Brandeis Innovation

Sam Aronson, Alden Kennedy, Gess Kelly

Tree for the Taking works to craft innovatively sustainable guitars and accessories using waste-wood from invasive trees. We seek to lead the guitar manufacturing industry away from its extractive roots through domestic additive manufacturing, and to further democratize the electric guitar by making them more accessible.

Eleftheria Topaloglou

ProjectTee is a customized search engine that helps with finding any clothing items made from sustainable and ethical slow fashion brands that are usually small businesses as well without investing any time in research. Project Tee is hoping to create an environment where the consumers will not have to compromise their values to buy nice clothes and where these slow fashion brands will be equally accessible as the fast fashion giants.

Marco Qin, Jacob Mikelberg, Eric Siebert, Jingqian Cheng, Jian He

Chasing Stars is the one-stop destination to look for the best stargazing spot. Chasing Starts will provide the users with personalized recommendations for the best stargazing spots based on their interests and location creating a vibrant community where star enthusiasts can share tips, photos, and experiences with each other. Chasing Starts will expand its offerings to include more features and services that cater to the needs of stargazers, such as information on celestial events, stargazing gear recommendations, and more.

Peter Meng, Randy Wang, Alex Danilkovas

Owly is an app that enables college students to purchase and sell used items on campus reducing reusable waste by 20% on all campuses.

Erica Hwang, Arie Rich, Archer Heffern

Get Started is a comprehensive productivity app for those who have trouble with task initiation. The app will act as a to-do assistant who offers smart suggestions for breaking down tasks into actionable steps, helping you convert a declarative task into imperative steps.

Kalkidan Antonios, Caleb Britton

MESKEREM is an educational platform that seeks to teach young girls and women how to make their own reusable, biodegradable sanitary pads. Meskerem education platform will work with the Ministry of education in Ethiopia to teach female students how to make their own reusable and biodegradable sanitary pads.

Eyal Cohen, Bar Weiner

Pool is a dynamic payments platform that allows the consumer to safely split purchases with any group of people without the liability and anxiety of waiting for others to pay them back. By implementing a new product primitive of social payment pooling, Pool will allow the users to invite their friends to “Pool Parties”, which will alleviate the financial burden on those who front large group transactions and will streamline group-coordinated spending.

George Nekwaya, Julius Nakale, Evan Goddard, Tina Li

Buffr is a payment gateway startup that streamlines payment processes, promotes interoperability, and provides localization and customization of payment services in Namibia. Its solutions aim to solve problems related to the fragmented financial environment, increase financial inclusion, and reduce reliance on foreign gateway companies.

Susan Li, Angela Lam, Jaden Farquhar, Yalda Mauj, Zihao Li

TalentPair is a reverse job board allowing startups recruiters to reach out to their desired candidates from a list of well-rounded portfolios for tech-related roles. TalentPair is establishing a unique matchmaking system that helps startups accurately and quickly identify and recruit the best match technical talents from colleges at a low cost.

Jacob Schireson, Isaac Goldings

Blockety is building enterprise applications (DocuSign, Trustpilot) with blockchain authentication via transactions on user actions and an API for customers to build their own blockchain applications. Blockety is to build out a larger suite of tools that will allow developers to build blockchain applications more easily.

Djounia Saint-Fleurant

Caribbean Connect serves as a facilitator of international trade for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the Caribbean. Our company offers assistance and intermediary services to help these local producers export their products to foreign markets. We aim to establish a bridge for Caribbean SMEs to reach global consumers worldwide. Our goal is to bring the best products from the Caribbean to the global market by making them accessible wherever there is a potential market, especially in countries and regions with established Caribbean communities.

Alison Elliott (Graduate student, MBA Social Impact, MA Sustainable International Development)

The Farmer Foodie LLC is an established brand tapping into the rapidly growing plant-based food market with a unique and healthy Mac & Cheeze. The product is plant-based, gluten free, and made with organic ingredients. It is boxed and shelf stable, and sold directly to consumers. The founder Alison Elliott, is a product and recipe developer and has four years of industry experience as an organic farm education manager. This is her initial product launch, featuring desirable flavors she plans to incorporate into future products.

Eric Moyal (Graduate student, Graduate Professional Studies: Masters of Science in Strategic Analytics)

Project Insulin is an incorporated non-profit looking to create, manufacture, and distribute a bio-similar insulin glargine.

Beck Hayes (Graduate student, MBA/SID), Ariel Wexler (Graduate student, MBA/SID)

Sustainable aquaculture is growing the crops of the future. By 2050, there will be 2 billion more people on the planet and food production will need to increase by nearly 50 percent. Addressing food security is critical to feed a growing planet. We are connectors with a mission to improve coastal community livelihoods in Latin America through vertical regenerative ocean seaweed and shellfish farming. We provide training, resources, and new channels within the flourishing global seaweed market for vulnerable fishermen, women, and youth. By building community-led collectives, we can offer alternative income streams for families with a new and innovative farming practice.

Aida Wong (Faculty)

The concept is to create jewelry such as necklaces and earrings that bear original designs with Chinese calligraphy. While there are many "name" or "alphabet" jewelry on the market, similar items with Chinese characters that are not clichés (beyond words such as ai 愛 [love] or heping 和 平 [peace]) are rare, and even less common if the design is done in classical calligraphic sophistication. As a professor and practitioner of calligraphy, I imagine basing the jewelry on my own calligraphy with inspirational and "badass" expressions to challenge stereotypes. Proceeds would partly go to causes against anti-Asian racism.

Douglass Guernsey (Graduate student, Social Impact MBA), Varun Edupuganti (Graduate student, MS in Business Analytics)

We connect students, alumni and donors to the school's mission by creating unique, interactive NFTs to support fundraising campaigns. From digital research molecules, to jerseys, buildings, and awards, we work with artists to create beautiful and inspirational NFTs from the unique stories of our partners. Our platform is everything the university needs to create branded NFTs, from consultation to marketing to drop.

Monica Oxenreiter (Graduate student, MBA, MPP), (Graduate student, MBA), Heidi Mizenko (Graduate student, MBA), Marissa Bresnahan (Graduate student, MBA)

Neu. aims to demystify and destigmatize mental illness through our inclusive community and fashionable apparel line that utilizes innovative technology to support people in conquering the challenges of everyday life. This apparel will include OmniFiber, a special type of fabric that can help regulate breathing to mitigate symptoms of major mental health conditions.

Shiko Rugene (Graduate student, Social Impact MBA/MPP), Alton McCall (Graduate student, Social Impact MBA), Samuel Aronson (Graduate student, Social Impact MBA), Andy Mendez (Graduate student, Dual Social Impact MBA & MA in Sustainable International Development)

Tenant2Tenant is a nonprofit organization seeking to challenge the existing power dynamic between landlords and off-campus student tenants. Tenant2Tenant provides a platform to evaluate landlords, offers a consolidated place for resources, and connects students with their peers. Relationships with local universities enable us to reach vulnerable students in need of support, while creating a safe ecosystem to exchange information.

Sara Landa, MBA '22

Google and other search engines are looking for sources of unique, relevant and recent content. To raise your domain ranking, you need to prove to search engines that you are a reputable source of content. Publishing articles frequently and consistently is the key to search engine positioning. However, publishing consistently can be a pain for businesses. They usually end up outsourcing their blog and having to deal and manage shady writers hired on Fiverr or Upwork who offer no guarantees of quality and who can disappear any minute. With WrittenSpells, there's no need to hire and manage overseas contractors that deliver dubious content. Our articles are guaranteed to be error free, on time, and completely unique.

Emmanuel Obasuyi, Daniel Zhang (Graduate Student, Computer Science), Dolu Obatusin, Samuel Ugheighele, Josephine Iyore

Onye is a mobile tool for clinics and hospitals in emerging markets to aggregate patients' feedback for better healthcare service delivery. In many emerging markets, there is a breakdown in patient-doctor communication, which leads to an average 55% missed appointment rate due to health providers' inability to track key grievances that are driving patients away. This translates into negative health outcomes for patients and revenue loss for hospitals. Onye closes the patient feedback loop for health providers to improve service delivery to reduce missed appointments.

Raphael Flicker (Undergraduate Student, Economics), Emma Greszes (Undergraduate Student, Computer Science), Rebecca Sokol (Undergraduate Student, Technology Management & Biological Anthropology)

Many skilled freelancers who offer services that highlight teachable skills struggle to find clients, lack the ability to schedule their hours, and process payments. Furthermore, families who need reliable service providers are at a loss for where to find and vet them. Skilside aims to create a dual-sided marketplace that combines the freelance connecting capabilities of Upwork with the neighborhood-generated content of Nextdoor to function as a community classified. Their cost-effective and locally-focused platform would integrate features such as payment processing, scheduling, secure messaging, customer service, as well as safety verifications and background checks on providers.

Kyung Hyun Kim (Undergraduate Student, Computer Science), Huaigu Lin (Undergraduate Student, Computer Science), Sam Ruditsky (Undergraduate Student, Computer Science) 

SpeechFlow is a voice app designed to improve your presentation flow, by allowing you to control the slideshow and interact with your audience using voice. It connects your phone to a local server on your computer using Google Assistant, allowing you to easily send voice requests to manage your presentation.

Nicole Dunn (Graduate Student, Heller), Lisa Knichols (Graduate Student, Heller), Ricki Herrera (Graduate Student, Heller)

SCil, Student-Centered Incubator Labs, is a nonprofit organization that provides experiential learning and career pathways to low-income youth in South Chicago. We do this through the lens of the 3rd fastest growing market in Chicago, food services. SCil embeds itself within a high school for three years beginning with a cohort of sophomores. First, we teach 21st century skills and provide industry certification and training. The 2nd year, juniors will learn from and network with industry professionals while building a business plan for an in-school food venture. Through private partnerships and fundraising, SCil raises seed money to fund a student driven after-school business venture their senior year. This comprehensive approach yields multiple career and health outcome on the community level.

Max Brodsky (Graduate Student, Heller), Daniella Fernandes (Graduate Student, Heller), Abigail Montine (Graduate Student, Heller), Liza Korotkova (Undergraduate)

Talk is an app-based platform that on-demand connects people or organizations with interpreters. Its video-remote-interpreting provides instant services for organizations and people when they need it and for the services they need. The app will be available via the app stores and through targeted outreach in select communities and schools.

Olivia Hoy (Undergraduate Student, Biology), Ryan Xu (Undergraduate Student, Mathematics)

iRemember is an app that helps people with memory problems caused by conditions such as dementia and TBI to remember things in their daily lives. Features include reminders to take medication, medical appointments, daily organizers, calendars, and other features that make their lives easier. The color scheme for the app is dementia-friendly and it includes visual and audio reminders for patients with sensory impairments. A confirmation system for medications and reminders allows family members and medical professionals to ensure patients have taken the correct medications and are following their daily schedules.

Abdishakur Ahmed (Graduate Student, Heller), Artdeansyah Dilaga (Graduate Student, Heller), Javaid Iqbal (Graduate Student, Heller), Qaisar Ahmed (Graduate Student, Heller)

KaabTech is a for-profit social enterprise aims to finance and distribute solar-powered water pumps in rural Somalia. The vast majority of Somali farmers use inefficient engines powered by diesel for their irrigations. Diesel is too expensive for them and eats up a lot of their revenue. Furthermore, since there are no adequate roads connecting between villages and cities in Somalia, it takes a couple of days to bring diesel to the farm. Fortunately, the technology to solve this problem exists. It’s called solar pumps. KaabTech aims to make this technology accessible and affordable to Somali farmers by introducing flexible payment models, and utilizing SomLite’s existing distribution network. SomLite is a solar lantern distribution enterprise currently operating in rural Somalia.

Arianna Arguetty (Undergraduate Student, Business and Creative Writing), Xinmiao Zhang (Undergraduate Student, IGS and Business), Sirui Yu (Undergraduate Student, Clark University)

Roselle Cosmetics aims to create all-natural makeup, with ethically-sourced ingredients because we believe that being careful about what you put on your skin, and caring about your planet, should not be privileges reserved for the wealthy. Makeup often contains a host of ingredients that are considered toxins, both for your skin and for your environment. As a result of low doses, these contaminants continue to be used, except for by a few companies aiming to bring natural products to the world. But these natural products are severely overpriced, taking advantage of what is now a niche market.

Abdul Rehman (Undergraduate, Peace, Conflict, and Coexistence Studies), Andrew Hirsh (Undergraduate, Peace, Conflict, and Coexistence Studies)

Little Dove Studios is a growing team of illustrators, animators, musicians, writers, comedians, actors, filmmakers, academic experts and religious leaders, and organizational partnerships, all representing a full range of perspectives on the Arab-Israeli Conflict. We are engineering the first multi-narrative epic animated musical feature film that captures the narratives of both sides of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. We are using the collective power of music, animation, storytelling, comedy/satire, language, and culture, supported by extensive research and consultation, to mitigate the cycle of hatred by exposing the humanity of the “other” for our children. Our first step is the production of a Graphic Novel as a marketable, scalable, proof-of- concept to conduct a reading campaign for libraries and schools across the Middle East.

Roba Bulga Jilo (Graduate Student, Heller), Elizabeth Keeffe (Graduate Student, Heller), Kyle Plummer (Graduate Student, Heller), Iwona Matczuk (Graduate Student, Heller)

Nomad Dairy partners with pastoralist communities to distribute quality camel milk in Ethiopia. They provide existing cooperatives with the technical and business knowledge to access markets, starting with refrigerated transportation and expanding to value added products. Nomad Dairy envisions a future in which indigenous peoples’ quality of life is preserved through the sale of environmentally friendly products.

Jessica Sanon (Graduate Student, Heller), Adwoa Asare (Graduate Student, Heller)

SySTEMic Flow is a nonprofit organization that works with female minorities in grades 11 through the second year of college to stimulate their success in STEM careers. SySTEMic Flow exists to bridge the transitional gap that young women of color face when entering college by providing pre-college courses, mentorship, and access to practical experience.

Enet Mukurazita (Graduate Student, Heller), Priscilla Rwandarugali (Graduate Student, Heller), Gbenga Oni (Graduate Student, Heller)

African Women Energy Solutions (AWES) economically empowers African women by bringing renewable sources of energy to their communities in a sustainable manner. AWES partners with a cooperative in Africa dominated by women, to setup a local business that produces biogas from a community biodigestor as a source of renewable energy.

Joe Wilson (Graduate Student, Heller), Lena Mutemba (Graduate Student, Heller), Baker Kasawuli (Graduate Student, Heller)

SafeRide is a network of licensed riders trained in defensive driving and equipped with safety gear. Passengers request a ride through the SafeRide website or hotline and pay a standardized rate using a mobile money account. The project will begin in Monrovia with a pilot focused on university students who are one of the largest users of motorcycle taxis. They will engage customers through outreach events, social media, and networking with a long-term plan to expand within Liberia and into other West African countries.

Daniel Garcia Murillo (Undergraduate Student, Neuroscience and Computer Science)

Noosphere transforms the research and learning experience online into an interactive interface that displays webs of concepts tied to interdisciplinary connections and applications. By presenting concepts at various levels of complexity and giving users the chance to collaborate, the Noosphere brings the joy of knowledge and research to anybody willing to learn, no matter their location or educational background.

Fernando Aguilera (Graduate Student, IBS), Juan Sebastian Zuluaga (Graduate Student, IBS)

Latam Biz is the first multi-sided SaaS platform that connects startups from Latin America and emerging markets to investors from all over the world. It fosters win-win situations by giving the tools needed to develop, grow and raise capital, while providing investors with management capabilities and aggregate data collected from startups.

Marshall Chang (Alumnus, IBS), Joyce Yu (Graduate Student, IBS), Yuwen Han (Graduate Student, IBS), Yuwei Lin (Graduate Student, IBS), Zhengyang Zhou (Graduate Student, IBS)

A.I. Capital Management is a Fintech hedge fund startup building Artificial Intelligence trading systems to trade Foreign Exchange markets, using cutting edge Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) method. Their A.I. traders are able to achieve stable profits trading live markets. The startup is in the process of starting a hedge fund fully managed by A.I. Their goal is to reinvent the money managing business by eliminating human emotions and errors.

Amelie de Cirfontaine (Undergraduate Student, Studio Art), Adam Elkaim (Graduate Student, IBS), Karthik Rangan (Undergraduate Student, Business and Economics)

A.K.A is a Fashion brand that informs consumers the cultural influences behind their clothes. Each season A.K.A designs a line of clothes that is influenced by a culture, each article of clothing holds a story to it that is printed on its tag. In addition A.K.A aims to start collaborations with artisans from the culture they highlight in the given lines. Their business model follows ethical manufacturing and production.

Galen Karlan-Mason (Alumnus, IBS), Rafael Martins Guimaraes (Graduate Student, IBS), Peitong Xue (Non-Brandeis), Maeve Donohue (Non-Brandeis), Sofia Regalado (Non-Brandeis)

GreenChoice™ helps consumers quickly identify and purchase products that align with their values. GreenScores™ are personalized to user preferences and evaluate food products for freshness, nutritional value, health safety, animal welfare practices, corporate sustainability and transparency. GreenChoice™ plans to license their GreenScore™ database and technology to ecommerce sites and grocers. By providing consumers with a meaningful personal shopping tool, they help grocery stores’ personalize their online customer experience and retain/gain conscious consumers.

Wafaa Arbash (Graduate Student, Heller); Shadi Sheikhsaraf (Graduate Student, Heller); Jennie Kelly (Graduate Student, Heller); Shai Dinnar (Undergraduate Student, Neurosc ience & Business). 

WorkAround is an online platform that connects untapped skilled refugee youth with the growing market to deliver online micro tasking such as image tagging and data entry. Users can use different tools of technology such as smartphones or laptops to be able to deliver the tasks.

Huong Le (Graduate Student, Heller); Gail Carter (Graduate Student, Heller); Aaro n Cooper (Graduate Student, Heller). 

R.E.S.T (Responsible Environmental Tourism & Stewardship)  an “edutainment” museum using cutting edge technology (virtual reality, 4D, 360-camera, etc.) to create a multisensory immersive experience, “virtually” bringing people to natural and cultural heritages; So they can enjoy them without destroying them. Our museum starts with the world’s largest cave, Son Doong.

Donald Son (Graduate Student, GPS/Rabb); Trevor Zwick (External); Ak hilesh Kumar (External). 

HerbDx  provides quality assurance testing for cannabis such as potency, terpenes, pesticides, microbials and others for public safety and to meet state regulations in California.

Kevin Sun (Undergraduate Student, Economics, Business); Gavin Yahna (Undergraduate Student, Computer Science); Vince Lauffer (Undergraduate Student, Business & Computer Science); Sigal Sax (Undergraduate Student, Computer Science); Mike Makivic (Undergraduate Student, Computer Science). 

IntraLeagues  introduces an intramural, intercollegiate gaming league that hopes to provide casual gamers with a competitive gaming experience.

Eduardo Beltrame (Alumni, Biophysics, CAS); Rian Reis (UFSC, Brazil); Patrick Machado (Unisul, Brazil); Matheus Santos (Estacio, Brazil); Debarshi Nan dy (Faculty, Brandeis International Business School). 

Laissez  is an innovation management platform that allows everyone in your company team to pitch ideas, review them, and invest in the best ones in a crowdfunding style using an internal currency system. Existing solutions focus heavily on large enterprises, with comprehensive and expensive platforms. By offering a simple and easy to adopt alternative, we are tapping the neglected market segment of innovation management for small and growing companies.

William Tarimo, PhD. (Alumni, Computer Science, GSAS); Timothy Hickey (Faculty, Computer Science, GSAS); Pito Salas (Faculty, Computer Science,GSAS); Joshua Wilson (Staff, Library and Technology Services); Dan Perlman (Faculty, Biology & Center For Teaching and Learning (CTL), GSAS); Ewen Bazirake, MBA (Alumni, IBS); John Novas (Undergraduate Student, Computer Science & Business); William Feng (Boston University); Kesey Sar (Bentley University). 

Discovery Teaching  is a classroom application designed to facilitate interactive and dynamic teaching in the classroom. The platform is designed to implement a new method of teaching and learning called Computer-Supported Agile Teaching (CSAT) that was developed in a PhD dissertation. CSAT is a process that allows curriculum content, teaching & learning methods, and personnel in the classroom to co-evolve towards academic excellence through continuous transparency, inspection and adaptation.

Anina Selve (Staff, Schusterman Center for Israel Studies); Philippe Selve (External). 

MyAlly  is a network alert on a smartphone that is stress-free and is set off when you squeeze it. It lets people you’re close to know you’re in trouble. And not just people you’re close to as in best friends, good pals, or the Resident Assistant on your floor, but literally everyone on the network that’s in your proximity. Everyone on the network is an ally.

Steven Siegel (Alumni, Heller); Rodrigo Moran (Alumni, Heller); Mariam Hassan (Alumni, Heller). 

Virtuous Reality  produces virtual reality simulations that teach hard and soft skills with a trauma-healing lens. Our aim is to restore dignity to refugees by giving them the tools to obtain gainful employment.

Individuals with autism often struggle with new or unfamiliar situations, and thus medical care or even a trip to the doctor can be very difficult. Likewise, physicians and other health care providers often struggle to adequately prepare their patients with autism for medical care, and are limited by the short amount of time allocated for most health care visits. With time and support, individuals with autism can be successfully prepared to receive needed health care and interact positively with health care environments. However, due to the many competing demands faced by health care providers, they are often unable to prepare their patients with autism, and consequently needed health care becomes significantly more stressful for both patient and provider.

In order to address this problem, our team will create an iOS app to be used by individuals with autism (including adults, adolescents and children) to prepare for a visit to the doctor’s office and other routine medical procedures they may need. Our app will use a social story to prepare the individual for their appointment and what will happen, imparting information about what to expect, what will happen, and how to interact successfully with the health care team. Social stories have been used since the 1990s to prepare individuals on the autism spectrum for unfamiliar social situations. Our team of experts in medicine for individuals with autism will design the content following a social story format, and collaborate with our coder to create an interactive app that can be personalized to fit the needs of the particular individual, and/or the particular medical practice and environment.

We aim to purchase, re-claim, and re-develop land in the United States previously used for industrial and commercial uses that has been contaminated with hazardous waste or pollution and presently unutilized. Our objective is to use financing obtained through securitization technology common in the real estate industry and re-deploy these “brownfields” into a combination of clean renewable energy, commercial, and residential real estate sites.

Under Federal law, current and past owners of polluted areas maintain liability for cleanup. Using a novel financial model, our proposal is to obtain a number of these properties, pooling them, and thereby reducing the liability risk of the entire portfolio. The resulting structure will then be financed through a real estate investment trust (REIT), which will be supported by cash flows generated through rents, solar energy sales, and ancillary income sources.

Many people suffer from complex corneal diseases that cause severely impaired vision or even blindness. Extreme dryness of the eyes can lead to these problems as well. The vision of these patients cannot be corrected with typical glasses or contact lenses, as the shape of the cornea is no longer a smooth surface. The Boston Foundation for Sight (BFS) has successfully developed a method to restore vision to such patients. PROSE (Prosthetic Replacement of the Ocular Surface) requires custom fitted lenses that form a seal on the sclera, allowing a saline solution to be held between the prosthetic lens and the damaged tissue. This creates a “new cornea” and thus restores vision, but there is a significant flaw in the fitting process. The lens fitting process is done entirely by trial and error in multiple lens-fitting sessions over several days. This causes patient discomfort as well as increasing the time and cost of the process, making PROSE less appealing and accessible to those in need.

Our proposed device will survey the sclera (hence the name Sclervey) without making contact. Sclervey will generate a high-precision map of the sclera non-invasively in a matter of minutes, providing medical professionals with the necessary data to efficiently design custom fitted lenses. With funds from the 2015 SPARK Awards, we will be able to complete the research necessary for building a working prototype. This is a very important step towards implementing this device for use by clinicians and making the vision restoration process significantly faster and easier for everyone.

Health disparities cost the United States approximately one trillion dollars per year. The primary cause of these health disparities are social disparities, which arise in areas such as education, income, housing security, and food insecurity. As the Affordable Care Act and other measures increase access to health care for Americans on the low end of these social yardsticks, the cost of health disparities will only rise if we fail to address their roots—generally referred to as the “social determinants of health.”

This fact is becoming increasingly problematic for health care systems across the country, which are beginning to be held accountable for ever rising costs in health care but which lack the structures to deal with the social determinants of health.

Our project will pilot such a structure and provide a method for developing others. Through the support of a SPARK grant and by leveraging partnerships with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Vermont and Vermont Legal Aid, we will design a system that coordinates medical, social service, and legal service providers for one to two communities in Vermont. The system will detect the social and legal needs affecting the health of individual Vermonters in these areas, and it will provide the coordinated services required to address these unmet needs. Both the process of developing this system and the system itself will be replicable, and they will be highly desirable products for health care organizations nationwide.

Idea:

• Develop a campus navigation app, which will include detailed information for each step and building on campus

Problem it will solve:

• Assist people including incoming students, parents, alumni, and visitors who are unaware of where they are,  how to get around on campus and inform them about each building.

Plan:

• Explore more resources to do marketing research to get better idea about our project

• Get developer licences of the mobile platforms to test and launch our app

CalcU is an online web application that serves as a course aid and study tool to students and educators learning and teaching calculus and grade-school mathematics. It uses machine learning models to try to parse apart how different users process information, and tries to deduce the resources that each individual needs to be successful. Additionally, it has core features that incorporate AB testing into the site's functionality, hopefully someday allowing researchers to test their theories on different mechanisms for knowledge acquisition. Currently, the testing mechanism is set up to test whether or not the "learn-alike" algorithm is more effective than a random recommendation engine. It was developed on the Google Web Platform over the summer by five Brandesians, three of whom were funded by our SPARK grant of $5,000. After CalcU's primary tools were implemented, the team focused on acquiring content for the website, and over the summer scraped 12,000 practice problems, questions, and explanations from the web, each tagged and categorized, and placed in our database. The result is a learning platform that is slowly starting to be utilized in the educational community, and one that hopefully can simultaneously contribute to learning, and a greater understanding of how that process takes place.

The Disabled Parenting Project (DPP) is on a mission to leverage technology in order to create opportunities for parents and prospective parents with disabilities to connect and interact, and serve as an information clearinghouse for relevant information about adaptive parenting. Moreover, the DPP seeks to inform social policy through the development of resources, created by and for the disabled parenting community, and to promote social justice for disabled families.

Since receiving the SPARK award, the DPP has had many achievements. During the summer, we conducted an online survey to better understand the needs of our customers. The DPP received 460 responses, including disabled parents (49%), prospective parents with disabilities (12%), spouse or partners of disabled parents (9%), children of disabled parents (11%), family members (7%), advocates and professionals (32%), and others (11%). We have also partnered with a website design and development team who specializes in accessible websites and are preparing to launch the website in December. Simultaneously, we are partnering with a vendor to caption our media content, to ensure full accessibility for all people with disabilities. Meanwhile, we are continuing to conduct outreach through direct contact with organizations, social media, and presentations at conferences. Finally, we just received approval from the Brandeis IRB and will soon begin interviewing parents; these interviews will be publicly available on the DPP website. There is substantial excitement about the DPP among parents and prospective parents with disabilities as well as professionals who support these families!

Project DressCode – or with its new name, FashionSnapp – is a mobile application that intends to serve as a platform for fashion advice. On Fashionsnapp, users can upload pictures of their outfits, input the event they are attending, and get votes anonymously and instantly from the crowd. Our research has indicated that many people would appreciate the help of a crowd sourced fashion advice service.

From a commercial perspective, our hope is to reach out to industry participants such as fashion designers, brands, retailers and fashion celebrities to use the application as a platform to reach their customers or followers. Over time, our plan is to get in touch with these participants to understand their needs in the market.

FashionSnapp is a simple to use application available for iOS and Android devices. The generous SPARK Grant has allowed the team to build a working Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that is currently being tested in focus groups. Throughout the school year, the Team will be working to improve the MVP in response to the focus groups. We anticipate the launch to happen early 2016.

Little progress has been made in the prevention and control of Dengue and Dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF) due to the very special biological characteristics of the causative organism (an arbo virus) as well as the vector (Aedes aegypti and, to a lesser extent, A. albopictus -- day biting mosquitoes breeding largely in household water sources). With a dramatic increase in its incidence, Dengue has emerged as a major and costly public health problem in Sri Lanka. In the absence of an effective drug or vaccine, the only strategic options presently available are case management to prevent death and vector control to reduce viral transmission. Results of vector control programs are often far from ideal. Routine interventions against the immature stages of the vector have proved ineffective for a long time, while the results of vertical interventions are often transient. Several user-friendly Dengue vector control tools and approaches have become available but questions remain as to their effectiveness, alone or in combination, and their cost-effective delivery by public health services and the private health sector. Most research on dengue vectors focuses on the biological and behavioral characteristics of the insect.

In this project we intend to test the efficacy and effectiveness of house and school screening as an intervention to prevent Dengue Fever. The Research will be carried out in 2 phases.  Phase I (6 months) has just begun and will develop a preliminary study to design the scientific trials to investigate the feasibility, cost effectiveness and sustainability of house and school screening as an environmentally friendly method; and Phase II (1-2 years) for the study proper based on the proposal developed in Phase 1. The Phase I Study Area is the Western Province of Sri Lanka (District of Colombo) which has the highest reported incidence of Dengue/DHF in the country. We will select 2 villages in an area where there the prevalence is high and 2 villages where the prevalence is low. The project is being monitored by the Sri Lankan Ministry of Health and by the World Health Organization Mission to Sri Lanka.

This “Women Be Healthy” project expands on a series of interventions created by The Lurie Institute to educate women with developmental disabilities about the importance of cervical and breast cancer screening. The current project is an intervention for family caregivers of women with developmental disabilities, educating them about the screenings and providing training on how to be an advocate for these essential procedures.

Our team filmed the content for the online interventions with a crew from Imagavision on July 24 at Brandeis. We are currently working with Imagavision to edit the video to its final format. After we have screened the video content with a focus group of caregivers, we will work with our accessible web designer to make the content available to a wide audience.

Extensive research, including ours, shows women with developmental disabilities do not receive cervical and breast cancer screening according to US Preventive Health Services guidelines. No tested interventions target family caregivers despite the reliance of women with developmental disabilities on their caregivers to secure health care. In our prior work, we found that family caregivers lacked important knowledge: they were often unaware that their loved ones with developmental disabilities needed cervical and breast cancer screening.

We have completed the filming of our online content of our intervention. Leah Igdalsky is exploring application of this project in cancer community as well.

Remote Control and Sensing Solutions is a hardware technology start-up. We are developing a platform for remote control and sensing that includes both hardware and software components. On the hardware side, we make sensors – devices that measure temperature, humidity, light level and other desired environmental variables. The sensors connect to the local WiFi or wired networks and continuously stream data to the cloud. Our web-based software platform provides users a secure way to access and visualize the recordings from each sensor, perform data analysis, set alerts and notifications, and share information with others.

The software and hardware approaches complement each other and allow us to create highly customizable remote sensors. Being currently based at Brandeis University, we identify academic research centers and labs as potential customers. Additionally, remote monitoring of the complex processes benefits manufacturing and technology industries. We can use connectivity over cellular networks to monitor automobiles, construction and farm equipment or other remote installations (from wind turbines to oil rigs to pipelines) inaccessible via WiFi or wired Internet connection. Finally, our products can be positioned to consumers as parts of the growing Internet of Things (IoT) trend.

Using the SPARK grant funding enabled us to build and deploy several working prototypes in a research lab. We are constantly improving the web-based application used to access the data.  Currently, our efforts are concentrated on the business development: going beyond the prototype stage, developing a business plan, approaching investors and potential partners.

The objectives of this proposal are 1) to create a focused and sustained collaboration between Brandeis University and Waltham High School and 2) to create STEM inquiry based open-ended research courses at Waltham High School that have students develop a portfolio of practical skills and research projects.

Over the summer, we hosted 6 very passionate and driven Waltham High School students, who were paired with graduate students and postdocs in various science labs at Brandeis.  The WHS students spent 6 weeks working on open ended cutting edge research.  The SPARK grant gave honorariums to these mentors.  These students also participated in a collaborative and innovative course developed by Dr. Pomeranz Krummel (Assistant Professor of Biochemistry), Dr. Anique Olivier-Mason (Director of MRSEC outreach) and Eduardo Beltrame (undergraduate president of the 3D printing club), in which students were given lectures on topics of biochemistry and then applied those ideas to 3D printing models of molecules.  Honorariums were given to the lecturers. Finally, a different group of students participated in a 6 week long Python programming course taught by Dr. Francesco Pontiggia.

In the next phase, we are making collaborations between various after school clubs at Waltham High School and Brandeis University.  In collaboration with Ian Roy (Head of the Brandeis MakerLab), we purchased many quadcopters for the engineering club.  Within the month, we will also purchase 3D printers.  Then, in collaboration with Brandeis undergraduates, students in the WHS engineering club (and newly formed robotics and 3D printing club) will learn to 3D print and apply that to engineering concepts such as PID control in quadcopter, model rocket design and prosthesis design.  Many WHS students attended and even won 3rd place at the Brandeis 3D printathon.  In addition, in the coming month, in collaboration with the science club, we will start research modules in which Brandeis scientists teach practical lab skills to students and give them an open-ended research problem to solve.  Finally, students from the summer program will re-teach what they learned during science club.