Communications of the ACM
Turning Big Ideas Into Solutions
Credit: Dan Page
Student teams' development of innovative tools has earned them awards in the University of California (UC) Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society's recent Big Ideas competition.
Winning first prize in the contest was Politify, an algorithm developed by UC Berkeley undergraduates Nikita Bier and Jeremy Blalock that enables anyone to enter a few simple facts about themselves to determine how presidential candidates' agendas will impact their lives and the U.S. government.
"I wanted to find a way to quantify [candidates'] proposals," Bier says. "We read their Web sites, and we wrote direct mathematical algorithms for what they propose."
Politify has drawn 250,000 uses and is fueling interest among both Democrats and Republicans.
Another project recognized in the Big Ideas contest is a pen that illuminates to help stroke victims and autistic children write by hand using a force sensor. Other notable competition entries include an effort that offers low-income people information about social services through text messaging, a project that uses new technology to identify incipient diabetes by non-invasively measuring microcirculation in the eye, and a prototype oral history archive of radio recording collections.
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