CITRIS is pleased to announce that three innovative proposals have been selected to receive joint seed funding grants from Tecnológico de Monterrey and CITRIS. The winning proposals represent the fields of healthcare, smart cities and communities, and civic engagement. They will improve projects in Mexico and in California and make future proposals more competitive for large-scale grant awards from national and private funders in both countries.
“We are delighted that the partnership with Tecnológico de Monterrey has yielded such promising research proposals,” notes CITRIS Deputy Director Camille Crittenden. “The seed grant program offers an excellent opportunity for mutual exchange of expertise and a chance to develop and test prototypes in a new context.”
Wearable-based monitoring of daily activities for patients with Alzheimer’s Disease
Victor Treviño, Tecnológico de Monterrey and Alexandre Bayen, UC Berkeley
The goal of this seed project is to set up a collaboration between teams at Tecnológico de Monterrey that has focused in the past on the study of the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease through clinical data and the group at UC Berkeley, which has worked on mobile sensing problems using smartphones and mobile sensors. The collaboration will focus on the development of a prototype platform running on the iWatch, the iPhone and a web interface that is capable of monitoring patients with Alzheimer’s Disease and coaching them based on the measured parameters.
Joint research program on Smart Communities, Energy and Infrastructure
Alberto Mendoza Domínguez, Tecnológico de Monterrey and Blas Pérez Henríquez, UC Berkeley
Urbanization is stressing energy systems, fresh water supplies, city infrastructure, ecosystems, and social services while putting pressure on health, sanitation, education, and the economy. This stress on natural and manmade systems is likely to be exacerbated under climate change. Smart urbanization has the potential to address challenges from population growth and climate change on these systems and eventually become an important driver for the global energy transition to a clean economy. In addition, social vulnerability related to climate change threatens the stability and capacity of ecological systems to serve as functional carbon sinks. The proposed research program will address the policy design, implementation and technological issues posed by energy transition in the region along with upgrades in transportation and urban infrastructure.
México Participa
Maria Elena Meneses, Tecnológico de Monterrey and Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley
Mexican citizens will go to the polls in July 2015 for important mid-term elections. In order to engage voters and alert them to topical issues, we propose to implement México Participa, based on the model of the CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative’s California Report Card. Using the CAFE platform, Mexican citizens will be asked to provide their feedback on the country’s performance on the following topics: security, employment, education, health, corruption, and public transparency. Participants will also be asked to suggest an issue that deserves increased national priority.