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EnterpriseWorks graduate startup Agrible is featured on the 2018 Thrive Top 50 list for the second year in a row. This ranking signifies the best in agriculture technology from around the world. This year, they placed in the “Biotechnology” category, and on the 2017 list placed in the “Big Data & Analytics” category. In February, Agrible will be honored at the Thrive Innovation Forum), an annual event bringing corporates, startups, academics and investors together to share industry milestones and opportunities.

SimBioSys, Inc., a startup company at EnterpriseWorks, was inspired by the Fox Family Innovation and Entrepreneurship Certificate Program. Co-Founder Joe Peterson participated in the entrepreneurship program to learn more about entrepreneurship and product development while he was studying to earn his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Illinois. The program introduces academics to entrepreneurship and has the participants develop their own business plans while they learn more about finances, intellectual property, marketing, product development, and more. Peterson took what he learned through the program and joined forces with biophysicist John Cole Jr. to found SimBioSys, Inc. based on Peterson and Cole’s doctoral research in computational biology. The technology they are working to develop would allow doctors and scientists to peer into diseased tissue to see how cells are interacting.

EnterpriseWorks hosted this years PYGHACK as a part of the Pygmalion Festival.  The goal of the PYGHACK is to bring University of Illinois students and community together in creating technology to strengthen the Champaign-Urbana community.  With over $9,000 in prizes given and over 70 participants from the University of Illinois and the Champaign-Urbana community, the 2017 PYGHACK participants created some amazing products. The overall grand prize winner created an app called SpreadBread.  This app connects local homeless and food shelters with restaurants and stores so no food goes to waste.  Using a point based system, students and community members are rewarded for donating food.  In second place and winning the Wolfram Prize, the Safe Shepard team created the app that gives students on the University of Illinois Campus the safest and quickest route to their destination.  Safe Shepard has hopes to integrate their system with UIUC’s Safe Walks system to create an even more secure campus.  The app called Dibbs won the second runner up prize.  Their app helps reduce food waste and fight hunger in the community.  One in six people in the community have insecurities about food.  Dibbs helps food pantries receive healthier food at no extra cost.  Winning the Volition Prize, the app UIUCFoodForThePeople looks at UIUC calendars and pools together events that provide free food on campus.  Finally, winning the Pixo Prize, the Movie Pool app was created to connect those wanting to carpool to local movie theatres. For more information on PYGHACK, click here.

Dario Aranguiz, Petronics Intern and winner of the Best Technological Innovation Award at the 2017 Research Park Intern Awards, sits down with The News-Gazette to talk about the future of robotics and what Petronics has in store. Petronics, an EnterpriseWorks startup, has been working on bring Mousr to the market, a robotic mouse designed to autonomously entertain cats. Dario admits that, “Startups can have a difficult time entering a market with big players like the robotics industry. Our co-founders have worked hard to find a niche that we are uniquely suited to fill.”  Dario’s research focus is enabling robots like Mousr to navigate and understand their environment. He has been recognized for his work in demonstrating single pixel SLAM, which, if successful, will bring capabilities to the Petronics robot never before seen in a commercial product. If somebody is interested in entering the robotics industry, Dario advices that individuals “Find a project that you can really sink our teeth into, like an automated door lock system or a little RC car, and just go. Anything that gets you started is the right thing to do.” Read more about Dario and Petronics on The News-Gazette.

CHAMPAIGN– University of Illinois Research Park has a new partnership with AARP. See how the Tech Nest shows initiative to come up with new technology.

CHAMPAIGN – Research Park’s most outstanding interns were honored on Thursday, July 28, 2016 at the Research Park Summer Picnic.  Almost 600 highly skilled students work for Research Park tenant companies, where they gain valuable work experience as well as make significant contributions to internal corporate research and development programs.  The interns nominated for this year’s intern awards represent a wide range of backgrounds, and are all students at the University of Illinois. A team of Research Park professionals evaluated all nominations and voted on the finalists and winners. The honorees are as follows: Best Entrepreneurial Leadership in a Startup Jessica Su, Technology Management, PhotoniCare. “Jessica exemplifies the startup mindset of problem-solving. If she does not know something, she figures it out. In my opinion, this is the single most-defining quality of a useful start-up team member. When everything you do it pushing the envelope, there are precious little resources you can use to figure something out. Learning to make do with what you have and learn need to learn as soon as possible is absolutely crucial, and Jessica models this behavior every day while pursuing a Masters degree.” Finalists: Wesley Roth, Xerion Advanced Battery Corp.; Andrew Cona Van Castile, IllinoisRocstar; Kai Lopez, Intelinair Best Technological Innovation Anna Madison, Psychology, State Farm RDC “Anna is leading a team of interns to create a learning platform for new driving students to better learn the rules of the road. They are using 3D programming to create a VR environment so that students can become fully immersed in their learning. Anna is not only leading the project, but she has learned to program in Unity so that she can contribute and help with the pace as they fine tune the 3D assets used in the simulator.” Finalists: Mitch Van Swol, Riverbed Technology; Adrian Daneshvar, Granular Most Advanced Marketing and Business Development Sara Hoke, Communication, Common Ground Publishing. “Sara has led the redevelopment of our company social media plan; she built the strategy, that for the first time integrates all our departmental plans. She has also doubled social media traffic to websites.” Finalist: Tiffany Zhang, AbbVie; Annie Mengzhen, AE Machines Most Outstanding Undergraduate Noah Flynn, Bioengineering, AbbVie. “Noah’s primary focus was on developing a chord chart, which we will eventually incorporate as part of our toolbox. However, due to his outstanding aptitude and velocity, Noah went ahead and added a chord view to the interactome viewer, which has now been put into production and is utilized within the company. It’s a huge accomplishment for anyone in R&D IT, especially a student.” Finalists: Mariana Vetromille, Agrible; Raaji Khan, CEB Data Innovation Center Most Outstanding Graduate Avinash Ahuja, Computer Science, Anheuser-Busch InBev Bud Analytics Lab. “As a result of Avinash’s contributions with our Eagle Eye project, we have improved our customer data consolidation and analysis tool in a way that has allowed it to become scalable to any market in the world. As a result, I believe that AB InBev’s yearly revenue will increase greatly as we are able to leverage our consolidation data and analyses to reach new customers more efficiently than ever before.” Finalists: Alexander Kaczkowski, Caterpillar; Alessandro Gondolo, Agrible; Zinnia Zhang, Abbott Laboratories

CHAMPAIGN – The Champaign City Council has agreed to give preliminary approval to at an additional $500,000 to an incentive agreement now up to $3.5 million. The incentives to Research Park are in the form of tax breaks over a 15 year period. The new mixed use project by Fox/Atkins Development will be located between the I-Hotel Conference Center and the Yahoo! Building. The new $10.8 million ‘town center’ project will fill a long needed gap in the amenities at the Park. It will include retail space for restaurants and shops, conference space, office suites, and apartments on the third floor. To learn more about the project, read the News-Gazette article, or WCCU’s report.

CHAMPAIGN – Lori Gold Patterson, the CEO of Pixo, will be honored this week as Parkland College’s Entrepreneur of the Year. Patterson serves as an EIR at Research Park – a role she believes is one of her favorites – a role where she can make an impact on future leaders. As an EIR she notes that “one of the key pieces of advice I give to new business founders is to digest the advice they get from mentors and advisors, but also to challenge it as wholeheartedly as they would challenge anything else.”

Following his visit to Champaign-Urbana and a similar trip to Blacksburg, Va., tech futurist Robert Scoble blogged about how “Small Town America is primed to beat Silicon Valley in Innovation”. Scoble cites the cost of doing business in Silicon Valley combined with the talent found at research universities as a reason why these communities can hold on to more innovators and companies. “If you watch even a few of these videos you’ll see just how high quality these companies and innovators are and why I believe these small communities are primed to see rapid growth over the next decade as both new kinds of startups and bigger companies decide to move more people to these kinds of communities due to the very high costs in Silicon Valley.” Read the complete story online.