Ezgi Demirayak (M.Eng.’17) was part of the grand prize winning team during the recent weekend-long event
Engineering Management student Ezgi Demirayak (M.Eng.’17) was part of the Grand Prize winning team at Cornell’s 1st Animal Health Hackathon, a weekend-long event held at eHub Collegetown, a flexible co-working space for emerging entrepreneurs located just off of the Ithaca, New York campus. Demirayak is a graduate student in the M.Eng. in Engineering Management Program, and has a background in Computer Science.
Co-hosted by the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine and Entrepreneurship at Cornell, the conference partnered 130 Cornell students from across degrees, majors, and colleges with professional mentors to generate ideas for promoting the health of animals.
Out of more than 25 groups, 12 were selected to give four-minute presentations as part of a “project showcase,” before an audience of peers, industry reps, and participants. The four judges then named winners in three “vertical” categories: Service Award, Software Award, and Hardware Award, as well as a grand prize winner, granting $5,000 in prizes.
Team Retriever, a group comprised of 3 veterinary students, 2 info-sci students, and Demirayak, the only Engineering Management student, won both the Grand Prize and the Hardware Award. For the competition, the team proposed a wearable device for pets that harnesses multiple low-power wireless technologies and a passive NFC failsafe to maximize the chances that a lost pet is returned. A free companion app enables the community to help search and connect lost pets with their owners. Demirayak is now considering the possibility of creating a startup for the product. She and her teammates from the competition are talking with venture capitals and professors to see how they might make their pet-tracking device a commercial product.
More information on the Animal Hackathon can be found here: https://www2.vet.cornell.edu/news/20170203/cvm-hosts-first-ever-animal-health-hackathon
Hundreds of high school students from the across the country have been challenged to design a sustainable house for college credit as part of the Cornell course Climate Change and You, the Engineer. Read more about ‘You the Engineer’ climate change course opens to Title 1 schools
For the first time in Cornell Engineering’s history, every school and department currently has, or will soon have, a woman faculty member on the college’s executive leadership team. The milestone... Read more about Excellence ascending: Engineering's women leadership at historic high
To conduct low-cost and scalable synthetic biological experiments, Cornell researchers have created a new version of a microbe to compete economically with E. coli – a bacteria used to synthesize... Read more about Low-cost microbe can speed biological discovery
