Past Projects
Browse below to see the list of past PROBEs (PRoblem-Oriented Business Explorations) at Project Olympus. A key goal is to augment and accelerate the process of moving basic research and great ideas to development and business stages, with licensing, spin-offs, start-ups and corporate collaboration and partnering.
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Novel, targeted cures for cancer. |
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A web application that provides gym managers essential information that enables Fitness Centers to manage their clubs and gym, as well as creative tools to manage their trainers and clients. We introduce a new system to digitally interact with fitness programs and exercises thus enabling new service offerings without the need for huge investments in integrated equipment. (Founded 2011) Web | Twitter | Contact Us Team Members: Ashton Thomas, Founder and President | H&SS Information Systems 2011 Joel Geiger, VP of Engineering |
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Technology that makes it possible for business software projects to be assessed and tracked even as work is being performed, as opposed to relying on manually created weekly or monthly status reports and documents. (Founded 2008) Team Members: Jainik Shah, Tepper MBA 2009 Manish Grover, Tepper MBA 2009 |
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AssignLink
An online school planner for school communities. Our goal is to simplify school life by providing tools such as an innovative visual timeline of work and assessment scheduling analytics to connect and enhance the teaching and learning experiences. (Founded 2013) Web | Facebook | Twitter | Contact Us Team Members: Daniel Gorziglia: Founder | CIT Electrical and Computer Engineering 2016 |
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Simplifies car buying for consumers and enables dealerships to reach tech-savvy consumers. AutoRef’s mission is to bridge the gap between car dealerships and customers. We believe the entire process of shopping for a car should be easy, fast and enjoyable. We built this service because we think there is a better way. (Founded 2012) Twitter | Facebook | Contact Us Team Members: Todd Medema: COO | Business and SCS 2014 Ilteris Canberk: CS 2015 |
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faculty project
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Leverages off-the-shelf smartphone and global positioning systems to provide support for a rich set of location aware, and context aware mobile applications, including first-responder support, building navigation, retail shopping, smart transportation and more. BeaconSys has developed a cellphone-based solution involving an Internet- and Bluetooth-enabled smartphone to assist the visually impaired with grocery shopping at any store and with cooking at home. Team Members: Priya Narasimhan|CEO|Associate Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering Department |
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Blog ranker, aggregator, and search engine that adapts to user preferences by matching search to the content topic and to the tone and source of content. (Founded 2010) Team Members: Tim Simpson, Dietrich 2012 Matthew Fiorillo, SCS 2013 Collin Scangarella, MCS 2013 Aaron Bernkopf, Dietrich 2013 Alex Kaminsky, Pratt Institue 2012 |
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A micro-collaboration system that enables internet users to find and connect instantly with an expert through voice and live-video conferencing, making Bright the "eBay for advice." |
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Software solutions for political candidates and organizations. (Founded 2011) Team Members: Aaron Marks, Tepper 2011 |
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Network. Mentor. Fund. A platform to engage alumni, and facilitate unprecedented involvement with their alma mater. Alumni can become mentors and investors in companies on the platform, i.e. provide financial and intellectual capital to entrepreneurs. (Founded 2012) Team Members: Sergey Astretsov, Tepper MBA 2013 Matt Moench, Tepper MBA 2013 Luis Gonzalez, MHCI 2013 |
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College Zen Our job is making the college application process as painless as possible.
Team Members: Neil Soni, Co-founder and CEO | CIT 2013 |
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 faculty project
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A personalized, intelligent software agent that selects and facilitates optimal meeting scheduling and booking services with other users' agents. (Founded 2007) |
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Connecting crowds to crowdsourcing by pairing micro-tasks requesting crowdsourcing with appropriate target websites with large user bases. (Founded 2011) Team Members: Vamshi Ambati, PhD MCS 2011 |
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Feeds on your Food Waste Team Members: Jacob Douenias, Co-Founder|College of Fine Arts, Architecture, 2013 |
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DocDok
A private virtual library for storing and organizing articles, cases and medical images for physicians and physicians in training. (Founded 2011)
Team Members: Margaret Goldsztajn, MBA Tepper 2011 Shivdev Rao, Cardiac Fellow University of Pittsburgh Daniel Benhayon, Cardiac Fellow University of Pittsburgh Moises Morgenstern, Cardiac Fellow University of Pittsburgh |
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DSO Global (Development Solutions Opportunities) A program where students can partner with an international consulting firm to gain practical experience and potential career opportunities in global NGOs, corporations and organizations dedicated to improving the quality of human life. (Founded 2008) Team Members: Edwin Shao, Masters SCS 2009 Ayan Kishore, Masters SCS 2009 Amanbir Singh, MCS 2012 Brittney Krieger, Dietrich 2011 Stephen Ma, Dietrich 2011 Susan Lin, Dietrich 2011 Larry Han, Dietrich 2011 Sauragn Sanghvi, CIT 2010 Matthew Cheung, CIT 2011 Rajit Kumar, CIT 2010 |
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An investment fund that seeks, acquires and actively manages a growing small business in the IT, Business process outsourcing or light manufacturing sectors for an owner seeking liquidity. (Founded 2010) Team Members: George Jones, MBA Tepper 2011 Keenan Simmons, MBA Tepper 2011 |
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Bringing crypto currencies to the masses. (Founded 2014)
Team Members: Fares Nimri, Tepper MBA | 2014 |
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Software product that provides a more cost-efficient and interactive system that revolutionizes the posting of federal and state-required public notices. (Founded 2010) Team Members: Brad Barbin, Founder | Tepper 2012 Bin Zhang, Heinz | Ph.D candidate 2013 Jon Stado, Tepper | 2012 Hao Su, Computer Science M.A 2010 |
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Founded by two computer science professors turned entrepreneurs, Flashgroup.com is an online tool that connects people and content around a particular topic or theme. Based on machine learning algorithms, Flashgroup has attracted seed funding from NEA, Innovation Works, and BlueTree Allied Angels, plus grants from the DoD and an Office of Naval Research SBIR award.
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An information hub for networks of restaurants, customers and restaurant delivery services that provide reservation, ordering and transaction clearinghouse services for all food delivery orders in designated target markets. (Founded 2008) |
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We make educational cartoons for mobile devices and tablets. Our stories and games are designed to teach children fundamental concepts such as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). But your kids and you will have so much fun playing our games that they won't know they're learning until it's too late. (Founded 2012) Web | Twitter | Facebook | Contact Us Team Members: Charles Kim, CEO | Tepper MBA | 2011 Antoni Abella Vendrell, Marketing Strategist | Tepper MBA 2011 |
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Is the next generation global B2B platform dedicated to serve the needs of small to medium-sized businesses involved in global commerce. (Founded 2011)
Team Members: Rami Saad: Tepper MBA 2012 |
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faculty project
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Go-Op Smart Mobility. We are different than current car sharing services because it is not simply a fleet of rental cars. It is a set of tools which work in concert and allow municipalities and their citizens to build a smart transportation network that works for them. Go-Op creates a person-to-person vehicle lending network that allows car owners to convert their idle vehicles into revenue generating assets by renting them to friends, and friends of friends, in their social networks. When fully implemented, the Go-Op toolset will remove the restriction of round trip travel, allowing member to create flexible chains of one-way trips to accommodate their unique travel plans. Team Members: Robert Hampshire| Co-Founder| Assistant Professor of Operations Research & Public Policy, Heinz College and Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon |
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Provides cloud centric and customer-oriented phone applications and business-oriented web components infrastructure that allows businesses to shape and manage the implicit social network their customer base represents. Our technology automates and drives word-of-mouth marketing, makes customers more loyal, actively encourages them to recruit their friends, intercepts negative reviews before they got posted to the internet, and passes back all of the marketing data to the business owner. (Founded 2011) Twitter | Facebook | Contact Us Team Members: Davin Lafon, CEO, CTO and Founder | CFA |
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An easy to use, non-intrusive tool to help physical therapists understand how patients are performing home exercises. | |
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A social networking site for the deaf and hearing impaired that allows participants to communicate and share resources through chat, blogs, and discussion boards. |
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A social network focused on finding better solutions to sustainability problems through action oriented dialog. Better, means shaping a healthier, happier world that offers the same opportunities to future generations. The network focuses on helping users frame problems and suggest answers in the form of actionable steps. |
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A college communication network using mobile phones to provide quick and efficient flow of information among faculty and students. |
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Invisible Technologies Choose what you hear Tyto is a smart phone case that allows you to select the sounds you want to hear and suppress those you don't. Team Members: |
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An online blogging and pen palling platform for classrooms that seeks to increase educational outcomes for African American and African youth, empower them with digital tools and create bridges in the African diaspora. Team Members: Kelechi Anyadiegwu | Founder | HCII & MHCI |
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KnowYourStyle, Now you Can Dress Better. A men’s fashion platform that suggests complete outfits based on the clothes they want to wear. It inspires men to dress better, and facilitates the saving and purchasing of clothes. Team Members: Daniel Dallala, Tepper | MBA 2014 Steven Musche, Tepper | MBA 2014 |
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A local online marketplace powered by a crowd-sourced delivery system wherein the community members themselves provide delivery services for other community members |
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Large Scale Image Understanding Developing a set of tools to automatically categorize large-scale images based on multimodal information including visual features and online tags and community networks if they are available. We build computationally scalable models and develop algorithms to perform efficient inference, such as understanding the image contents and cleaning/completing the online tags. Team Members: Eric Xing PhD| Project leader| Associate Professor, Machine Learning Department & Language Technology Institute & Computer Science Department, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon Jun Zhu, PhD| post-doctoral researcher |
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Legal Analytics Legal Analytics allows law firms to harness historical billing, attorney and client data to quickly and accurately predict the costs of undertaking new legal matters. By using Legal Analytics, a law firm will greatly reduce the time and expense spent on the budgeting process, while maintaining, or even increasing, its profitability as the legal industry transitions from the billable hour to alternative fee arrangements. (Founded 2015)Team Members: Team Members: Gregory Martin, Co-founder | Tepper School of Business, MBA, 2015 |
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LeSyn Labs
LeSyn Labs will be the first company to offer a technology (the XO laptop), an extensive application repository, training, and a support platform, focused entirely on education.Our vision is to bring technology to 21st century education in Pittsburgh by creating an ecosystem value-added infrastructure to the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) XO laptops. (Founded 2012)Facebook | LinkedIn | Contact Us Team Members: Reginald Cox, Chief Administrative Officer | MPM Heinz College 2013 |
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We manage how much you pay for electricity. You save. We help residential electricity consumers save money, save time, and save the planet, by managing how much they pay for electricity. Team Members: Prashant Reddy, Founder | SCS PhD, 2013 |
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Service that produces high-quality, 3D images and meshes of microstructures for metal, ceramic and composite microstructures that are ready for analysis and testing.Using the models reduces the time to production exponentially. |
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A project management training simulator that offers a cost-effective alternative to current training programs employed by leading corporations. The Game Based Learning (GBL) simulator teaches how to successfully plan and manage projects so they are delivered on time and under budget. |
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Organizes medical information from a variety of forms and sources to provide medical professionals with a highly usable reference library and diagnostic tools to help with the evaluation and treatment of patients. |
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An innovative social-networking schema that circumvents the creation of stereotypes by displaying anonymous posts for others to ‘like'. With each post ‘liked', the user gains a piece of the author's profile, eventually getting his/her full picture, user name and contact information |
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A suite of mobile applications that help festival and conference attendees plan their attendance, receive up-to-date information about event activities, share their experiences through photos and messages and coordinate plans with friends and other attendees. |
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Web and mobile applications that provide a centralized location for campus event postings so that student organizations can effortlessly announce and students can easily search through campus events. |
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NAYAN (Sanskrit for "eyes") is a universally compatible sensor system for walkers that will monitor the walker use and provide feedback reports to users, family members and caregivers. NAYAN thus allows occupational therapists and caregivers to observe patient health and safety from their clinic and provide suggestions whenever needed. Team Members: Prasanna R Natarajan | Mechanical M.S. 2016 |
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OnlyinPgh is a social enterprise that is building new ways for making it easier to connect to, participate in and interact with local communities online. Through our web and mobile application called Scenable, we connect people to the businesses, places, events, news and other people that make up local communities (“Scenes”) while also providing a platform for local commerce to happen online. (Founded 2010) Team Members: Brett Wiewiora, CEO | M.A. Heinz 2012 |
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Optimization Firm
Team Members: Nicholas Sahinidis| John E. Swearingen Professor of Chemical Engineering| Carnegie Institute of Technology |
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Outliers Finance
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A social venture dedicated to improving socio-economic conditions, such as unemployment, by offering research, education, and consulting services. |
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Pillow Castle Pillow Castle is a video game development studio composed of artists, technologists and storytellers coming together to create unbelievable experiences without the need for machine guns or rocket launchers. Their goal is to create safe spaces for daydreamers to explore and imagine — a Pillow Castle, if you will. (Founded 2013) Web | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Contact Us
Team Members: Albert Shih | Entertainment Technology Center 2014 Xiao Li | Entertainment Technology Center 2014 |
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A ‘Blackboard' for managing a university's school campus events. |
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An algorithms that can dynamically adjust server capacity depending on incoming demand, thereby increasing server utilization, and decreasing the amount of power that is being wasted by idle machines, all without compromising on performance. POW’s novel approach merges advanced queueing, optimization, and stochastic processes’ theories to produce new, non-conventional analytical models. Results from POW’s work have demonstrated up to a 30% decrease in response time (for the same amount of power) or up to a 30% power savings (with negligible impact on job response time).
Team Members: Mor Harchol-Balter| Associate Professor, Computer Science Department | Carnegie Mellon University |
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Premier Distributors Online retailer of imported consumer goods. Team Members: Ro Reynolds: Dietrich BA, 2017 |
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Project Aura A Bicycle Safety Lighting System.
Team Members: Ethan Frier Co-Founder | Industrial Design 2013 Jonathan Ota Co-Founder | Industrial Design 2013 |
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Project Productivity Advisor (PPA) Project Productivity Advisor is engaged in prototype development of an Architecture Engineering Construction (AEC) system element as a project management toolbox. The PPA project is conceptualized as a system used by a professional engineer serving as a project or program manager, both at the office and in the field, requiring a ruggedized laptop with mobile-broadband connectivity, robust graphics and computational processing capabilities to query, remotely collect, analyze, calculate, and store data, and providing visually effective user-defined productivity monitoring information in a secure and timely manner. Team Mmebers: Burcu Akinci, PhD |Co-Inventor| Civil & Environmental Engineering, Carnegie Mellon Anu Pradhan, PhD |Co-Inventor| Drexel University, Civil Engineering Wm. Westberg, Wilson Held LLC, Technology Commercialization Consultant |
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A platform to maximize your mobile revenue by creating a mobile-friendly site for your online store. Prooty provides tools and resources to effectively target consumers on mobile devices. (Founded 2012) Team Members: Seong Bae, Product Development Lead | M.S. H&SS 2012 |
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A web-based application which predicts how much consumers will enjoy a bottle of wine prior to purchase based on an individualized taste profile that will allow consumers to make more informed decisions on the value of their purchase. (Founded 2010) Twitter | Facebook | Contact Us Team Members: Darren Olson, Co-founder, CEO | Tepper MBA 2011 |
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Provides a portfolio of student services to universities such as tools for scheduling laundry and finding study groups. Also provides contract services to start-up companies to help create their online presence and underlying technology.
Team Members: Todd Medema, Executive |
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Find a roommmate you like! Use our personality-based roommate matching test to make a friend in a new city, or just to avoid creepy strangers on Craigslist. RoommateFit has been used by over 7000 people, and growing every day. We also integrate with Facebook to make it as easy as possible to find your ideal roommate. (Founded 2011)
Team Members: Justin Mares, Founder |
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Schedule+
A scheduling tool for college students to plan their course schedules and find out what courses their friends are taking. Schedule+ is useful for students to know which of their friends are free during a certain time to help organize events. Team Members: Steven Fackler, SCS and MCS | May 2013 |
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SchemaFusion One-stop information hub with integrated and visualized data for high efficiency building management. SchemaFusion is a software solution that uses Machine Learning and Cloud Computing technology to integrate, organize and distribute complex building information to facilities operators and building owners, who can search, visualize and analyze building information using multi-platform devices. By enabling proactive planning and execution of the O&M tasks, SchemaFusion not only directly reduces the maintenance cost, but also minimizes the down-time and yields a safer, more comfortable building environment. (Founded 2013) Team Members: Te Gao | CEE Ph.D candidate, 2013 Jianan Jiang | CEE & EPP M.S., 2013 Chen Feng | CEE & EPP M.S., 2014 Chang Liu | CEE Ph.D candidate, 2014 Xiaofei Wang | Public Relationship and Training Specialist |
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Online searchable database of local scholarships. |
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A game-based-learning platform for individualized group training and development. Significantly increases decision-making skills and magnifies content retention in the light of real-world scenarios and pressure using the power of interactive game technology. |
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A new style of recommendation/search engine that uses bleeding edge algorithms to help you find more things you'll love. |
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A Facebook application that enables users to eliminate shipping charges when making online purchases. ShipTogether combines users' orders based upon users' privacy and sharing settings. |
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SimSim has a vision to be the world’s access management solution. The first product is a smart lock that helps a consumer access homes and buildings in a safe, reliable way. (Founded 2015) Team Members: Raghav Kandubai, Tepper MBA, 2015 |
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Technology that dramatically reduces the cost of video-streaming by allowing peer-to-peer file sharing of pieces of video files between browsers of concurrent viewers. This occurs with no special software, local application or plug-in, or deterioration of the original content. (Company acquired) |
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RFID technology that allows retail stores to increase service quality by generating personalized clothing and accessory recommendations for individual customers. |
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A segmentation algorithm, Spectral Rounding, with broad applications in the medical image-processing domain. By efficiently computing and exploiting global functions of medical scans, such scans can be decomposed into a collection of meaningful components in nearly linear time. Unlocking the latent potential of medical imaging by providing quantitative analysis tools that satisfy the time and reliability constraints of a clinical workflow.
Team Members: Hiroshi Ishikawa, MD | Assistant Professor, Department of Ophthalmology and Bioengineering | University of Pittsburgh |
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Synergy Games Team Members: |
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The ‘Netflix' for ebooks. (Founded 2010) Team Members: |
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Tailored Fit Pandora for clothes shopping Team Members: Nathaniel Eliason, CEO | DC Philosophy 2015 |
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TellTale Team Members: Jamie Callan| Professor Language Technologies Institute| Carnegie Mellon University |
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Provides real-time personalized news feeds. (Founded 2011) Team Members: |
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Thinkerous Team Members: Aaron Zhang | ECE 2013 Graduated |
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Digital electronic devices are everywhere, from smart phones to car navigation systems, and they will only become even more prevalent in the future. Transactional DA focuses on the technology to automate the development of efficient and verified hardware components for such digital devices. At the heart of our technology is the transactional hardware description and synthesis framework, which can automate critical development tasks that traditionally required tedious and error prone manual effort. Our technology significantly reduces hardware development time and effort, while improving the quality of the resulting hardware implementations. |
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The Ultimate Gift Guide App is a tool that lets users easily buy gifts for their friends, family or significant others, without ruining the surprise. We know that finding that perfect gift can be hard, and the last thing you want to do is disappoint that special someone by buying them the wrong gift or worse a great gift but wrong size. The Ultimate Gift Guide will enable you to check out a friend or family member’s profile to see their sizes, favorite stores and products they want, so you know exactly what to get. We take the stress and guessing out of gift giving! (Founded 2014) Team Members: |
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A location-based chatroom service delivered through mobile platforms such as Android and iOS. It allows people at a particular location to share moments with each other in real-time. (Founded 2012) |
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# marks the spot. A local search tool crowdsourcing tags to increase the visibility and relevance of neighborhood business and culture. (Founded 2013) Team Members: Mitch Turck, Co-Founder Carlos Gil, Co-Founder | ECE 2014 |
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V-teractive
Designs and develops interactive games that will better engage audiences and drive traffic to clients' site and services. Specializes in gaming elements for online dating and library reading programs. (Founded 2009) Team Members: |
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Yarn George Magovern, Co-founder | Tepper School of Business, 2016 Harini Peri, Co-founder | ETIM, 2015 |
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Faculty are welcome to create their own PROBE projects. Browse below to see the list of current faculty PROBEs at Project Olympus.