Portuguese Students Win Open Innovation Competition

Two software engineering masters students from the Carnegie Mellon | Portugal program, Marina Santana and João Pina, won first place in Carnegie Mellon's first Open Innovation Competition on March 20. Their team won the competition with a proposal to predict the success of Internet startups by incorporating social networks into the traditional Delphi method of forecasting.

The Open Innovation Competition is an interdisciplinary project sponsored within Carnegie Mellon by Project Olympus (SCS), the Don Jones Center for Entrepreneurship (Tepper), and the Institute for Social Innovation and Masters of Information Systems (ISI, MISM, Heinz College). Nine teams of six students each presented their ideas for predicting emerging consumer Internet trends to a panel of six judges, including Charles Moldow, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who sponsored the campus-wide competition. The first-, second-, and third-place teams won prizes of $2,000, $1,000 and $500, respectively.

The students were asked to predict the next big thing on the internet. "The challenge was to know if something could become the next Twitter or Facebook," said Santana and Pina. "Our team took advantage of our multidisciplinary skills to create an idea that uses technology, social economic factors, and consumer preferences. We developed a method that brings the human factors into the equation in order to organically evolve through time until it gets to the best possible prediction."

In its proposal, "Algorithmic facilitation of the Delphi method using crowdsourced forecasting data," the team noted the success of the Delphi Method, an iterative process developed by the RAND Corp. in which a panel of experts anonymously answers questionnaires and the results are summarized by a facilitator over two or more rounds until a consensus emerges. To apply the method to forecasting Internet consumer trends, the team concluded that an extremely large group of experts would be required. They plan to use social networks to gather rankings regarding the merits of various Internet consumer ideas and then use an algorithm to evaluate each participant's predictive power over time.

"This award shows us that the world class education we are having both at Universidade de Coimbra and at Carnegie Mellon University is proving to be inspirational," said the teammates. "We feel really proud to have our work recognized even when competing at the highest level with some of the most talented people from around the world."

Santana and Pina, both students in the master's dual degree program in software engineering, are supported by the industrial affiliate NOVABASE. They are doing their dual degree master's program jointly at Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra and at Carnegie Mellon.


Adapted from the story originally posted at: http://www.cmuportugal.org/tiercontent.aspx?id=2578.