Author: Mike T

Healthy Shopping App Wins Big in MIT STEM Competition

Two women studying at Cornell University have won $10,000 for designing and developing a Web application that can help people make healthier choices while grocery shopping.

Claire Lambrecht and Rachel Wang — both MBA students at Cornell Tech, part of the Johnson Graduate School of Management — shared the TradingScreen Technology Entrepreneurship Award at the recent “Dream it. Code it. Win it.” student coding competition for an application called Epicure.Epicure, Philippe Buhannic, Mariel Tucker, Cristina Dolan== 2nd Annual Dream It, Code It, Win It, Contest== The Cooper Union, Great Hall, NYC== April 30, 2015== ©Patrick McMullan== Photo - Sean Zanni/PatrickMcMullan.com== ==

The contest — open to university and high school students and co-organized by the MIT Club of New York, MIT Enterprise Forum of New York City and TradingScreen — is aimed at promoting creativity, diversity, and literacy in the field of computer science.

Epicure automatically analyzes online receipts from people’s personal grocery shopping and recommends healthier options to the items they’ve chosen, Lambrecht and Wang told Design News.

“Changing eating habits is hard,” Wang explained. “Existing products aren’t much help. They require you to count calories, log food journals, and buy specialty foods. Epicure makes it easy to change your eating habits. All you need to do is log in, and our system automatically handles the rest.”

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Elizabeth Montalbano – DesignNews – May 14, 2015

Dream It. Code It. Win It. 2015 Winners Announced

When Cristina Dolan, MIT Media Lab Alumna and co-founder of OneMain, organized the first Dream it. Code it. Win it. competition in 2014, she ended up winning the Traders Magazine Charitable Contribution Award and an MIT Volunteer Honor Roll nod. Four of the 2014 teams of finalists went on to launch companies from their submissions.

The student coding competition is judged based on both the quality of the problem being tackled by the competitors and on the solution itself, with the aim to “promote creativity, diversity and literacy in the field of computer science.” The judging panel brings together experts from three tech-heavy sectors: finance, media and technology.

Winners of the 2015 competition were announced and celebrated at an “Unleashing Opportunities with Technology” event April 30, where speakers discussed how computer science education can create these new opportunities across industries. Winners worked on solutions in virtual reality, computer simulation and biological-related applications, among many others. Interestingly, as was the case in 2014, the majority of the applicant pool were female.

The winners and their solutions:

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IT Business Edge – May 6, 2015