela. The program will take a group of twenty children, aged ten to fifteen, and spend four months providing them the opportunity to express their stories through different artistic modes with the goal to improve the student’s conception of the self. The programs will provide guidance for students to tell their personal narrative, focusing on writing, photography, reusable art and music, and ultimately create an exhibit that will be displayed in all socio-economic areas of Rio de Janeiro. The children will meet four times a week in this program to receive assistance with homework and cultivate the emotional benefits of an increased sense of self-worth that comes from accomplishment and much needed personal attention. The children will stay involved in the program to develop leadership skills and remain involved in art classes after the four months finish, even as the program will restart the cycle with twenty more children.

STORIE: Students for Educational Equity (3rd Place)
Team Members: Ela Banerjee, Lindsay Walter
STORIE will help students of the Berkeley Unified School District and UC Berkeley jointly investigate the issue of educational inequality and tell their personal stories of how inequities have affected their lives. The project will work specifically with Studio H at REALM Charter School, a design and build program that teaches critical thinking and technical skills through a community project completed over the course of a semester. They will work with the teachers of Studio H to develop an educational equity project that will allow students to investigate educational trends on a national and local level, and will then offer a complementary, afterschool, documentary filmmaking project that would enable students to investigate inequities through the stories and experiences of their peers. In partnership with the Studio H teacher, they will apply the studio’s creative inquiry process to help the students’ research inequities, map out key stakeholders, and ground trends in lived experiences. Specifically, STORIE will invite community leaders, including representatives from the City and District 2020 Vision process, to speak to the students, and will travel to interview Cal professors in the Graduate School of Education. Together, the afterschool project will edit interviews into a 10-15 minute documentary that STORIE will show at a 2020 Vision community event and on the University of California, Berkeley campus.

From Farm to People: Connecting People to Their Food Source (Hon. Mention)
Team Members: Lauren Tarver
The establishment of innovative and sustainable farms is crucial to changing our current food system into a sustainable, environmentally friendly, and healthy system. From Farm to People will illuminate innovative farmers, producers of food, and food activists across the nation, shedding light on the people making efforts to create a new paradigm for how we think about food. Providing visual context as well as written documentation for these sustainable producers will support the establishment of a closer connection between the consumers, as well as give people a notion of personal relation and responsibility. While there is a need for more future-forward thinking farmers, From Farm to People will also confront the larger problems encompassing public health and the issues within our current centralized, industrial food system. This project has three parts that use photography and writing to offer a way to see the community and larger public impact of sustainable farming, creating a strong relationship between users and the farms that produce their food.

Global Poverty Alleviation

Sponsor: The Blum Center for Developing Economics
Description of the Challenge: Propelled by the energy and talent of students committed to helping the nearly three billion people who live on less than two dollars a day, the Blum Center for Developing Economies is focused on finding solutions to the most pressing needs of the poor. This competition asked students to describe an action-oriented project that would help alleviate poverty. Possible areas of innovation included financial services, wireless technologies and services, education, health care and agriculture.

Building a Youth Leadership Association in Rabinal, Guatemala (1st Place)
Team Members: Michael Bakal, Kira Levy, Kimberly Vinall
Six years ago, as a junior at UC San Diego, Michael Bakal received a student grant to coordinate a health fair in the indigenous community of Rabinal, Guatemala. Since then, Michael has returned to Rabinal 10 times and formed a non-profit organization. Named Voces y Manos, his nonprofit originally sought to improve health through direct provision of medical care. However, feedback from the community enlightened him to the reality that this was just a band-aid solution to a much deeper problem: the community’s lack of control over its own health. This project seeks to address this issue by empowering a group of indigenous teenagers to form their own Youth Leadership Association to design and implement innovative solutions to the community’s most pressing health problems. After receiving extensive training, the Youth Leadership Association will be given total control over a $4,000 budget, which they will have one year to allocate toward developing innovative solutions to the community’s most critical challenges. This will not only incubate sustainable solutions to local health challenges, it will also prepare the next generation of indigenous youth to assume leadership in addressing the most pressing challenges facing their communities.

FlowBit (1st Place)
Team Members: Nick Lee, Hung Leong, Cory Levy, Yasir Motiwala, and Nicole Murphy
FlowBit will create a low-cost, flexible system that is capable of providing the following services to developing world projects: remote monitoring, remote control, and accessible data storage. The goal is to drastically improve the scalability of existing developing world projects while improving transparency and service to the people who depend on them. For their pilot project, they will install a prototype system on a water-dispensing kiosk in Mexico through collaboration with Mexican non-profit Fundacion Cantaro Azul and researchers at UC Berkeley. FlowBit is currently in talks with leaders of two social enterprises: LoLo Utility in India and Fundacion Cantaro Azul in Mexico. Although the organizations have different business models and serve culturally-influenced markets, they both struggle with similar key issues. They mentioned that if technology could help in scaling up or maintaining their networks, more people would gain reliable access to clean drinking water at even lower prices. FlowBit’s technology provides three essential capabilities: real-time monitoring of sensors, wireless control over systems, and access to big data collection over an entire smart water network. FlowBit will turn rural water delivery from reactive management to preventative management.

Roofing Out of Poverty (2nd Place)
Team Members: Hasit Ganatra, Pablo Rosado, and Naomi Rosenberg
India is experiencing rapid migration from rural areas to cities. Rampant urbanization in India has caused the proliferation of slums and increased demand for adequate housing. Among many of the physically and socially deteriorated living conditions that characterize life in the slums, housing with poor structural quality is one of the major limiting factors in the advancement of socio-economic growth. A functional roof is a basic and essential component of shelter for a family, but poor house planning and a lack of resources results in inadequate and unsafe roofs for families. After surveying 15 low-income households in a slum in Ahmedabad, India, this team got direct feedback from the field that helped them identify the top current roofing problems: extremely hot indoor temperatures, high roof maintenance costs, leaks during monsoon season, and the presence of asbestos. Roofing Out of Poverty’s challenge is to design an affordable and reliable roof that not only addresses these top priorities, but is modular, fits within a financially viable business model, and improves the safety and quality of living of low-income home dwellers. Their product will fill the market gap between inexpensive, low-quality roofing options and cost-prohibitive concrete slab roofs.

Vision from the Bottom: Providing a Brighter Future (2nd Place)
Team Members: Silvina Bee and Moon Parks
Vision from the Bottom aims to bypass the costs of customized eyeglasses and vision screening by implementing a social business model and supply chain network to deliver easy, inexpensive and effective vision correction to people in Cambodia. Using recent innovations in self-refraction technology for vision screening and standardized eyeglass products for vision correction, Vision from the Bottom will provide job training for vision vendors—a door-to-door community-based sales force for self-adjustable glasses. Vision vendors will also provide a basic eye-disease detection test and can consult and coordinate visits to eye clinics or hospitals for patients who need further care. Vision from the Bottom will apply an incentive-based, scale-up supply chain so vision vendors who achieve higher sales are provided with more discounts when acquiring these self-adjustable glasses for the purposes of selling them to customers, and they will also be promoted to a higher position.

100 Strong (3rd Place)
Team Members: Vrinda Agarwal, Julie Brown, Madeeha Ghori, Smriti Joneja, Ruhi Nath
100 Strong is an innovative non-profit that will give at-risk teenage girls in San Francisco the skills they need to take leadership roles in bettering their communities. First, one hundred teenage girls will be invited to participate in the program. The girls will be paired with a UC Berkeley undergraduate and, together, the pair will select a service-based project they want to develop during the program. Then the one hundred girls will attend a two week leadership workshop, the 100 Strong Summer Workshop, that focuses on developing their leadership potential by planning out their project and learning how to lead a non-profit project. Through the course of the two-week program, the participants in 100 Strong will observe non-profits in action in San Francisco, learn from guest speakers, and participate in leadership building exercises. 100 Strong will give at-risk teenage girls the skills they need to create change within their own communities, developing these girls’ leadership potential by equipping them with the training and skills they need to be change makers within their own communities. The goal is to pilot a new leadership program that will not only empower girls to better their own lives, but will also empower girls to better the lives of others.

Lungs For Life (3rd Place)
Team Members: Brenna Alexander, Ariella Godblatt, Drew Thompson, Paulina Tsai, Allie Wallace, and Simon Wang
Though smoking is a prevalent issue among the homeless population, it is rarely addressed. Many factors predispose homeless individuals to nicotine addiction, and the underserved often do not have sufficient medical care or the strong support base that is critical to kicking the habit. The Suitcase Clinic, a student-run volunteer organization serving the homeless in the East Bay, aims to launch a project called Lungs for Life. They intend to treat the health related issues associated with smoking and create a social network to empower clients to successfully quit. The project has three main components: asthma/COPD screenings; treatment through prescription inhalers; and weekly, student-run support groups supplemented with nicotine replacement. Lungs for Life will establish monthly screenings for respiratory issues and secure more funding for inhalers and diagnostic tools, creating tailored client plans for asthma control. Lungs for Life will institute student-run support groups to not only provide important health information, but also offer an open space for clients to express their hardships and reach out to one another. The enactment of a smoking cessation program will mark Suitcase Clinic’s pioneer effort to expand services beyond acute treatment and into long-lasting care.

Improving Student Life

Sponsors: Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC)
Description of the Challenge: UC Berkeley is a rich and diverse milieu of student life and initiative. Proposals for this competition focused on new policy programs, initiatives or services that are aligned with the strategic priorities in the Division of Student Affairs: access, service, and engagement. Proposals included implementation plans that, among other things, outlined the specific roles of individual and/or groups of students, staff, faculty, and external collaborators in executing the idea.

The UC Berkeley Science Shop: Connecting Communities to University Research (1st Place)
Team Members: Karen Andrade, Erik Behar, Sushma Bhatia, Hekia Bodwitch, Melissa Eitzel, Jennifer Palomino, Leah Rubin
Many science students at UC Berkeley view science as a tool that allows them to advance the frontiers of human knowledge and have a positive impact on society. For many students, the gap between their work and its real impact on society makes it difficult to believe that their work is relevant, leading to a loss of motivation and ultimately to high attrition of these talented individuals from science-related degrees and careers. This attrition and disconnection is at odds with an increasing need for access to scientific knowledge and research in many communities. Science and technology are fundamental to problem solving, and access to science and research often dictates who has a voice in policy and societal decision-making processes. This big idea is to translate community research questions into projects that undergraduate and graduates can carry out. By facilitating and fostering the relationship between community non-profits or small businesses and students’ research in the Bay Area, which has a distinctive landscape of non-profit organizations in diverse fields, business startups and progressive local governments, Science Shop will spark distinct solutions for social and environmental problems.

Push Me, Pull You: O-Chem, the Fun Way! (2nd Place)
Team Members: Norman Bae, Prithvi Bomdica, Nithya Lingampalli, Rahul Nayak, Vinay Viswanadham, and Hubert Wang
This proposal’s plan is to develop a computer program that can be used to practice electron-pushing mechanisms in organic chemistry. Students struggle significantly in electron-arrow pushing mechanisms, a critical part of an organic chemistry course’s grade. By implementing this project, Push Me, Pull You hopes to increase students’ understanding of this phenomenon in organic chemistry, and therefore further students’ overall understanding of the subject. The application for this computer program will include a tutoring and a solving level. With this new program, Push Me, Pull You, will help students to better understand organic chemistry, and take away the unnecessary fear that strikes new organic chemistry students.

Free Ventures (3rd Place)
Team Members: Jeremy Fiance, Sam Kirschner, Alex Mandel, Sahana Rajasekar, Arushi Saxena
Free Ventures is UC Berkeley’s first student-initiated non-profit startup accelerator, meant to catalyze the development of young entrepreneurs to innovate and create high-impact, sustainable ventures. Free Ventures is a key part of an innovation movement that involves changing the culture amongst the student body from focusing all of their energy on classes to a world where the things learned in the classroom can translate into real world products and services. They intend to do this by giving young entrepreneurs access to student consulting, mentorship, funding, and a more intensive accelerator program for students that show a higher potential of success. Initially they plan to implement a pilot program of roughly five passionate student teams that will be given mentors, project deadlines, and seed funding all wrapped up in 10 weeks. The pilot will help them to build an initial infrastructure, which they will use as a platform to build on. This organization will work along current leaders on campus to help accelerate Berkeley’s already talented student body into a more creative, free thinking group of students with a higher potential to pursue their passions and create meaningful ventures.

Financial Literacy

Sponsors: The Haas School of Business; The Blum Center for Developing Economies
Description of Challenge: Proposals for this category involve improving the financial literacy of young adults as they transition to universities, state schools, and community colleges. The proposals focus on the question: “How can we better equip high school students or incoming freshmen with the basics of managing sources of funding such as financial aid (grants/scholarships/loans), credit cards, pre-paid debit cards, among others?”

Cashify, a Social Platform & Business Model for Financial Literacy (1st Place)
Team Members: Shuonan Chen, Justin Chu, Virginia Chung
In partnership with business sponsors, Cashify will establish a sustainable program to support an interactive online platform for financial literacy, targeting entering students at various schools. This platform will allow students to open accounts with which they can gain points by completing tasks such as reading the monthly newsletter, completing periodic trivia on financial literacy, and engaging in the online social community by sharing their activities and participating in forums that discuss financial tips and are moderated by professionals from sponsoring schools. Students’ accounts would be directly tied to their school email to ensure security settings. Cashify will also partner with existing institutions to provide the information and resources that would benefit students not only in the present term but also in the long-term. The material will be presented in interactive formats such as simulation games, which not only provide information but also actively engage students, allowing Cashify to characterize financial literacy as something fun and meaningful for students.

Cash FLOW: Financial Literacy (2nd Place)
Team Members: Leanne Fan, Lizi Feng, Brian Kim, Siranush Manukyan, Akash Patel, Felicity Tang, Dennis Vidalj, Alice Wang
Cash FLOW aims to address the problem of low financial literacy by bringing personal finance classes to high schools. Through these classes, high school students will be equipped with the knowledge and skills to make informed financial decisions during and after college. Currently, the team leads a weekly “Teaching Financial Literacy” DeCal course that teaches students about personal finance and guides them to apply their knowledge by counseling low-income individuals at homeless shelters. By using the student-to-student teaching model, instructors hone their leadership skills, solidify their knowledge base, and create a platform for open discussion with students. Leading an after-school program in high schools, starting with the pilot program at El Cerrito High during the 2013-2014 school year, the team intends to use their democratic teaching model to provide high school students with the key money management skills that they will need to succeed in their post-high school lives. The curriculum includes loans, budgeting, banking services, financial aid, and other financial information that may impact their lives.

L.I.F.E. Courses (Learning and Inspiring through Financial Education) (3rd Place)
Team Members: Jacqueline Aldaco, Blanca Zepeda
This project will target students and their parents through a year-round program focusing on financial literacy. This program will focus on Richmond High School in Richmond, CA, which is a socio-economically disadvantaged and underserved school primarily serving students of color. L.I.F.E. will also conduct a one-day conference on the UC Berkeley campus in the spring semester for students from all around the East Bay area to increase outreach and accessibility as well as extend knowledge and resources.

Maternal & Child Health

Sponsors: USAID; The Blum Center for Developing Economies
Description of the Challenge: Each year, 350,000 women die due to complications during childbirth, and approximately 10 million children die before reaching their fifth birthday. In the vast majority of cases, the causes of these deaths are preventable, occurring because expectant mothers and young children do not have access to health care services and informational resources or receive sub-standard medical care. The Improving Maternal and Child Health Competition rewards innovative solutions to safeguard the health of expectant mothers and young children.

Emmunify (1st Place)
Team Members: Sanat Kamal Bahl, Erik Krogh-Jespersen, Anandamoy Sen, Jessica Watterson
Emmunify is a non-profit social venture providing a unique solution for patient identification and immunization tracking in rural India. The project’s technology allows any rural villager to carry an electronic medical record containing their child’s immunization history on an electronically readable tag placed on their phone. Families are reminded of their immunization appointments via an SMS text message or a voice message sent to their phone. When the parent arrives for their child’s vaccination appointment, the data from their electronic medical record can then be read and updated by a healthcare worker using a low cost handset with near field communication capabilities. Emmunify’s technology dramatically simplifies the immunization process for both the rural villager and the health worker, ultimately delivering on the big impact goal of reducing child mortality.

Que Viva La Mujer: Knights Landing Community Maternal Health Program (2nd Place)
Team Members: Pooja Boinapalli, Elizabeth Johnson, Nandini Nittur, Sarah Yang
This team aims to open a maternal care unit with an onsite OB/GYN in the Knights Landing community of Yolo County. Since the closing of CommuniCare in 2008, the community of approximately 750 migrant families and undocumented workers living in Knights Landing has lacked access to comprehensive health care in their community up until the beginning of this year. The project will provide women with more birth control options, urine tests, emergency contraception, and prenatal packages. These packages would include prenatal vitamins and vouchers for transportation to hospitals in Sacramento and the greater Yolo County. The goal is to integrate community members in all steps of the process, ensuring they take an active role in their own health care and the health care of their neighbors. Que Viva La Mujer would not just be a place where women can see a gynecologist in their own community, but also their resource for all their maternal and post parturition health care and educational needs.

India Smiles (2nd Place)
Team Members: Hani Ahir, Priyanka Athavale, Ashmita Baral, Amina Khimani, Nikita Patel, Priya Patel, Karen Sokal-Gutierrez, Radka Varimezova
India Smiles is a 3-year project aimed at alleviating childhood malnutrition and poor oral health outcomes caused by the transition from traditional agricultural-based diets to processed snack and “junk foods” in India. Through an effective entrepreneurial and social marketing model for community-based distribution of oral health care products and services by local community health workers, India Smiles works towards improving oral health in children ages up to age six. The project will employ oral hygiene education, application of fluoride varnish, preventative oral health care, dental examination, and distribution of toothbrushes, toothpaste and dental assistance to provide not only health benefits for mothers and children, but also financial benefits for the entrepreneurial health workers fostering a system of community involvement and sustainability.

Promoting Human Rights

Sponsors: USAID; The Blum Center for Developing Economies; The Human Rights Center; The Data and Democracy Initiative
Description of the Challenge: Although the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights was designed to be a common standard of human rights for all peoples in all nations, human rights violations exist in almost every part of the world; Amnesty International’s 2009 World Report states that individuals are tortured or abused in at least 80 countries, face unfair trials in at least 50 countries, and are restricted in their freedom of expression in at least 70 countries. The challenge for this competition is to develop a proposal that will, in some way, combat the causes or consequences of corruption and thus directly or indirectly foster the rule of law.

The Pachamama Project (1st Place)
Team Members: Rebecca Peters, Lindsay Dreizler
The Pachamama Project strives to eradicate taboos and stigmas associated with menstruation and improve the human right to clean water and education in Bolivia. The goal of the project is to develop and disseminate information regarding menstrual hygiene management (MHM) in underserved peri-urban indigenous and migrant communities in Cochabamba, Bolivia. By fostering community and school level participation in discussions and education about water, sanitation, hygiene (WASH), and MHM, the Pachamama Project seeks to broaden understandings of the human right to water, gender equality, and basic human rights. This project, in collaboration with the NGO, Water for People, will collect information in areas overlooked by the government, facilitate community organizing, lead education initiatives, and involve local stakeholders in project decision making. By framing MHM as a human rights issue, it can tap into larger discourses of justice, equity, and gender equality instead of remaining a taboo subject with complex stigmas assigned to it.

Bay Area Resource Connection: Health Equality Through Resource Consultation and Medical-Legal Partnerships (2nd Place)
Team Members: Sudarshan Bhat, Abby Burns, Gabriel Fregoso, and Wijin (Jason) Kim
We believe all humans have the right to health and wellbeing regardless of socioeconomic status. The roots of good health must begin long before the administration of a therapeutic drug. Several socioeconomic factors including nutrition, housing, and education often determine a family’s state of health. We plan to train a group of committed undergraduates to staff a “help desk” at Highland Hospital in Oakland. Emergency room and chronic disease clinic staff will refer appropriate patients and their families to the help desk, where the volunteers will walk these clients through the process of accessing a multitude of resources. We will provide support with finding housing, employment, food access, child-care, and medical-legal advocacy, among other necessities. We are collaborating with East Bay Community Law Center and students at the UC Berkeley Boalt Law School to provide legal services. The goal of this interdisciplinary approach is to improve the health of low-income patients, enhance the patient experience, reduce emergency room utilization by high frequency patients and ultimately lower healthcare costs in outpatient clinics and the emergency department.

Truth as Freedom: Promoting Human Rights and Accountability through Access to Information in Sierra Leone (3rd Place)
Team Members: Holly Dranginis
In its current reconstruction phase, Sierra Leone has made valiant efforts to reckon with its past and develop rule-of-law, historical memory, and accountability for war crimes. However, Sierra Leone has a history of corruption and remains one of the poorest nations on earth. Today, citizens need food, healthcare, and education. But they also need to trust their government. State secrecy breeds distrust and resentment among citizens— traits that can escalate into upheaval. The government has responded to this need by establishing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). FOIA laws empower citizens to request and receive information once kept as classified; thereby breaking through walls of secrecy that once concealed state corruption and violence. Equipped with the support of the National Security Archive and extensive professional experience in transitional justice and human rights, Truth as Freedom will harness FOIA’s innovative power to engender respect for human rights in Sierra Leone. Partnering with FOIA experts in the US and the growing citizen-movement for access to information in Sierra Leone, Truth as Freedom will be motivated by two goals: 1) Test and thereby strengthen the enforcement of the new FOIA law by assisting requests filed by local citizens and 2) gather and analyze documents resulting from those requests to build a dossier of potential evidence for human rights-related litigation.

Clean & Sustainable Energy Alternatives

Sponsors: The Blum Center for Developing Economies; The Berkeley Energy & Climate Initiative
Description of the Challenge: The aim of this category is to encourage the adoption of clean energy alternatives that are sustainable and have the potential for broad impact. Proposals may focus on the design, development, or delivery of sustainable energy solutions and can be domestic or international in scope. However, all proposals should clearly demonstrate the relationship between the proposed intervention and its impact on the environment.

Off-Grid Solar Electrification in Africa with Mobile Phone Interface (1st Place)
Team Members: Louis Kang, Ivan Maric, and Henry Wang
This project seeks to provide a feasible and sustainable solution for growing energy demand in Africa. Its core innovation is in the village-scale solar power system that is currently being prototyped at UC Berkeley. One team member’s extensive contacts in renewable energy organizations in Ghana gives this team a platform and local access to start implementing pilot systems. Ghana’s growth rates for energy need, population, and development approximate Sub-Saharan Africa’s on a whole, and therefore can be used as a suitable benchmark for testing. This team utilizes an array of inexpensive solar panels to provide remote generation. A predictive back-end will provide energy generation forecasts up to three-days ahead, and will convey expected generation shortfalls through SMS to end-users. Electricity sales will be on-demand and sold via mobile credits, expecting to generate USD $50 per month for a 2kw system.

PT-E generator: Harnessing the Energy of Moving Cars (1st Place)
Team Members: Tuan Hoang, Phuc Le, Long Tran
PT-E generator proposes to build a device that can harness the energy generated by the impact of moving vehicles onto highway and city road surfaces. This energy is then converted into electricity that can be stored in batteries or uploaded into the electric grids to power residential and public facilities. The device uses the same mechanism of an automatic watch to store and release the mechanical energy collected from vehicles. This project may help solve the ever-increasing energy demands while reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and cutting back the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere that cause global warming.

Wallflower Ventilation: Intelligent Home Ventilation Network with Wireless Control (2nd Place)
Team Members: Eric Burger and Ari Novack
Traditional central heating and cooling systems treat an entire house as if it were one room with one uniform temperature. Furthermore, these systems fail to provide room-specific temperature control, instead heating or cooling the entire home based on the readings of a single temperature sensor in the thermostat. By installing a wirelessly controlled vent cover, equipped with temperature sensor and motorized shutter in each room of a house, the Wallflower Ventilation system provides the ability to control room-specific temperature settings. Each vent will communicate with a central thermostat that controls and monitors the network. The thermostat will also record temperature readings to the homeowner’s online account. By accessing the system’s website, the user can update their desired temperature, change settings from their smartphone or office computer, and track their home’s energy use. With this system, the home’s ventilation network can become part of the Internet of Things, offering real-time monitoring, access to weather forecasts, and the incorporation of advanced analytics.

Near Zero (3rd Place)
Team Members: Sadegh Asefi, David Atkins-Maters, David Olmos, Togay Ozen, Marwan Rammah, and Paul Weitekamp
Unlike chemical batteries that have a limited power output and diminishing cycle lives, flywheel batteries can supply quick surges of power in milliseconds with a reliable 20-30 year lifespan. The small footprint of flywheel batteries makes them easily deployable in any environment. Near Zero’s rapid ramping abilities, high cycle life, and low maintenance make it an ideal supplement to current regulation plant operations. While current installed storage capacity is seeking to compete with fossil fuel regulation plants, Near Zero aims to enable more efficient operation of these plants in a collaborative integration. The ability to provide both energy absorption and generation services at fast ramp rates means that less capacity is needed per regulation event, which enables the plant to increase the number of ancillary service market bids and reduce idle time. While the flywheel is ideal for the initial ramping of supply, Near Zero’s customers will increase asset utilization after the ramping period has ended or when installed flywheel capacity has been discharged.