Beall Butterworth Competition Results Announced

The ninth annual Beall and Butterworth Product Design Competition culminated with an awards ceremony at Calit2 on May 24, and many engineering students received prizes for their designs. The awards included a first, second and third place for both tracks, the Beall Student Design Competition for engineering and the Butterworth Product Development Competition for information and computer sciences. The engineering side focuses on solving current design problems and developing technology while the information and computer science side centers on creating new software and computing technologies.

Thirteen Beall and 16 Butterworth teams participated, and the judges were industry specialists, entrepreneurs and UCI faculty. The six-month contest includes multiple design and coaching workshops and a demo day where the teams present their prototypes.

The Butterworth teams presented a variety of software and app designs. The first-place winner was Eupnea, an AI-based app for diagnosing tuberculosis. Second prize went to Nibble, an app tailored to make dining recommendations for groups based on the individual users’ preferences, and ChewRank, a system for ranking restaurants, placed third.

The competition also featured an international track where UCI students partnered with students from Brazil’s Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul to form 17 teams. The groups connected remotely to design their products and align their business cases to international markets. The judges selected team N3.AI as the winner based on both the product and the members’ overall cooperation skills. N3.AI presented an app for pregnant women and new mothers to monitor and improve their mental health through diet tracking and mindfulness activities. Instead of receiving money, the team’s six members will conduct exchange work at each other’s universities.

– Lilith Christopher

Read the full story on the UCI Samueli School of Engineering website.