ECE Teams Take Top Prizes at Entrepreneur Design Contest
Teams consisting of ECE students and professors won first and second place at the 2008-2009 Boston University College of Engineering Entrepreneur Design Contest (EDC).
The EDC, which is open to teams throughout the College of Engineering, was initially founded on the idea that young scientists and engineers, who work on cutting edge research, come across business opportunities before anyone else does.
In addition to a cash prize, the winners are entitled to a full and expedited review by Boston University’s New Ventures Division at the Office of Technology Development and 20 hours of legal consulting from Foley and Lardner.
This year’s winners:
1st place
VCon
Team members: Ajay Bangla, Stephen Chao, Prakash Ishwar, Janusz Konrad
In the last decade, the security industry has seen huge improvements in its ability to amass surveillance information. But despite huge increases in security spending, there has been little to no reduction of fraud, theft, crime, and terror. Part of the reason is that even as surveillance systems have become more advanced, we human beings haven’t gotten any faster at watching or reviewing all that video, understanding its contents, and finding critical information. This “Security Gap” between what we collect and what we can analyze is at the root of the most pressing problems in surveillance today. VCon Technologies will provide state-of-the-algorithms to help close this gap between information gathered and that analyzed.
2nd place
Route Optimization System
Ashish Agarwal, Matt Wool, Lonn Drucker, Thomas Little, and Iain Cockburn
Route Optimization System will deliver a hardware and software technology innovation that significantly reduces the time wasted while stuck in traffic thereby increasing vehicle utility, driver productivity and business efficiency. Our vision is to cut-down the delay in real-time traffic updates and deliver intelligence to customers that lack the scale, know-how, or resources to enable smart transportation independently. An important part of the company vision is to concurrently help customers reduce their impact on the environment. As eliminating waste and lowering unintelligent use of transportation resources will reduce carbon emissions, our company gives its customers the tool to reach this goal.