Above: Winners and judges
The concluding event
of the first multi-disciplinary competition in Israel, Smart Technologies:
Innovation for Better Life, took place last Tuesday, June 26th, 2017.
The BGU Smart
Competition was created with the understanding that every life-changing
technology begins with people from different disciplines. The competition is a
joint initiative of the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management, the
Faculty of Engineering Sciences and the Bengis Center for Entrepreneurship and
Innovation.
From the opening speed-date event
three months earlier, over 150 students from all over the country applied, met
and grouped into 21 teams working rigorously on their projects to utilize
life-improvement technology and management. Teams were required to contain at
least one management student and one engineering student among them. With the
support and accompaniment of devoted mentors, every team submitted an
impressive project.
Awards for the
projects placing first, second and third were NIS 25,000, NIS 15,000 and NIS
10,000 respectively, intended for use in furthering their ideas into forming
actual start-up companies.
Above: Award ceremony
A team of 4
dedicated entrepreneurs won first prize: Gil Boral an MBA student in the
Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management at BGU, Michal Cohen,
a graduate from the Faculty of Engineering of Ariel University; Shaked Magal
a mechanical engineer from the Azrieli College of Engineering and Tom Dekel
a graduate in government science from IDC, Herzliya. The team created BabyRoo,
a smart baby growth monitor that autonomously measures, calculates and reports
the most important growth indicators.
Second prize went to
Linoy Shafrut from BGU's Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and
Management and Daniel Schnider, an alumnus of the Faculty of Engineering
Sciences currently pursuing his second master's degree, in business
administration. Linoy and Daniel created MelaShield, a technology based
on image processing to help diagnose Melanoma.
CYou!
is a technological solution for photographers and their customers. CYou!
utilizes facial recognition technology to help its users sort themselves out of
thousands of photographs. The project’s leaders, Shabi Dagan, an MBA student
in BGU’s Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management and Tzvi Diskin,
a Ph.D. student in Computer Science, gave an impressive demonstration of their
technology and were awarded the honorable third prize.
Other praiseworthy
projects were: EDEN, a 4 legged robot developed for planting trees
efficiently on hard terrain; Social JukeBox which enables its users to
vote and influence the music played in their surroundings; SueApp, which
simplifies the process of submitting small claims; DeepSearch, a Chrome
add-on readily available in the webstore, which eases the use of search
engines; CTRL-FV enables the search function “ctrl+f” in videos. TopGuides,
a website where one can find reliable information on local tour guides; and
Novex, a secure platform to liaise between tenants and leasees.
A team of eight
judges from academia and industry evaluated the finalists: Prof. Oded
Lowengart, Dean of the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management; Prof.
Yossi Kost, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering Sciences; Prof. Dafna
Schwartz, Chairman and Director of the Bengis Center for Entrepreneurship
& Innovation and Dr. Stav Rosenzweig, a lecturer in the Guilford
Glazer Faculty of Business and Management, Mr. Elad Goshen from
Orbotech; Mr. Oleg Brodt from Deutsche Telekom; Ms. Ora Horowitz
from B.G. Negev, and Mr. Ronen Lago and Ms. Einat Yuzent.
The competition led
to the development of promising and innovative technologies and equally
important to the emergence of new entrepreneurs, who received valuable
experience and tools for their future careers.
