Honda Announces Winners of First iDream Student Challenge

Students from The Ohio State University display innovative science and engineering projects at annual symposium

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Honda announced the winners of the first iDream Student Challenge at the 2010 Honda Initiation Grant (HIG) Technical Horizon Symposium in Columbus, Ohio. With a focus on technologies that advance the quality of human life, the iDream Student Challenge is a scholarship program designed to inspire new thinking to everyday challenges and foster a spirit of innovation among the leaders of tomorrow.

This year’s competition included 19 teams of Ohio State University science and engineering students, whose projects offered creative engineering solutions and innovative technologies in one of three categories: Electronics, Mobility, and Materials. A total of $60,000 was awarded to the top three teams in each category, as well as the viewer’s choice winner who was chosen by online voting. This year’s winners are:

* Electronics, First Place: No Abandonment, Baby Wireless Sensor
* Mobility, First Place: Solar Solutions, Solar Thermal Electric Car Charging Station
* Materials, First Place: Smaller Memories to Remember, Oxide Nanowires for Next Generation Solid State Memory Devices
* Viewer’s Choice: OSU Gait Trainer Team, Gait Trainer for Children with Cerebral Palsy

“As an organization dedicated to being at the forefront of innovation, Honda created this program to inspire new thinking, foster creativity, and encourage students to be the leaders of tomorrow,” said Lara Minor, Principal Engineer at Honda R&D Americas-Ohio and organizer of the HIG and iDream Student Challenge programs.

Since 1997, Honda has also awarded grants to academic professors to further their research in a variety of areas including automotive, materials, computer and robotics, safety, intelligent vehicle, and environmental technologies. This year’s HIG recipients, who were each awarded a grant of $50,000, are:

* Andrea Thomaz, Georgia Institute of Technology, Socially Guided Machine Learning for Humanoid Robots
* Alan Black, Carnegie Mellon University, Conversational Speech Synthesis
* Michael Harold, University of Houston, Enhancing Liquid Fuel Yield During Algae Pyrolysis in Structured Catalytic Reactors
* Donald Bliss, Duke University, Light and Flexible Multi-Element Structures that Resist Sound and Vibration Transmission
* Yaser Sheikh, Carnegie Mellon University, Dynamic Visual SLAM: Reconstructing Dynamic Environments from Mobile Cameras

About Honda
Honda began operations in the U.S. in 1959 with the establishment of American Honda Motor Co., Inc., Honda’s first overseas subsidiary. Honda began U.S. production of motorcycles in 1979 and automobiles in 1982. The company has invested more than $12.1 billion in its North American operations with employment of nearly 28,000 associates, and annual purchases of more than $17.5 billion in parts and materials from suppliers in North America. Honda vehicles are manufactured using domestic and globally-sourced parts.

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