By Frida Carrera

After almost a year since the completion of the 2021 InVenture Prize Competition, we caught up with Matt McMullen and Emma Bivings who competed as finalists on the SPOT Harness team, a harness that uses sensors and vibrators to help blind dogs navigate. Their experience in the competition exposed them to multiple experiences, environments, and demands necessary for startups for the first time. As a result, they were able to distinguish their areas of growth, gain valuable insights, and make potential changes in the direction of their product.

Today, Matt is currently a graduate student seeking a master’s in music technology and Emma is a full-time operations management trainee at McMaster-Carr. The team is still developing the SPOT Harness and has even grown its team to five members. Through funding and participating in Georgia Tech’s CREATE-X Startup Launch program, they have been able to launch their company Saving Grace Pet Solutions LLC. They plan to launch SPOT Harness under this company as well as develop other future products.

To future InVenture participants, Matt advises, “Don’t give up on your idea! The most important part of making it the distance is having a team with a passion for your product.”

The SPOT Harness team will be launching a kick-starter soon for preorders ahead of the official market launch of the SPOT Harness for blind dogs. They also advise anyone who has or knows someone who has a dog suffering from vision loss to visit their website to sign up for their newly refined prototype!

Visit their website here: www.savinggrace.tech

To learn more about the upcoming InVenture Prize Competition visit https://inventureprize.gatech.edu/ . Registration closes on Jan. 19.

By Frida Carrera 

Several months after the completion of the 2021 InVenture Prize Competition, we caught up with John Wooten to see what he’s been up to! In 2021’s competition, John’s innovation Block Transfer, a decentralized stock transfer agent protocol for global financial markets, placed as a finalist.  

Today, John Wooten has been actively working to grow Block Transfer by securing final SEC approval, acquiring funding by US Bank, and submitting utility patents. He believes that by combining blockchain tech with traditional financial markets, we can fundamentally change the world. John describes his experience as a finalist in the competition as being invaluable and advises, “We didn't know we could partake given prior admission to CX. Biggest advice is to just TRY!” 

You can learn more about Block Transfer here: https://www.blocktransfer.io/consult 

To learn more about the upcoming InVenture Prize Competition visit https://inventureprize.gatech.edu/  . Registration closes on Jan. 19. 

By Frida Carrera

After almost a year since the completion of the 2021 InVenture Prize Competition, we caught up with finalist Sammie Hasen to see what she’s been up to over the past couple of months! For 2021’s competition, Sammie’s invention, BCase, placed as a finalist for its accessible, discreet, and secure birth control storage that attaches directly to the back of your phone. 

Today, Sammie successfully launched BCase in New York City on World Contraception Day as one of five brands featured by Medsur Inc, the consumer goods company founded by Sammie. On September 26th, Medsur was even invited by The Pill Club, a leading contraceptive company, to participate in the launch of their uterus-shaped vending machines in New York. Medsur now continues to garner the attention from many leading health companies in the birth control space and this is just the beginning for Sammie. 

“I plan to keep growing Medsur and follow our vision of creating a suite of innovative products for uterus owners. I am slowly growing the team, and I have now added the incredible Alexa Graham as COO. She is a rockstar, and she will help me grow Medsur to be all that we envision it to be!”, she explained. 

Sammie adds that Medsur is always looking for new ambassadors to join the team and encourages anyone passionate about the femtech space and building innovative products to consider signing up!

You can learn more about Medsur and BCase on their website here: https://www.medsurinc.com/

To learn more about the upcoming InVenture Prize Competition visit https://inventureprize.gatech.edu/ . Registration closes on Jan. 19.

Adolfo Rocco, a graduate student assistant studying under SCL faculty members Alan Erera and Alejandro Toriello, recently earned his PhD after successfully defending his thesis "Service Network Design for Parcel Trucking". Adolfo's research focuses on applications and technologies that use optimization techniques to solve complex real-world problems. Its relevance to supply chain and logistics revolves around last-mile logistics, an essential part of the economy involving the transportation of goods from producers to end-consumers. As a result of the explosive growth of e-commerce in the past decade, e-commerce sales ratios have nearly tripled globally and demand for last-mile delivery is expected to grow 78% globally by 2030. One of the main objectives of last-mile delivery logistics is to deliver packages as affordably, quickly, and efficiently as possible.

Adolfo’s dissertation research involved a large-scale package express service network design in collaboration with one of the largest courier companies in China. The objective of the project was to support the growth and evolution of the intercity logistics network (expanding coverage, offering tighter service levels, and improving efficiency). The challenge was to build flat network models given large problem size, time requirements for package movement, and consideration for relevant operational constraints. The first phase of the project focused on a detailed intracity scheduling service network design problem for megacities and developing a simple rated-based model to design shuttle and commodity paths. The next project phase focused on linehaul consolidation planning, and specifically, determining the most cost-effective hubs for cross-docking activities through developing decomposition greedy approaches that employ smaller tractable integer programming problems. In the final project phase, the focus was on a freight flow plan that conforms generalized in-tree structure and which basically generalize the in-tree concept. A main goal of the project was to build a large-scale plan when hub selection is not a concern, time requirements are relevant, and conformity and enforcement of a generalized in-tree structure that enhances operational realism is accomplished. 

When asked why Rocco was interested in this specific research area, he commented, "I am passionate about employing operations research techniques to solve challenging real-world problems. I strongly believe that city logistics plays a major role in the economy because of the growth in world population and e-commerce in past years. City logistics directly impacts the lives of people and, if not addressed correctly, can have a negative impact on quality of life. Advances in scientific methodologies and computer capabilities permit us to employ enabling cutting-edge technology to tackle these challenges appropriately. This is an exciting field that I yearn more people get involved with."
 
Before being accepted into the PhD program, Adolfo worked for five years at an operations research consulting firm in Chile building optimization models for a Workforce Management technology system. In the summer of 2019 he interned at Delta, developing an approach to increase revenue through routing optimization. In the summer of 2020, Rocco interned with the worldwide capacity planning operations research group at Amazon, enhancing scheduling models for customer service agents. After earning his PhD, Adolfo will join Amazon as a Research Scientist working with the team he previously interned with. 

Dr. Christine Ries has been invited to serve on a Review Panel for the New NSF Future Manufacturing Program on Eco-Manufacturing. 

This new multidisciplinary NSF program supports fundamental research and education of a future workforce that would enable the types of manufacturing that are not existent yet or are at such early stages of development they are not yet viable (Future Manufacturing). Reviews considered impacts on the economy, workforce, human behavior, and society at large.

IDEaS recently awarded a series of grants to stimulate the research efforts of Georgia Tech’s brightest minds in data science and related disciplines. Faculty and student research programs targeted for IDEaS awards must demonstrate research goals that will be highly cross-disciplinary and emphasize how data science can assist in related research areas.

The Data Science Research Scholarships program will support scholarships for the Spring 2020 semester and focus on Ph.D. student research that enables new collaborative research or adds a data science dimension to established research projects. Each scholarship will fund 50% of the cost of a GRA appointment, with the project PI funding the remaining 50%. 

Data Science Research Scholarships 2020 Awards

• JC Gumbart (Physics) & David Sherrill (Chemistry): Force-field Development to Enable Simulations of Xeno-nucleic Acids
• Xiuwei Zhang (CSE) & Haesun Park (CSE): Development of an Integrative Clustering Method for Single Cells
• Vince Calhoun (ECE) & Audrey Duarte (Psych): The Chronnectomics of Memory
• Annalisa Bracco (EAS), Jie He (EAS) & Matt J. Kusner (University College London): Machine-learning Techniques for Cloud Modeling
• Toyya Pujol-Mitchell (ISYE), Nicoleta Serban (ISyE) & Constantine Dovrolis (CS): Network Weight Prediction Using Node Attributes
• Xiaofan Liang (City & Reg Planning), Clio Andris (City & Reg Planning) & Diyi Yang (IC): Advancing Metrics for Spatial Social Networks in the Era of Big Data
• Omar Asensio (Public Policy): Do Micromobility Options Reduce Traffic Congestion? Quasi-experimental Evidence from Uber Movement Data
• Constantine Dovrolis (CS) & Kelly F. Ethun (Emory/Yerkes): Connections Between Social Behavior and Food Intake in Rhesus Macaques

• Diyi Yang (IC) & Mai ElSherief (IC): Defining, Characterizing, and Detecting Implicit Discriminatory Speech Online
• Umakishore Ramachandran (CS) & Zhuangdi Xu (CS): Generating Labeled Vehicle Tracking Dataset for Large-scale Geo-Distributed Camera Networks
• Surya R. Kalidindi (ME/CSE/MSE) & Christopher Saldana (ME): Advanced Materials-Manufacturing Data Curation
• Agata Rozga (IC), Thomas Ploetz (IC) & external: Annotation of Datasets from Severe Behavior Treatment Program at the Marcus Autism Center

• Diyi Yang (IC): Allen Institute for AI and University of Washington
• Josh Kacher (MSE): Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Rachel Cummings (ISyE): Georgetown University and U.S. Census Bureau

• Betsy DiSalvo (IC): Data Work Civic Engagement Panel
• Diyi Yang (IC): Natural Language Processing/Computational Social Science Seminar

Georgia Tech Arts is still seeking projects for the 2021 ACCelerate: ACC Smithsonian
Creativity and Innovation Festival in Washington, DC. All Georgia Tech students, faculty, and staff are invited to apply by May 1, 2020.

Even if you do not have a finished project exploring the intersection of science,
engineering, art, design, and technology, we encourage you to speak with Es
Famojure at esther.famojure@arts.gatech.edu about your concepts.

Learn about Georgia Tech's 2019 participants for some inspiration.

The festival brings together all institutions included in the Atlantic Coast Conference to
celebrate creativity and innovation with a specific focus on science, engineering, arts, and
design. It will be held April 9 -11, 2021 at the Smithsonian National Museum of American
History.

Submit your project for consideration by May 1, 2020 to be considered.

LEARN MORE & APPLY