Agricultural projects win CITRIS White paper competition

Two agricultural proposals'one on supporting urban agriculture in Mexico City and the other on alleviating water scarcity in California farming'are co-winners of the first annual CITRIS White Paper competition and will receive $7500 each. CITRIS, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, hosted the competition, which was organized by Tom Kalil, Special Assistant to the Chancellor for Science and Technology at UC Berkeley, in order to tap into the extraordinary energy and creativity of UC students to help translate basic research into projects that have a direct positive impact on society. 

 

To participate in the competition, each group project must have at least one student member at one of the four CITRIS campuses: UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Merced and UC Santa Cruz.

 

The members of the Concrete Garden, which seeks to establish an interactive web portal that will support the work of environmental organizations by promoting the spread of information regarding urban agro-ecology in Mexico, are Lily Foster and Sara Emery, both undergraduate students at the University of California, Santa Cruz majoring in Latin American & Latino Studies.

 

The proposal Mitigation of Water Scarcity in California Agriculture through Use of an Information Technology Platform for Environmental Data was prepared by AgLinx Solutions, a team formed by mechanical engineering graduate students Thomas H. Cauley III and Brian D. Sosnowchik, and Alexander K. Do, a project manager at the California Energy Commission. The company was formed in the fall 2004 through the New Product Development Course in the Management of Technology (MOT) Program at UC Berkeley and has previously received a $16,000 a National Collegiate Innovators & Inventors Alliance (NCIIA) Advanced E-Team grant to pursue its goal of mitigating frost in northern California vineyards though wireless sensor networks. The prototyping work and research for the project is also supported by the Ford Lab in mechanical engineering.

 

The second prize of $3000 was awarded to Mayuri Panditrao, Prasanth Jeevan and Tahir Akbar, UC Berkeley graduate students at the School of Public Health, EECS and Goldman School of Public Policy, respectively, whose proposal focuses on the use of geographic information systems to predict vector-borne disease outbreaks.

 

UC Berkeley researchers and graduate students Madelaine Plauché , Joyojeet Pal, Divya Ramachandran and Richard Carlson won the $2000 third prize for their proposal on simple, scalable speech technology to allow IT access for all literacy levels in developing regions.

 

The volunteer judges involved in the competition included faculty members from CITRIS campuses UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, and Tom Kalil.

• Introduction by Tom Kalil and Shankar Sastry

• Mitigation of Water Scarcity in California Agriculture through Use of an Information Technology Platform for Environmental Data, by Thomas H. Cauley III, Alexander K. Do and Brian D. Sosnowchik, UC Berkeley
  
  
• Use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to Predict Vector-borne Disease Outbreaks, by Mayuri Panditrao, Prasanth Jeevan and Tahir Akbar, UC Berkeley
  
  
• The Concrete Garden Project, by Lily Foster and Sara Emery, UC Santa Cruz
  
  
• Simple Scalable Speech Technology, by Madelaine Plauché, Joyojeet Pal, Divya Ramachandran and Richard Carlson, UC Berkeley
  
  
• Awards and closing
  

 

 

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