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.