Keysight Technologies announced the winners of the Keysight Innovation Challenge 2022. The six finalist teams presented their innovations to a panel of judges in Santa Rosa, Calif., on October 29, 2022.
“It was fascinating to see the wide range of innovative solutions each student team created when posed the same challenge: to design an IoT device that will help the world reach net zero,” said Jeff Harris, Vice President of Portfolio and Corporate Marketing at Keysight, who also served as a judge and co-sponsor of the Keysight Innovation Challenge.
“We added another layer of criteria to this year’s challenge, requiring that all teams were woman-led and had at least equal representation of women to men,” said Renee Morad, Innovation Challenge program lead. “It was inspiring to see such diversity on the stage and to shine a spotlight on today’s women in STEM who are leading their teams and leading the way for future generations of innovators.”
Winners of Innovation Challenge awards
First Place – $30,000 USD in cash to the design team and $10,000 USD of Keysight test equipment to their university:
Chloe Rubinowicz, Saurabh Saluja, Colin Prochnow, Kaya Jones, Anthony Banuelos, and Katarzyna Staron from the Illinois Institute of Technology for their entry, Tree of Life: Carbon Capture.
“Our team learned and experienced more from this project than anything else we’ve done before,” said Chloe Rubinowicz, lead of the Illinois Institute of Technology team. “This has served as a pivotal moment for us, learning to work with a team to develop an idea and actualize it. Winning this competition has been surreal, and we’re so excited to see where our team goes from here.”
Second Place – $25,000 USD in cash to the design team and $10,000 USD of Keysight test equipment to their university:
Vaishali Maheshkar, Yaoli Zhao, and Patatri Chakraborty from the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, for their entry, Piezo-cantilever Sensor for Real-time Monitoring of 8 Greenhouse Gasses with LoRa Communication.
Third Place – $20,000 USD in cash to the design team and $10,000 USD of Keysight test equipment to their university:
Meredith Hunter, Kaitlyn Phan, Berke Lunstad, and Grey Aycock from Vanderbilt University for their entry, EcoBuddy: IoT OBD2 Monitoring Device for Fuel Efficiency and Emission Consciousness.
The panel of judges for the 2022 Innovation Challenge event included:
Juan Pablo Celis Garcia, Youth Engagement Specialist for the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
Mehdi Sadaghdar, Electrical Engineer and popular YouTube influencer known as ElectroBOOM
Anand Lalwani, 2019 Keysight Innovation Challenge Winner
Gabriella Garcia, 2019 Keysight Innovation Challenge Winner
Jeff Harris, Vice President, Keysight Corporate and Portfolio Marketing
Mark Wallace, Chief Customer Officer and Senior Vice President of Keysight Global Sales
Susan Morton, Senior R&D Director at Keysight Technologies
Chris Williams, Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Keysight Technologies.
The Keysight Innovation Challenge is a design competition challenging graduate and undergraduate engineering and computer science students to conceptualize an Internet of Things (IoT) device or network of devices that will provide carbon neutrality monitoring at the community or corporate level.
The competition attracted 52 entries from around the world, with each entry scored by a panel of eight semi-final judges on metrics such as sensor effectiveness, AI capabilities, and cybersecurity resilience, with device prototypes evaluated by Keysight’s IoT Security Assessment software. The general public also played a role in judging by voting for their favorite design entries. These votes contributed to 10 percent of each entrant’s overall score.
