Category Archives: Awards

Google Lunar X Prize – First 10 Teams

The X PRIZE Foundation and Google, Inc. today announced the first ten teams to register for the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon to win a remarkable $30 million in prizes. This international group of teams will compete to land a privately funded robotic craft on the Moon that is capable of roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending video, images and data back to the Earth.

“We are excited that ten teams from around the world have taken up the challenge of the Google Lunar X PRIZE,” said Megan Smith, Google’s Vice President for New Business Development. “We look forward to the exciting achievements and scientific advancements that will result from the efforts of these teams as they participate in the next great space race.”

The 10 fully registered teams now:

Aeronautics and Cosmonautics Romanian Association (ARCA): Based in Valcea, Romania and led by Dumitru Popescu, ARCA was also a contender in the Ansari X PRIZE. Two of ARCA’s most innovative projects to date have been the Demonstrator 2B rocket and Stabilo, a two-stage manned suborbital air-launched vehicle. The craft they plan to enter in the Google Lunar X PRIZE will be called the “European Lunar Explorer.”

Astrobotic: Team Astrobotic, led by Dr. William “Red” Whittaker, was formed to coordinate the efforts of Carnegie Mellon University, Raytheon Company and additional institutions. One of Carnegie Mellon’s specialties is autonomous navigation through stereo vision and other technologies. This enables Carnegie Mellon’s robots to automatically avoid obstacles and select their own route across unmapped terrain. Astrobotic will compete for the prize using their “Artemis Lander” and “Red Rover.”
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Google India Women in Engineering Award 2008

The award is open to full time woman students at recognized institutions majoring computer engineering or related fields in their 2nd to final years of a bachelor’s program and all students from a master’s or PhD program. Student must have a cumulative of at least 4.0 on a 5.0 scale, 8.0 on a 10.0 scale, or equivalent. The application deadline is January 31st. Apply online for this new award.

$500,000 for Innovation in Engineering Education

The 2008 Bernard M. Gordon Prize, recognizing innovation in engineering and technology education goes to Lawrence Carlson and Jacquelyn Sullivan, University of Colorado at Boulder. CU-Boulder Faculty To Receive $500,000 Prize For Innovation In Engineering Education

The $500,000 award honors them as founders of the Integrated Teaching and Learning Program at CU-Boulder, which infuses hands-on learning throughout K-16 engineering education to motivate and prepare tomorrow’s engineering leaders.
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The laboratory is essential to the ITL Program’s undergraduate curriculum in which engineering students from all departments, beginning in their first year, can take design courses in which small teams develop products to solve real problems. Leadership qualities emerge as teams call upon each member’s strengths to create and manage an engineering project from start to finish, and all teams showcase their creations in the semi-annual Design Expo. The first-year design course has contributed to significantly higher retention for all students across the engineering college.

A second element of the program’s curriculum is the extensive development and implementation of K-12 engineering education. About 1,700 students in grades three through 12 experience the excitement of hands-on engineering in weekly classes taught by engineering graduate students — helping them realize that engineering is about making a difference in the world. The classes are a partnership between the ITL Program and six neighborhood public schools in Lafayette as well as the Denver School of Science and Technology.

Girls Sweep Top Honors at Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology

Girls Make History by Sweeping Top Honors at a Science Contest

Janelle Schlossberger and Amanda Marinoff, both 17 and seniors at Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School on Long Island, split the first prize – a $100,000 scholarship – in the team category for creating a molecule that helps block the reproduction of drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria.

Isha Himani Jain, 16, a senior at Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Pa., placed first in the individual category for her studies of bone growth in zebra fish, whose tail fins grow in spurts, similar to the way children’s bones do. She will get a $100,000 scholarship.
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Three-quarters of the finalists have a parent who is a scientist. The parents of Alicia Darnell, who won second place, are medical researchers at Rockefeller University, and her maternal grandparents were scientists, too. Isha Himani Jain, who took home the top individual prize, published her first research paper with her father, a professor at Lehigh University, when she was 10 or 11; her mother is a doctor.

Read about projects by the finalists.

Google Offers $10 Million in Awards for Google Phone Development

Android is the new Google Phone platform. The Android Developers Blog has announced Google has offered $10 million in the Android Developer Challenge:

One of our goals in releasing the Android SDK is to unleash the creativity of application developers on the platform. We’d also like to get feedback early enough that we can make changes before the first Android-powered devices are available to the public. We plan to release updates to the SDK regularly which means that there will be additions and changes to the APIs and user experience — subscribe to this blog to stay up to date.

We’re really looking forward to seeing all the amazing applications that developers will create on an open mobile phone platform. In fact, you may even want to enter your application into the Android Developer Challenge — a USD$10 million challenge sponsored by Google to support and recognize developers who build great applications for the Android platform.

The award money will be distributed equally between two Android Developer Challenges:

Android Developer Challenge I: Submissions from January 2 through March 3, 2008
Android Developer Challenge II: This part will launch after the first handsets built on the platform become available in the second half of 2008

In the Android Developer Challenge I, the 50 most promising entries received by March 3 will each receive a $25,000 award to fund further development. Those selected will then be eligible for even greater recognition via ten $275,000 awards and ten $100,000 awards. Once again Google is showing they understand how to manage in the new world.

Sandwich Brick – Reusing Waste Material

A brick-through, Malaysia

at the British Invention Show 2007 held in London recently, waste material bagged Universiti Malaya (UM) researcher Asrul Mahjuddin Ressang Aminuddin a Diamond (Special Award for Earth Science). The lecturer, from UM’s Built Environment faculty, designed a “sandwich brick” that incorporated unwanted plastic, wood particles and other waste material at its core. Helping to save about 26% to 30% on construction costs, the sandwich brick promotes green architecture in the built environment.

“I first came up with the idea when I was assisting the tsunami victims in Thailand and Indonesia,” said Asrul Mahjuddin Ressang. “There was a lot of debris lying around and I wondered how if any could be used for rebuilding purposes.” The brick design has been well received by British construction companies as it is not only environmental friendly but is also entitled to tax incentives across Europe.

It also provides a solution to Britain’s hard-pressed construction industry following the ban on sand mining from riverbeds and waste accumulation that stands at 15 million tonnes in 2007 alone. The innovation impressed judges as it had better heat insulation compared to ordinary bricks and encouraged industries to rethink recycling at minimal costs.
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Meanwhile, engineering faculty senior lecturer Dr Mohd Hamdi Abd Shukor received a Double Gold (Special Award for Industry) – for his work on tough synthetic bio-ceramic for bone implant technology and a minimal cutting fluid application in a pulse jet form.

CMU Wins $2 million in Urban Robot Auto Race

CMU wins $2 million in urban robot race

Carnegie Mellon University won the $2 million first place prize in DARPA’s urban robot race this weekend, stealing the thunder from 2005’s Grand Challenge leader, Stanford University. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Urban Challenge awarded a total of $3.5 million in prizes on Sunday, a day after the race. Stanford University took second place, with a $1 million cash prize, and Virginia Tech won $500,000 for third place.

The Urban Challenge was a six-hour test of driverless vehicles on the suburban roads of the former George Air Force Base in Oro Grande, Calif., where the robotic cars were required to complete three missions while obeying traffic laws and avoiding obstacles and collisions with other driverless vehicles. The challenge was the first ever to test robots driving among other robots, and it was significantly harder than DARPA’s 2005 desert Grand Challenge because of that interplay and the urban setting, according to race officials.

Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers

The Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, established in 1996, honors the most promising researchers in the Nation within their fields. Nine federal departments and agencies annually nominate scientists and engineers who are at the start of their independent careers and whose work shows exceptional promise for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Participating agencies award these talented scientists and engineers with up to five years of funding to further their research in support of critical government missions.

Awards were announced today – links to some of the awardees:

Jelena Vuckovic, Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University
Matthew Rodell, Physical Scientist, NASA
Katerina Akassoglou, Assistant Professor of Pharmacology, University of California, San Diego
Carlos Rinaldi, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering University of Puerto Rico at MayagÃ¼ez
Ahna Skop, Assistant Professor of Genetics, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Krystyn J. Van Vliet, Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, MIT
Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Brown University

The Simplest Universal Turing Machine Is Proved

The Prize Is Won; The Simplest Universal Turing Machine Is Proved:

And so as part of commemorating the fifth anniversary of A New Kind of Science on May 14 this year, we announced a $25,000 prize for determining whether or not that Turing machine is in fact universal. I had no idea how long it would take before the prize was won. A month? A year? A decade? A century? Perhaps the question was even formally undecidable (say from the usual axioms of mathematics).

But today I am thrilled to be able to announce that after only five months the prize is won–and we have answer: the Turing machine is in fact universal! Alex Smith–a 20-year-old undergraduate from Birmingham, UK–has produced a 40-page proof.

Vaughan Pratt Standford CS professor, disputes the proofs validity.

PhD Student Speeds up Broadband by 200 times

John Papandriopoulos

Local whiz speeds up broadband by 200 times:

A Melbourne PhD student has developed technology to make broadband internet up to 200 times faster without having to install expensive fibre optic cables.
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Harnessing the potential power of telephone lines and DSL broadband, the technology will deliver internet speeds up to 250 megabits per second, compared with current typical speeds of between one and 20 megabits per second. Dr John Papandriopoulos, who has patent applications for the technology being processed in the US and Australia, won one of Melbourne University’s top academic prizes yesterday, a Chancellor’s Prize for Excellence in the PhD.

It sure seems like many of these breakthroughs never actually make it into my life. It would be nice if this one did. On the research page of his web site he uses the under-utilized blink tag 🙂 He also has a some nice explanations on his site:

Our technology, developed as part of my Ph.D. thesis work with advisor A/Prof. Jamie Evans, aims to manage this crosstalk interference, consequently allowing telecommunication providers to maximize the data-rates of their networks. We can do this dynamically, and adaptively, to try and get the “best compromise” of interference between neighboring lines to maximize performance. In research circles, this is known as “Dynamic Spectrum Management” (DSM).