News/Research
06 May, 2015

Revisited: CITRIS Mobile App Challenge

To promote innovation, community service, and career development among UC Berkeley students, The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) hosted a semester-long competition for students to develop mobile apps that address needs in the following categories: Civic Tech & Smart Communities, Education, Energy, Climate & Environment, and Health. Over the course of the spring 2015 semester, more than 50 students across 13 teams developed apps.

On May 5th, CITRIS hosted the Public Pitch/Demo Day when teams gave presentations on their app projects to a panel of judges and the UCB community. Featured apps included Walk With Me, which aims to solve the issue of scheduling conflicts by having students upload their schedule on FB and match them for a walk with nearby people in their network who also have free time; Snapily, a mobile grocery shopping app with a grocery pick-up model, aimed towards families using SNAP and WIC vouchers; Gyaan, which matches volunteers in India who speak one of the many local languages with students, who connect over a regular non-smart cell phone to learn English; CrowdLearn, a free learning platform that integrates all the learning modules already on the web and develops further knowledge by subject through user generated content, weEAT, which aims to build a community through food by allowing users to indicate that they are interested in food, a snack, or a coffee, and then inform the user of other individuals in their network who are in the vicinity and also seeking food; Seedit, which gives users a wifi hub that connects to sensors throughout their garden, giving real time readings on soil temperature, pH, and moisture that the user can view on their mobile app, with real time notification reminders of what these specific plants need.

The 2015 CITRIS Mobile App Challenge is made possible through the generous sponsorship of these following organizations: Microsoft, IBM, AT&T, the University of California, Pinterest, Berkeley Center for New Media, Social Apps Lab, and Amazon Web Services.