Winners of Assist 2 Develop's Open Innovation Challenge for NASA
Assist 2 Develop has concluded its first open innovation challenge. This challenge was a collaborative pilot hosted by Assist 2 Develop and sponsored by NASA.
Details of the challenge:
“Mission architects mostly start from scratch to build model elements representing the functional and physical architecture of a system in SysML. There are a few beginning libraries, but these are also local to a program or group. A common library will save system engineers a large amount of time, will allow project stakeholders to recognize common graphics and quickly understand the architecture options. This will be a prize contest open to individuals as well as university students to create a habitat-related architecture library of model elements.”
With $8,000 in cash up for grabs, participants worked through the holiday season to create the perfect submission. A panel of judges was selected by NASA to identify the top submissions based on the criteria specified.
Assist 2 Develop’s platform can help with the judging process. Our team handpicks mentors to help judge challenges and provide feedback to the challenge hosts, in this case, NASA. For our systems engineering challenge, Denis Eralp volunteered his time to help with the judging process. Once the mentor evaluation was completed, a team at NASA led by Samantha Infeld went through all of the submissions and selected the winner.
Congratulations to the winners:
Jean-Marie Gauthier is an R&D engineer from Toulouse, France & Alejandro Trujillo is a Space Systems Engineering Graduate Student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
These two participants will be splitting the cash prize 50/50. We would also like to recognize the other top submissions for their amazing work:
Steven Bailey who is a veteran (thank you for your service) and a senior systems engineer for the United States Air Force.
Nathan Vinarcik who is a Mechanical Engineering and System Modeling Student at the University of Detroit Mercy.
Thanks again to everyone who participated and made this pilot successful. This was a great opportunity for students to get hands-on experience solving a real problem for NASA. Here are a few of the top submissions for this challenge.
If you would like to learn how open innovation challenges can help drive innovation forward, help students, and solve real problems listen to this episode of the Grinding Gears podcast featuring Steve Rader who is the Deputy Director for the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation at NASA.