Professors Gil Zussman (PI), Peter Kinget, John Kymissis, Dan Rubenstein, and Xiaodong Wang, won the first prize in the 2009 Vodafone America Foundation’s Wireless Innovation Project competition, which had nearly 100 university and non-profit applicants. The competition identifies and funds unique innovations using wireless related technology offering the best potential to address critical social issues around the world. The Columbia team will use the associated funding ($300K) to support their project, “Active Networked Tags for Disaster Recovery Applications”. The project focuses on developing a system that uses wireless devices to track and locate survivors trapped by fires and structural collapse. The system is based on energy harvesting tags using ultra low power communications. The project draws upon the team’s diverse research expertise in energy harvesting materials and devices, ultra low power electronics, wireless communications, and networking.

 

For additional details, please see the Wireless Innovation Project’s website and the School of Engineering and Applied Science website.