CITRIS at UC Santa Cruz and the UC Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation have partnered to select student projects to receive 2024–25 Tech for Social Good awards.
This year’s recipients are:
- AI-Supported Virtual Reality Tools to Support Grief Counseling Through Gamified Therapy, which uses AI-driven storytelling and interactive virtual reality (VR) environments to create a personalized, gamified experience that supports individuals dealing with grief. Team members: Amina Kobenova and Piper Stickler.
- Environmental NeTwork Sensors (ENTS): Low-Cost Scalable Hardware for Studying Agricultural Field Sensors, which enables large-scale, energy-efficient environmental monitoring with hardware designed to capture a variety of field sensor signals and transmit them to a software platform for real-time data visualization and analysis. Team members: Charlie Chesney, Ella Ferraz, Caden Jacobs, Miles Johnson, Alec Levy, John Madden and Varun Sreedharan.
- Gateways Digital Literacy Classes, which provides digital literacy classes and skill-building opportunities to incarcerated individuals, working to reduce recidivism and improve their opportunities for successful reintegration. Team members: Emily Ball, Alex Guzman and Quynh-Thy Hoang.
- Project Blueprint, which uses an assessment platform to address a lack of access to career guidance and industry connections for K-12 students, especially those from underserved communities, in Santa Cruz County. Team members: Brenda Aceves, Akshay Kamath, Kartikeya Kumaria, Mandar Patil, Malco Salcedo, Emil Wilson and Erika Wu.
- Wildfire Management With UAV Systems, which targets the transformation of wildfire detection systems using fleets of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) to collect critical environmental data that will be fed into machine-learning-powered algorithms to predict fire behavior. Team members: Alexander Aghili, Aditya Davanam, Parsh Gandhi, Gabriel Jaimes, Jordan Miller, Nathan Pham and Andy Wu.
The teams will present their progress at a project showcase at the end of May.