The mission of the Social Entrepreneur Center is to promote the use of technology for social issues by creating sustainable enterprises. This will be achieved by

(i) creating an undergraduate major (and minors linked to existing majors) in social entrepreneurship well integrated with information and technology education,

(ii) fostering an internship program where students can add value to a company, an NGO (non-governmental organization), or a non-profit organization within US or in a foreign country by leveraging technology,

(iii) organizing an annual tech fair where socially-oriented high-tech companies and organizations connect with students, and

(iv) organizing seminars on social entrepreneurship.

Additional funding will be sought from other agencies to

(v) create a community of researchers on social entrepreneurship to create an on-going intellectual foundation for emerging societal needs that can potentially be met through technological advances,

(vi) undertake sustainable technology training programs for socially motivated community workers and high school children who will act like change agents in the society at large,

(vii) enhance the curriculum of new courses on social entrepreneurship, and

(viii) broaden the participation in computing by attracting diversity students and students majoring in many different areas.

2009 Update:

This seed grant was partially used towards the planning of a larger social entrepreneurship program. Current
students are educated primarily in academic silos in which they learn about only one of the necessary areas to work
in this space: engineering, business, or social causes. Very few students are exposed to all three. We hypothesize
that giving this sort of broad background to students will enable better application of academic knowledge to
actual real world social needs.
* Established a Social Entrepreneurship minor program for undergraduates. – We believe that a successful research
center will need a solid academic program paired with the research. We ultimately intend to establish both an
undergraduate major and a graduate program.
* Established a Business Plan Competition – Students have many ideas, but often lack the final push that gets them
to go start an organization with intent to change the world. A business plan competition provides that push. In our
first year, 4 out of 7 finalist teams were pitching business plans meant to address a pressing social need.
The award was also used to support graduate research in a particular area of societal need.
* Improved algorithms for digitally representing cultural heritage artifacts - The existing state of the art is to use
simple photography to record objects of importance. Unfortunately a single photo does not well convey the
essence of most museum artifacts. We improved existing methods for generating digital photos in which the
lighting can be changed by a later viewer. We found that we could improve both the fidelity as well as simplify the
capture process.