[liberationtech] UC Berkeley CITRIS Big Ideas winners for 2013

[Yosem Companys]

From: Yvette Subramanian <yvettes at berkeley.edu>

This year, CITRIS awarded five student-led proposals a total of $30,000
in prize money for our annual competition---two proposals from UC
Berkeley, two from UC Santa Cruz, and one from UC Merced All of the
proposals that we received were outstanding, and everyone who entered
should be congratulated for their hard work and insightful ideas about
complex societal problems.

Congratulations to this year's winners of the CITRIS Big Ideas competition!

http://citris-uc.org/news/big_ideas_winners_2013

      Co-First place: ParkExperienceMap for Schools (UC Berkeley).  To
survive, California's National Parks must become more relevant to people
of diverse cultural backgrounds. Drawing on research about underserved
populations and parks, ParkExperienceMap, in partnership with the
national Park Service, proposes to implement an online participatory
mapping system for creating park maps that is tailored to underserved
audiences.

     Co-First place: Low-Cost Utility-Driven Guardian Robot for Older
Persons Living Alone (UC Santa Cruz) | This proposal aims to produce a
robot that acts as a guardian for older persons living independently
that is low cost, low maintenance, unobtrusive, and gives the family
peace of mind that their loved one is safe.

     Co-Second place: Small, Low-Cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for CAL
FIRE Reconnaissance (UC Merced) | The Sacramento firefighters memorial
has over 1,100 fallen heroes, and UC Merced students have developed a
way to improve firefighter safety. While combating wildfires,
information is key; therefore, this big idea envisions a cheap way to
continuously update CAL FIRE with small, unmanned aerial vehicles.

     Co-Second place: Facilitating Independence for Photo Capturing,
Browsing, and Sharing for Blind People (UC Santa Cruz) | This big idea
is to facilitate independence for blind people in capturing, organizing,
browsing, and sharing photos using an iPhone.

     Third place:  m3d (Mass Minable Medical Data) (UC Berkeley) | m3d
is the "Google for Healthcare" -an intuitive and fast search engine for
clinical and biomedical research.


More information about Big Ideas, including news about the Grand Pitch
Day and winners of the other local contests, can be found at
http://bigideas.berkeley.edu/news/.
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yvette subramanian, ph.d. | CITRIS writer and editor
356-C Sutardja Dai Hall, UC Berkeley campus
(510) 643-4866 | (510) 642-1800 fax | yvette at citris-uc.org

Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society
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