Congratulations Winter 2021 Quantum Valley Investments® Problem Pitch Winners

This semester we saw a group of 12 amazing finalists deliver their deep understanding of important commercial problems affecting a variety of industries.

The teams had 5-minutes to distill and record their pitch detailing the problem they identified. Judges selected winners that were best able to demonstrate they had the most thorough analysis of the problem. With multiple teams emerging as the top picks from the judges, we are excited to annouce three winning teams that each left with $7,500 in R&D funding to finance the development of a solution to the problems they presented!

Congratulations to the winners and all the finalists in this semester’s Quantum Valley Investments® Problem Pitch competition.

Quantum Valley Investments® Problem Pitch winners

Billion Dollar Problem Stream

AI Ethics 

The problem:

Biases within Machine Learning (ML) Models and Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms have caused unfair discrimination to less represented or unrepresented populations.

Team:
Monica Tsang - Arts, Psychology

Open Problems Stream

Cove

The problem:

Safety plans, a proven suicide intervention strategy, lacks effectiveness in non-controlled settings.

Team:
Hanna Kyowski - MBET, Engineering
 

Green In You

The problem:

Lack of coordination between the major players in the textile industry results in the failure of any efforts towards the establishment of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and causes the fashion industry’s take-make-waste model to persist. 73% of all clothing in circulation thus end-up getting landfilled or incinerated instead of being reused or recycled, that’s $500 billion dollars worth of materials wasted.

Team:
Tanisha Ghorpade - Environment & Business, Environment
Aarti Jain - Design, Srishti School of Design
Srishti Malaviya - Design, India Institute of Technology

All finalists presented important and well-researched problems. The Problem Lab commends each of the teams for the time and hard work they put in during the competition process. Please see the news post for the full list of Winter 2021 Quantum Valley Investments® Problem Pitch finalists.

Judges at this semester’s event included UWaterloo's own Dr. Vanessa Schweizer, Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Undergraduate Studies, and Director, Waterloo Institute for Complexity & Innovation,  Vlado Jokic, Co-founder of Footloose Games, InsightNG, and Snowbird.aero, Brian O'Grady, Founder and Principal Consultant at Search Warrant, Tricia Mumby, Co-founder of Mabel's Labels, Gavriel State, Senior Director for Simulation and AI at NVIDIA, and Fred Hosking, Analyst at the Government of Canada.

The Quantum Valley Investments® Problem Pitch Competition is made possible by $300,000 in funding from Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin, principals of Quantum Valley Investments® and founders of Blackberry.