The UIST Student Innovation Contest is an annual competition that gives students the opportunity to shine and impress the world with their creative ideas! This is a great opportunity for students (high-school, undergrad or graduate) to get started with research and present themselves and their work at an internationally renowned HCI conference.
Makeblock, together with co-sponsors Microsoft, Adobe, Snap, and Facebook, provided the educational DIY kit Ultimate 2.0 to each of the student teams from all over the world.
Because of their great cooperation and performance, the following outstanding teams become the winners in this contest.
Team FOX
Most Creative
- Most Creative Award: Team FOX, Keio University–Mondo Saito, Ryosuke Fujiki and Makoto Amano
- Honorable Mention: Team VoiSports, Keio University–Motoki Watanabe, Shinsuke Tomizawa and Soma Sakata
Team DoodleIT
Best Implementation
- Best Implementation Award: Team DoodleIT, University of Michigan–Shiqing (Licia) He, Yue Wang, Mengzhu(Olivia) Ouyang, Hariharan Subramonyam
- Honorable Mention: Team MakeBar, National Taiwan University–Pai-Chen Yen and Bo-Xiang Wang
Team IMSGroup
People’s Choice
- People’s Choice Award: Team FOX, Keio University–Mondo Saito, Ryosuke Fujiki, Makoto Amano
- Honorable Mention: Team IMSGroup, Chengdu University of Information Technology–Yanjun Chen, Chenmei Yu, Yuwei Li, Sirui Wang, Yao Zeng, and Jingyun Yang
“The kit provided an easy entry point for the teams to get started immediately and develop and build their great ideas. We specifically liked the low entry barrier. Every team was asked to build one of the sample robots once they received the kit, and none of them had any problems. This allowed them to focus on their creative ideas. At the contest, the kit worked perfectly and allowed students to present their ideas and shine.” –David Lindlbauer
David Lindlbauer is a postdoctoral researcher in the field of Human-Computer Interaction at the Advanced Interactive Technologies lab at ETH Zurich. His research focuses on the intersection of the virtual and the physical world, how the two can be blended and how borders between them can be overcome. David created physical interfaces with controllable transparency that can hide and appear only when needed, or changed the appearance of real-world objects by combining them with virtual capabilities through projection and displays. Besides such optically dynamic interfaces, he has worked on projects to expand and understand the connection between humans and technology, from dynamic haptic interfaces to 3D eye-tracking.