Students 'Up their Game' for 2024 Beall Butterworth Competition

June 18, 2024 - “This year’s Beall Butterworth Competition was record-breaking in many ways,” says entrepreneur David Ochi, who serves as director of the product design and development competition at UC Irvine. “The number of students competing eclipsed any previous year by over 25%, and the participants demonstrated user-focused design skills, prototyping, and business and market acumen that upped the game to levels the judges had never seen before in the 12-plus years of this competition.” 

The annual competition has two elements: the Butterworth Product Development Competition, catering to students in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), and the Beall Student Design Competition, serving students in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering. ICS and Engineering students have the opportunity to team up with other UCI students and experience real-world product development and entrepreneurship. The six-month competition includes nine workshops and three coaching sessions, leading up to a final demo day with a panel of industry leaders serving as judges. 

A record-breaking 56 concepts were submitted to the competitions this year, culminating in a total of 33 projects for Demo Day. The top teams for each competition received $10,000 for first place, $6,500 for second place, and $3,500 for third place.

Butterworth Product Development Competition

Sentinel won the top prize for the Butterworth Product Development Competition. The novel driver-conscious AI dashcam detects distraction and fatigue targets vehicle fleets with high operator liabilities, such as trucking companies. The system aims to address the more than half a million semi-truck accidents each year, resulting in nearly six thousand lost lives and costing trucking companies $91,000 per accident. Sentinel, which also went on to win the UCI Paul Merage School of Business New Venture Competition, was developed by Cody He, Kevin Wu, Kyle Deck, Michael Ross, Natán Ampudia and Spike O’Carroll. 

“The resources and expertise we gained from the Butterworth competition have been crucial in shaping our approach. Through speaking to judges and guests, we’ve not only gained the skills to better pitch Sentinel but also received fantastic connections to demo our tech further in the industry,” says computer science major Spike O’Carroll. “It was a life-changing opportunity that will forever impact my entrepreneurial journey.”

Two Cube, which offers a platform for fully autonomous bioinformastics analysis and research agents, took second place in the competition. The platform streamlines single-cell RNA analysis pipelines, enabling automatic code generation, result interpretation and hypothesis development, empowering users to advance their scientific inquiries with ease. Two Cube was developed by Dylan Riffle and Shushrruth Sai Srinivasan.

Biru took third place. The maid-matching digital platform aims to provide convenient and reliable help to households in Indonesia. This product was developed by Jessica Hardisurjo, Kevin Salim, Nicholas Chairnando, Pierre Theodorus, and William Hartono.

Beall Student Design Competition

NeoMold came in first for the Beall Student Design Competition. The customizable, 3D-printable ear mold is designed to correct newborn outer ear deformities within six weeks of birth. Each mold is based on a 3D scan of a patient’s unique anatomy, increasing efficacy while decreasing complications and patient readmittance. NeoMold was developed by Christine Ly, Christine Nguyen, Frida Sandoval and Kathy Duong.

Instinct took second place. Mimicking the human brain in a microfluidic chip, Instinct aims to accelerate drug development for neurological diseases by empowering researchers and pharmaceutical companies to accurately assess the safety and efficacy of drugs. Instinct was developed by Edouard Aleman, Jay Tong, Milan Das, Nathaniel Green and Winston Doud.

PetPointDx came in third place. The user-friendly portable diagnostic platform provides pet owners with affordable and accessible at-home fecal testing kits to check for different parasites as a supplement to tele-visits with a veterinarian. PetPointDx was developed by Lawrence Kulinsky, Luke Chavez, Will Janlaor and Zarya Rajestari.

2024 International Collaboration Prize

Cartello won the competition’s international track, a track that allows UCI students to partner with students from Brazil’s Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS). Through remote collaboration, the teams design products targeting an international market. Carello is a B2B marketplace for corrugated cardboard pallets. The platform streamlines the pallet procurement process to improve efficiency. The work was a collaboration between UCI students Ariel Tjandra, Ariya Gowda and Felix Toffaneto Werner and PUCRS students Pedro Vaz Lorea and Thiago Borges de Souza. 

“This year’s competition was fierce,” says Ochi, “and we couldn’t be more proud of the students and their extraordinary efforts.”

- Shani Murray