Three CS Teams in National Field of 64 for Student Startup Madness

1/13/2015 By Mike Koon, College of Engineering

Three CS @ ILLINOIS teams were among the 64 selected for the 2015 Student Startup Madness.

Written by By Mike Koon, College of Engineering

It may be a couple of months away from determining the brackets for the March Madness basketball tournaments, but the field of 64 is now set for the 2015 Student Startup Madness and of those, nine hail from the University of Illinois—the most of any school. And three of these nine are by CS @ ILLINOIS students.

Now in its fourth year, Student Startup Madness (SSM) affords college student digital media startups the opportunity to compete against fellow student entrepreneurs, grab the attention of potential investors and supporters, and build an elite professional network. The competition was developed in conjunction with the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive. The first two rounds of the tournament will be held online, and the competition culminates with the finals at SXSW on March 16 in Austin, Texas. Last year the startup Style Puzzle represented Illinois as part of the final eight.

SSM is promoted and supported by anchor universities in regions across the country, as well as by corporate sponsors who believe in the power of American entrepreneurship and innovation on college campuses.

The complete list of finalists is found on the Student Startup Madness website.

The three projects from CS @ ILLINOIS students are the following:

  • RESIDENT - Taylor Fairbank, Computer Science
    Currently, administrators spend hundreds of hours per program to produce their schedule using Excel. The software, RESIDENT, automates the production of customizable schedules in real time. It is a software service with a yearly license that will help 866 residency programs with 42,000 residents. The developers conducted an alpha test with the University of Illinois Urbana's Internal Medicine program and are building a spring 2015 beta.
  • Shaked - Krishna Mittal, Computer Science
    Shaked is an application for the smart watch market, with which users can exchange contact information by shaking hands with each other, helping speed up the process of meeting new people and thus networking. Shaked will be cross-platform and is aimed to be launched for various platforms like Android wear, Apple smart watch and even Microsoft band.
  • Shortnotice - Neil Nijhawan, Computer Science
    Shortnotice is a social media platform with the goal of increasing friends face-to-face interactions. A user would simply add an activity with a time and place to meet and the number of people required to make it happen and invite friends to participate. Once enough friends respond positively, they’ll each get a notice that the activity is on.

The other six projects from Illinois are the following:

  • 8countr - Ricardo Pierre-Louis, Information Sys & Info Tech
    8countr is building a small chip that attaches to an athlete’s mouth guard that detects concussions in real time. An app displays pertinent information to a user in a visual, easy way to understand.
  • Clean Connect - Amrit Singh, Civil Engineering
    Clean Connect is a web/mobile application that looks to seamlessly bridge the gap between cleaners and apartment residents across college campuses. The application will only allow for university students to register as cleaners. The cleaners will be able to create personal schedules for when they are available to clean. Apartment residents can then access the application and book cleaners based on available times and cleaner ratings. Clean Connect manages cleaner enrollment, scheduled cleanings, and payment processing:
  • FreeSkies - Jay Mulakala, Aerospace Engineering
    FreeSkies is building a video equipped quad copter and drone control intuitive to use. It will allow directors and videographers to gain complete control of their video direction at minimal cost. FreeSkies is developing a software solution that would allow users to select points in space for the quad copter to follow, producing high quality stable video.
  • HigherEd - Jake Dluhy, Aerospace Engineering
    HigherEd is creating an online suite of educational software for university students. The product will include practice problems, reference material, and interactive teaching guides. The goal is to replace textbooks in the educational system with an online reference built to teach them the way they learn. The highlight will be the integration of different visualization tools with the problems
  • MyLastNight - Ben Stoehr, Engineering Undeclared
    MyLastNight is a social safety mobile application designed to reduce some of the risk of high risk drinking that is prevalent on college campuses.

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This story was published January 13, 2015.