2006 I2P® UT Austin Entries and Award-Winners

Ten teams competed in the semi-final rounds, from which four teams were sent to the final round. Following are details on all of the entries.

Finalists

Selig First Place Award

Product

NanoTaxi: Injectable Nano-fabricated Disease Responsive Drug Delivery Device

Team Members

Abiola Ajetunmobi (Mechanical Engineering),
Luz Cristal S. Glangchai (Biomedical Engineering),
Jakub Felkl (Physics),
Rohin Mukhi (Mechanical Engineering),
Shreyas Rajasekhara (Materials Science and Engineering)

The idea integrates concepts and technologies from the biomedical field and the semiconductor industry to develop a target site-sensitive nanocapsule that selectively delivers its contents to specific sites in the human body with the unique capacity for stimulus-triggered release. The product is a stimulus-responsive drug and/or imaging agent delivery device.

Second Place

Product

FOSS for pipeline leak detection

Team Members

Erik Azulay (Science and Technology Commercialization),
Mike Breck (Science and Technology Commercialization),
Jeremy Carter (Science and Technology Commercialization),
Chyn Jing (Science and Technology Commercialization),
Sushma Patel (Science and Technology Commercialization),
Elena Schneider (Science and Technology Commercialization),
Brad Moncla (Science and Technology Commercialization)

FOSS is a Fiber Optics Sensing System using enhanced stable lasers and optical amplifiers to allow long distance seismic based detection of disturbances along the fiber optic cable. By using the FOSS system, companies can continuously monitor pipelines for leaks, receive instant feedback on their precise location and respond immediately. It represents a vast improvement in cost, accuracy, sensitivity and detection time over current leak detection methods.


Third Place

Product

Derivatives Valuation and Risk Management Kernel

Team Members

Konstantin A. Mardanov (Computational and Applied Mathematics),
Sergey P. Kolos (Computational and Applied Mathematics)

Derivatives Valuation and Risk Management Kernel is a code library that implements a novel algorithm for valuation of financial derivatives and their risk management. The algorithm and the library provide a single, easy to understand and use framework for development of effective pricing engines for even the most complex financial derivatives.


Fourth Place

Product

Software Service Meter (SSM) for SaaS

Team Members

Divakar Jandhyala (Business),
Ranjit Nayak (Business)

Software as a service (SaaS) model is rapidly being adopted in the computer industry. Companies like Salesforce.com and Google are leaders in offering SaaS. This new model poses an interesting problem for vendors on pricing their business services, since it must account not just for software development costs, but also any additional operational costs. Software Service Meter (SSM) is a novel technology to measure and bill customers based on a pay as you use model.

 

Semi-Finalists

Product

Unidirectional rotational transducer to extract sea wave power

Team Members

Ignacio F. Gallardo (Physics)

A wave transducer that converts oscillating sea water waves into electrical power. Novel hydro-turbine blades make the shaft rotate one way only; regardless of the direction of the axial water flow. This turbine collects energy even under several axial flows that may have opposite direction at the same time. Turbine stall times are reduced in comparison to unidirectional hydro-turbines when driven by oscillating currents.


Product

Semi Positive-Drive Continuously Variable Transmission

Team Members

Michael Richard Gallegos (Engineering)

The Semi Positive-Drive Continuously Variable Transmission, designed with automotive applications in mind, allows for more power transfer during acceleration and greater efficiency at constant speeds, than other CVT’s, as well as other transmission types. It relies on durable, commonplace mechanical components, unlike friction-drive CVT’s which depend on belt pulleys and such, or its positive-drive counterparts which rely on Floating Sprocket Bars, or other fragile variablediameter mechanisms.


Product

Chips2Gas

Team Members

David Horsey (Chemical Engineering),
Hanna Horsey (Business)

The product is a compact wood gasifier that is attached to the side of trucks used by tree service companies to haul waste wood chips. The gasifier is fed a supply of wood chips from the truck, and generates a combustible gas mixture that is piped to the engines of the truck and attached chipper.


Product

March Technologies

Team Members

Kevin Cinq-Mars (Mathematics)

Water purification technologies are used to keep our water supply clean and make drinking water taste better. Unfortunately current technologies require the user to either utilize a faucet with an attachment or sacrifice a significant portion of their storage space to water that has not yet been filtered making filtration technology largely inaccessible for people on the go. March Technologies has a novel design for making great tasting, cheap water available to people on the go.


Product

OPTER

Team Members

Raghavan Srinivasan (Computer Engineering),
Raghavendra Hareesh (Computer Engineering)

A lot of clever routing strategies are employed in order to effectively use optical fiber links. The existing optical routers convert the incoming optical signal into its electronic equivalent and then process them. This bottleneck greatly reduces the performance of the link as it is a dependent linear system. In order to overcome this problem we have designed an all optical router that does not convert this optical signal, and directly processes it in it's optical form itself.


Product

FireMan: High Assurance Firewall Management System

Team Members

Alex X. Liu (Computer Sciences)

FireMan is a security appliance with a suite of programs that assist security officers and administrators to manage security policies enforced on their firewalls. Firewalls are crucial elements of network security. A firewall is a network traffic filtering device serving as the security guard for a private network. Making a firewall to filter out just malicious traffic, no more and no less, is extremely important, yet extremely difficult. FireMan makes this task significantly easier.


Hosts Partners and Sponsors

Chair of Free EnterpriseTechnology Entrepreneurship Society

NSF Logo

NCIIA Logo

Selig Fund in Entrepreneurial Studies

Roden Center of Entrepreneurship

Kelleher Chair