The poster session and awards ceremony will be held on Thursday, April 5th, at 1:00 p.m. in the Jean & E. Floyd Kvamme Atrium, Sutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeley. Students from each of the finalists groups will present a poster on their project and be interviewed by the judges, followed by the presentation of certificates.
The projects in the 2012 Big Ideas Final Round in the Information Technology for Society category (in no particular order):
• Yaygo: reliable personal transit – Our Big Idea is to re-evaluate the needs of public transit users to determine whether a better solution could exist using smartphones. Yaygo hopes to provide a reliable, on-demand, comfortable and safe mode of travel with the flexibility of a taxi and the efficiency of a bus.
• Pathologicode – The microcirculation in the eye can serve as a biomarker to gauge pathogenesis of prediabetes. Pathologicode combines peer-reviewed research and novel technologies to analyze the microcirculation, detecting diabetes earlier than any other non-invasive method. Early detection leads to early intervention, and better health outcomes. Ultimately, more lives are saved.
• Pika Pen – Handwriting is essential for communication and improving self-confidence, but is difficult for children living with autism. We will develop a low-cost, intuitive, sensor-rich pen that allows children with disabilities to improve their handwriting alongside occupational therapists or independently.
• Politify (www.politify.us) – Politify is the first tool to quantify the personal financial impacts of political scenarios. Users simply input their information and Politify forecasts the effects a candidate or policy will have on their lives—in dollars. Using economic models from non-partisan think-tanks, Politify brings academic analysis of politics to consumers.
• Pop-Up Radio Archive: Rescuing Lost Culture – Independent radio producers hold culturally significant collections that lack archival systems and structured metadata. These producers desire interaction with their audiences using new web technologies and platforms. We are working with local producers, open-source communities and national radio organizations to build a replicable and scalable solution for oral history archives.
• Power Service Description Language (PSDL) – The current scheme for power generation incorporates over-provisioning to account for uncontrolled peaks in power usage. Coordination of consumption events can enable more efficient use of existing capacity. No standards exist to facilitate communication between power consuming devices at any scale. We propose a Power Service Description Language (PSDL).
• Bribecaster – Corruption is endemic in many emerging economies–many transactions of private citizens with government institutions require the payment of bribes. Bribecaster is an application enabling citizens to report and consume corruption information in dealings with government offices and functionaries. This citizen-induced transparency facilitates rational social and individual responses to corruption.
• Speech enabled toys for early literacy – We want to create interactive, screenless, speech-enabled learning environments for pre-school children. These environments would be capable of conducting various activities like question-answering, shared-reading and storytelling.
• TxtWorker – The mission of TxtWorker is to create direct access to social services for low-income wage-workers by providing targeted information about community resources directly to the worker’s mobile phone.
See more photos from the poster session on our Facebook page.