Top Prizes Awarded in the Create the Future Design Contest

On November 7, the top prizes in the 2014 Create the Future Design Contest were presented in New York City. Winners in seven categories, as well as the Grand Prize winner, received awards for their innovations in the annual contest.

Bernt Nilsson, Behrokh Khoshnevis and Coby Kleinja

The Create the Future Design Contest – sponsored by COMSOL and Mouser Electronics, and presented by Tech Briefs Media Group, an SAE International company – stimulates and rewards innovation, and has attracted more than 9,000 product design ideas from engineers, entrepreneurs, and students since 2002.

Find descriptions of all winning inventions and honorable mentions at www.createthefuturecontest.com .

Keynote speaker Monika Weber, Grand Prize winner of the 2011 Create the Future contest, talked about how far her technology has progressed since her win. The Fluid-Screen silicon biosensor chip technology she co-invented at Yale University brings the power of an entire lab into the palm of your hand to detect bacteria in blood and water in 30 minutes or less. Her spinoff company, Integrated Microfluidic Devices (IMD), is based in Boston, MA and New Haven, CT. Learn more at www.fluid-screen.com .

What if you could 3D-print emergency shelters for tens of millions of victims of war and natural disasters? And what if those shelters could be built automatically in just a day? Behrokh Khoshnevis of the University of Southern California (center) won the $20,000 Grand Prize for his answer to those questions: Contour Crafting, a computerized construction method that 3D-prints entire buildings automatically. Here, Bernt Nilsson (left) of COMSOL (contest sponsor) joins Khoshnevis and Coby Kleinjan (right) of Mouser Electronics (contest sponsor). Learn more at http://contest.techbriefs.com/grand_prize .

Each of the seven category winners received a workstation from prize sponsor Hewlett-Packard. John Bickel, Corporate Account Manager, Workstation Sales, represented HP at the event.

2014 Create the Future Design Contest winners and sponsors. Standing from left: Bernt Nilsson of contest sponsor COMSOL; Rikki Razdan, Machinery/Automation/Robotics category winner; Marilyn Cooper of contest sponsor Mouser Electronics; E. Hunt Bergen of contest supporting sponsor Analog Devices; Sumit Awasthi of Analog Devices; and Coby Kleinjan of contest sponsor Mouser Electronics. Seated from left: Jim Hester, Electronics category winner; Dipul Patel, Sustainable Technologies category winner; Steve Arnold, Automotive/Transportation category winner; Alan Kielar, Machinery/Automation/Robotics category-winning team member; Grand Prize winner Behrokh Khoshnevis; Frederick Moxley, Aerospace & Defense category winner; Yunus Alapan, Medical category winner; and Jonathan Moritz, Consumer Products category winner.