Congratulations to Scope, fourth-year NE students Holden Beggs, Alisha Bhanji, Fernando Peña Cantú, Zhenle Cao and Ishan Mishra, and first-year NE student Athulya Nambiar for their success in the Winter 2020 Quantum Valley Investments® Problem Pitch Competition.
In this competition, students are asked to identify an important problem to solve and conduct research necessary to thoroughly understand its scope, scale and history before pitching their findings. Teams with the best pitch are eligible to win a share of up to $30,000 in funding.
This term, six finalists were selected from a pool of thirty-five applicants to complete in two categories: Open Problems and Billion Dollar Problems. Nanotechnology Engineering students won both of the competition’s categories.
Holden Beggs, who pitched on behalf of team Scope, explained that smartphone cameras cannot optically zoom. In fact, they simply mimic true optical zoom through the use of multiple cameras. This approach increases costs, minimizes aesthetics, reduces scalability and, importantly, relies on lossy digital cropping to zoom. To solve these problems, Scope pitched a liquid crystal lens with electrically tunable focus that works in a series to achieve optical zoom without movement.
Athulya Nambiar won the Billion Dollar Problem category by identifying that there is no effective tool for women in India to protect themselves against sexual violence and pitching the concept of non-lethal weapons.
These winners now have the opportunity to double their funding, as they work with the Problem Lab to develop a solution to the problems they identified.
For more about the Quantum Valley Investments® Problem Pitch Competition, read Problem Pitch finalists announced and The Winners of the Winter 2020 Quantum Valley Investments® Problem Pitch competition.