ASCC lab students win cash prizes from weekend competitions

Monday, February 8, 2016

Barath Lakshmanan, Minh Pham and Yehenew Mengistu, who are graduate students in the Laboratory for Advanced Sensing, Computation and Control (ASCC Lab http://ascc.okstate.edu), recently received two awards in two competitions. 

While working as an intern at Intel, Lakshmanan and his fellow Interns won second place at the PayPal Hack'on Competition. PayPal organized a two-day application development contest 'Opportunity Hack' on October 10-11, 2015, which involved 33 hours of coding. There were about 217 people registered for the event. Each team consisted of three to five members, out of which 23 teams made their final submissions. Each team developed an application for a non-profit organization which was assigned to them. Lakshmanan worked with his fellow interns to develop an application (both a website and a mobile app) as a one-stop solution for pet care. This application was deployed on the cloud with features such as adaptive search, location based service, etc. Lakshmanan’s team was awarded second prize with a $2,000 cash prize and a guaranteed interview with PayPal. The details of the app can be found in the following link: http://devpost.com/software/nagi_app.

Pham and Mengistu, along with Mostakim Tanjil from the Department of Design Housing and Merchandising formed a team and participated in the Rural Healthcare Innovation Weekend hosted by the OSU Center for Health Systems Innovation on November 13-15, 2015  in Tulsa, Okla. The team won first prize for developing a prototype for the project "Cloud-based healthcare personal platform" with a $3,000 cash prize. Their cloud-based healthcare platform can collect ECG, respiration, blood oxygen saturation, heart rate and activity (standing, sitting, lying and moving) continuously through a smart medical garment. Signals are then uploaded wirelessly to a cloud where they are stored and analyzed automatically. The system can send a notification to the physician when something wrong happens, so that the physician can go to the web portal and check the patient's vital signs. The details of the event can be found at the following link http://chsi.okstate.edu/rural-healthcare-innovation-weekend/.