Every year, the Innovation Expo marks the closing of the year and celebrates the hard work of all of the seniors for their amazing accomplishments in their final projects and designs. One of the highlights of the day’s proceedings is the Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition. This high-stakes business competition awards prizes to the top senior-design projects that can be turned into successful businesses. This year, the top three teams were Maritime Security, No-Trill Drill, and VoFix.
The first-place team this year, Maritime Security, consists of Reva Grover, Dehan Kong, Laura Mathews, Daniel Wadler, and Samantha Weckesser of Industrial and Systems Engineering. In collaboration with the United States Coast Guard (USCG), the team developed an AI algorithm that scans and identifies potential hazards in container shipping. Their project sought to improve the ability of the USCG to detect high-risk cargo hidden in over 11 million containers that go through the Maritime Transportation System every year in the US. Remarkably, Maritime Security also developed a user-friendly platform for the algorithm that was integrated into the current systems of the USCG. Their project is already helping to reduce the $100 billion lost annually to container ship accidents, as well as help prevent the environmental damage they cause.
The second-place team, No-Till Drill, consists of Dolcinea Carroll, Justine Schleuss, Stephen Schmidt, Jack Staub, Aaron Stultz, and Peter White. Their project sought to improve the designs of drill arms that create consistent furrows in fields without disturbing the nearby environment. Their product, which is equipped with an innovative triple-blade design and computerized depth control, could allow farmers to reduce their dependence on liquid fertilizers and improve their productivity.
The third-place group, VoFix, consists of Andre Faubert, Susan George, Matthew Halvorsen, Rachel Pinho, and Carter Rosen of Biomedical Engineering. Their project is a device that measures and reports on the sounds and motions of a speaker’s larynx to help prevent and treat the degradation of vocal quality. It also consists of an application that accepts the device’s readings to generate a report score for a physician. This improves on the current self-assessment method used by those with vocal disorders and their physicians, which is unreliable and challenging for the patients, and enables a better treatment adjustment protocol.
The Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition is a program that allows seniors, who worked tirelessly on their senior-design projects, to submit an entrepreneur proposal to the competition’s judges. From there, the field is narrowed down to semi-finals, the final 10, and then the final three teams are ranked and given awards. The teams received monetary awards, donated by the Cy and Jan Ansary Foundation, of which the competition is named after. The Ansary Foundation was created in 1983 by Cy and Jan Ansary as an organization to support, raise awareness, and help students build the skills needed to start, run, and profit from successful designs that could be marketable entrepreneurial start-ups. The foundation has supported the competition since 2016 and endowed a fund for it in 2018. The first-place team received $10,000, the second-place team received $5,000, and the third-place team received $2,500.
The competition was judged by industry leaders, professionals from various disciplines, and some Stevens alumni. This year, the judges’ list included the Director and Managing Associate General Counsel β Stevens Class of 2006, the President of Consolidated Edison Company of New York β Stevens Class of 1998, the executive director of New Jersey Commission on Science Innovation and Technology, and emceed by President and CEO of TechUnited β Aaron Price.
One unique aspect of the competition is that its nature is designed to allow and foster interdisciplinary collaboration for the projects. All the teams, no matter the final placement, included cooperation from students in many different majors from mechanical and biomedical engineering to computer science and quantitative finance.
Congratulations to all the teams that participated in the challenge, from the preliminary round candidates to Maritime Security and the other winners. Regardless of placement, every team showed great innovation, and technological diversity, and exhibited all the hard work the seniors put into their final projects.
