Apr 21, 2014

Big Ideas to Prevent Wildfires, Support Household Workers, and Strengthen Democracy

Nine School of Information students are working on a series of big ideas to solve important societal problems using technology.

The students are finalists in the CITRIS Big Ideas competition in IT for Society. The competition recognizes the best student ideas using information technology to address a major societal challenge; winning projects can receive up to $10,000 cash to support their project’s development.

Three teams of I School students are among the contest’s eight finalists. The winners will be announced in early May.


Extinguish

Xavier Malina (MIMS ’15), Peter Swigert (MIMS ’15), Colin MacArthur (MIMS ’14) 

Extinguish is an application for fire officials that provides accurate, high-resolution, wildfire risk predictions in real-time.

Each year wildfires destroy lives, cost $3.5 billion to suppress and send over $1 billion in property up in smoke. Despite these recognized costs, current models used by wildfire predictive services in the United States fail to effectively leverage the amount of data that is now available to them. Our team has a background in environmental science, data analytics, web development, and government, and it is our vision to create Extinguish, an application for fire officials that provides accurate, high-resolution, wildfire risk predictions in real-time.


Sahay

Priya Iyer (MIMS ’14), Seema Puthyapurayil (MIMS ’14), Eric Zan (MIMS ’14), Timothy Meyers (MIMS ’15)

Sahay connects workers in India with employment opportunities in the informal household sector as maids, cooks, drivers, and more, thereby alleviating poverty among rural and migrant workers.

Sahay in Hindi translates to ‘help’. Our solution is an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) approach that connects workers in the household informal sector (domestic help, cooks, drivers, security guards, etc.) in India with employment opportunities. Jobs will be posted and accessed on Sahay’s platform through one of the following available means: web page, Short Message Service (SMS), or an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) interface. IVR is the technology that allows customers to interact with a company’s host system via a telephone, where they listen to voice commands or menu options and respond to those commands using their keypad. Employers will post the jobs on the platform with information about the skills that they are looking for. Job seekers will receive alerts about jobs through IVR or SMS on their mobile phones.

Our solution will allow job searching beyond a job-seeker’s restricted social network. It also allows job-seekers to save time and expenses by avoiding unnecessary travel involved in job hunting. Most importantly though, we plan to address the issues of trust that exist between the two parties through identity verification, reputation systems and abuse reporting mechanisms.


DailyVote

Galen Panger (Ph.D. student), Raymon Sutedjo-The (MIMS ’14), Jeff Tsui (computer science student), and Jen Wang (MIMS ’13)

DailyVote gives citizens a voice in the workings of politics by leveraging the millions of people who read the news every day, and giving them simple tools to express the opinions they have about the politicians they read about.

DailyVote enables citizens to have a say in the workings of politics every day. We do this by taking advantage of the fact that millions of people read the news every day and have opinions about the politicians and public officials they read about. When you share a link to an article on DailyVote, a ballot appears with the names of the politicians and public figures in the article, and you’re able to vote up or down on them in response to what they said or what they did. On the homepage, DailyVote displays the most popular stories and headlines along with how people voted on the behaviors of their public officials. DailyVote is a simple and powerful way to strengthen the hand of ordinary citizens and increase the responsiveness of government to them.


All finalists will present their ideas at a poster session today from 3–5 pm in the Kvamme Atrium, on the 3rd floor of Sutardja Dai Hall.

The "Big Ideas" competition is organized by CITRIS, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, and sponsored by the Rudd Family Foundation.

(Wildfire photo by Josh O'Connor, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service)

Last updated:

October 4, 2016