On Friday, April 29, 2022, the annual Innovation Expo was held on campus from 10 a.m. to 6:15 p.m., the first in-person Expo in two years. This showcase for student design, innovation, and entrepreneurship brought together Senior Projects from the College of Arts and Letters (CAL), the School of Business (SB), the School of Engineering and Science (SES), and the School of Systems and Enterprises (SSE), of which the teams competed in the Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition — a contest with the purpose of persuading prospective investors to help students turn their projects into effective businesses.
The prizes for the Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition totaled $17,500, as provided by the Cy and Jan Ansary Foundation, which supports education, entrepreneurship, and other philanthropic causes. Established in 1983, the Cy and Jan Ansary Foundation supports educational opportunities by promoting interest and teaching both entrepreneurship and business concepts to economically disadvantaged students. The Cy and Jan Ansary Foundation has supported the Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition and Prizes at the Stevens Innovation Expo since 2016, and in 2018 established an endowed fund to support both the competition itself and prizes.
The first prize of $10,000 was awarded to Brianna Garland, Jayden Pereira, and Chloe Sharpe, whose Real-Time ASL Transcription captures a user’s hand motions and instantly transcribes their ASL into English Text. The second prize of $5,000 was awarded to Cielo Abe, Shea Bontempo, Keely Coval, and Katie Foster’s MOD Filter, which aimed to create a cutting-edge water filtration method that would be both accessible and affordable. The third prize, totaling $2,500, was awarded to Abdullah Hyder and Grant Simmons’s SuperLU-FPGA, which improves on existing solutions for matrix LU decomposition by implementing a custom hardware architecture in order to accelerate matrix decomposition using an FPGA.
Other events at the Expo included the College of Arts and Letters Concert, as well as the Thomas H. Scholl Lecture by Visiting Entrepreneurs. This year’s speech was Innovation and Perseverance: The Secret to Success, given by Ann Fandozzi ‘93, CEO of Ritchie Bros.
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