Winner! TechConnect 2016-Washington DC: Innovation Awardee

Thursday, May 12, 2016

UW technology for vehicular communications received a global innovation award

A novel technology for vehicular communications developed by the University of Waterloo’s Broadband Communications Research group (https://uwaterloo.ca/broadband-communications-research-lab/) is recognized as an Innovation Awardee at the TechConnect World Innovation Summit 2016 in Washington, D.C, and listed on the TechConnect Innovation Awards home page http://techconnectworld.com/World2016/participate/innovation/awards.html. The technology received this Award because it placed in the top 15% of all submitted technologies as ranked by the TechConnect Corporate & Investment Partner Committee. The technology can efficiently enable a variety of advanced road safety applications, through reliable broadcast of safety messages by vehicles and road-side units (RSUs). Such invention can have a significant impact in reducing traffic accidents, which represent a leading contributor to human death and disability. The same UW technology has previously received the second prize in the highly competitive Valeo Innovation Challenge (among 969 teams from 450 universities in 55 countries), for a design project that can make future cars smarter and more intuitive. The BBCR group, led by Prof. Sherman Shen and Weihua Zhuang, is working in partnership with the University of Waterloo Commercialization Office (WatCo) to further develop and market the technology, with an NSERC idea-to-innovation grant of $125,000.

Demonstration video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqCWmPebu_w