MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Dec. 4, 2012 —
Traffic jams typically produce little more than frustration, profanity,
and CO2. Four years ago, though, they happened to give Christian
Brüggeman an idea.
He was sitting in a London Starbucks with a friend and fellow
computer science student. As they chatted, they noticed that one street
outside was choked with cars while another was practically empty.
They wondered why drivers weren’t taking advantage of every
possible route. If cars could be directed along less-congested roads,
wouldn’t that prevent back-ups before they began?
That idea ultimately became nunav,
navigation software that aims to stop congestion and get its users from
Point A to Point B as fast as possible. While existing services like
Bing Maps can show commuters real-time traffic jams and offer alternate
routes, nunav can prevent jams from happening in the first place by
predicting where cars are headed, Brüggeman said.
Here’s how it works: nunav tracks the location and destination of
every user in its network, currently through a Windows Phone app.
Meanwhile, its routing algorithms also crunch data about surrounding
streets, such as the number of lanes and speed limits, to calculate the
maximum number of cars they can carry before traffic bottlenecks. nunav
then “reserves” spots for drivers along their routes, making sure each
road never reaches maximum capacity.
Voila – no more traffic jams, no more lost productivity, and no more needless CO2 emissions.
In computer simulations involving 50,000 cars, nunav users get to
their destinations twice as fast and use significantly less fuel,
Brüggeman said. Now he wants to transition nunav from simulations and
trials to a market-ready product. The former university students who
created nunav have launched their own company, Graphmasters, to try and
sell nunav’s routing algorithms to manufacturers of navigation systems.
nunav drew notice from industry, press and venture capitalists
earlier this year after winning the Environmental Sustainability Award,
sponsored by Coca Cola, at the 2012 Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals. The young company can expect more attention.
Today at the Social Innovation Summit, Microsoft announced Team
Graphmasters, formerly Team Greenway, was among the five winners of the
second annual Imagine Cup Grants program.
“Through Microsoft YouthSpark, we’re aiming to create
opportunities for 300 million young people around the world over the
next three years. We want to give youth greater opportunities for
education, employment and entrepreneurship and the Imagine Cup grants, a
three-year, US$3 million competitive program that enables Imagine Cup
participants to take their projects to market as the next step in their
business development, is a great example of the innovative ways we’re
creating these opportunities for young people,” said Akhtar Badshah,
senior director, Citizenship & Public Affairs, Microsoft.
Badshah said Team Graphmasters represented the growing number of
Imagine Cup teams that keep working after the competition to bring their
solutions to market.
“One reason we were so excited to expand the Imagine Cup is
because of Microsoft’s commitment to invest and provide opportunities
for youth so they can imagine and realize their future,” he said. “The
Imagine Cup Grants are this interesting way to help these teams that are
imagining what the future can look like and then trying to go out and
realize it.”
Brüggeman said the $100,000 grant will go toward expanding his
company and hiring developers, marketers and sales staff to help bring
nunav to users worldwide.
He added that the Imagine Cup helped his team make the leap from
interesting research idea to actual business. “We are computer
scientists,” Brüggeman said. “We can program and write software, but we
had never thought about starting a company before.”
The competition’s focus on social issues resonated with them as
well. Sitting in Starbucks, the students’ coursework had taken them deep
into graph theory – a complex branch of computer science that powers
nunav’s routing algorithms. The Imagine Cup inspired them to turn that
initial spark at Starbucks into a project that could help the planet.
“We’re happy we found an application for our research that saves
the environment, saves your wallet, and that's good for everyone,”
Brüggeman said.
A Stethoscope in the Cloud
The Imagine Cup’s call to tackle real-world social issues also resonated with Hon Weng Chong, founder of Australia’s Team StethoCloud.
Microsoft announced today that the team’s innovative project to advance
the detection of respiratory illnesses such as pneumonia and asthma
also won an Imagine Cup Grant.
StethoCloud is a cloud-powered stethoscope that can help health
workers diagnose early stages of respiratory illness. By connecting a
stethoscope to a cell phone, a community health worker or unskilled
administrator can transmit diagnostic information into a Windows
Azure-based cloud service. StethoCloud’s software then analyzes a
patient’s breathing for patterns that indicate the earliest stages of
pneumonia or asthma.
Chong is a newly minted doctor who has always had an interest in
both health and technology. He heard about the Imagine Cup through a
friend and previous Imagine Cup grant recipient, Cy Khormaee from Team
Lifelens. The competition seemed like a great opportunity to bridge his
two disparate passions.
At the same time he heard about the Imagine Cup, he began his
pediatric rotation at The Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. A
senior clinician there told him that pneumonia is the leading cause of
death in children worldwide. Chong decided to tackle the disease for the
Imagine Cup.
A cheap diagnostic tool to detect pneumonia could have a huge impact on global health, Chong realized.
“Respiratory rates are the most sensitive indicators of the
disease. But they’re also one of the last vital sign measures in
medicine that haven’t become widely automated,” Chong said. “The only
machines that do automate the process are extremely expensive. “
As part of the project, Chong and his teammates prototyped a
low-cost digital stethoscope from off-the-shelf components.
Compatibility with smartphones makes it easy for the devices to connect
to the Internet and therefore the team’s powerful algorithms that could
provide clinical decision support to health workers worldwide.
Chong said the $75,000 Imagine Cup grant will support their
R&D and help determine if StethoCloud is in fact an accurate way to
diagnose pneumonia and asthma. The team is about to start clinical
trials of StethoCloud at The Royal Children’s Hospital. It could take
months to get a statistically significant sample set. If all goes well,
they’ll shift gears from R&D to commercialization. They’re already
in talks with regulatory agencies around the world about manufacturing
their digital stethoscope.
In the meantime, Chong will focus on his new career. He’s hopeful
that StethoCloud will be in use worldwide in the near future. But he’ll
wait for the data first.
“As much as I love what we're doing, this is so new that there are
many things we don’t know, and it’s possible we may find nothing,” he
said. “With cutting edge science and research, you never know what
you're going to get. The risks may be high, but the rewards even
higher.”
0 comentarii:
Post a Comment