Student wins at Technology Titan challenge
USU graduate student Joel Gillespie won $1,000 in a statewide technology innovation competition March 31. More than 100 submissions were judged for the chance at the $5,000 grand prize in the Technology Titans Innovation Challenge.
“It encourages students to think outside the box and collaborate with instructors and other students,” said Gillespie, who is working on a master’s degree in computer science.
Tech Titans is an annual contest sponsored by the University of Utah and the Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Development. Gillespie was one of 12 finalists to present ideas to a panel of judges at the University of Utah.
Gillespie’s platinum prize-winning entry comes from bioinformatics, a field in which computers are utilized in biology to sort and analyze data. The idea is called “multiple sequence alignment.”
He explained this to mean that in biology, similarities between species or the understanding of how we work is determined by similarities in DNA and protein sequences. Gillespie said due to mutation in genes, these sequences don’t always line up properly. He said there are methods to correct this error when comparing two sequences of DNA, but when stringing together multiple sequences, it becomes “really expensive, both in computer time and in the space it takes to store it.”
In multiple sequence alignment, which Gillespie said will be “faster and more accurate,” the local similarities in sequences will be slowly expanded to match the entire sequence.
Gillespie said he developed his idea over time as a “natural result of classes and discussions.” In one class, Bioinformatics II, which Gillespie says consists of three students and a professor, there was “a lot of opportunity to discuss the proven methods out there. You could say it is a novel combination of a lot of ideas and concepts,” Gillespie said.
Entries are two-page papers on a new, feasible and marketable technology from any field. The finalists then each prepared a 10-minute PowerPoint presentation and spent five minutes answering questions from the judges.
“They wanted to know who would use it, how I would market and about the content and background,” Gillespie said. “The question and answer was a little bit more intimidating.”
He said he had to cover the background of the field and problems it presented as well as his concept, how it solves the problems and how it would be used.
“I had to show that my idea is an innovation,” Gillespie said.
He said his preparation included heavy involvement with his professor and “making my wife listen to my presentation to get feedback from her.”
Working with Ming Hui Jiang in USU’s computer science department, Gillespie is currently developing a prototype of his idea.
“The end result will be an online service for analyzing DNA sequences,” Gillespie said.
“Honestly,” he said, “the best part of the competition was being done with it. Walking out was my favorite part – up until I found out I won.”
During the competition, finalists were not allowed to see or hear the presentations of the other contestants, but Gillespie said there was “a lot of variety” in the submissions.
“The grand prize winner had this idea with silicon microcameras for cell phones and video cameras,” he said
Gillespie will be at the University of Utah Thursday, April 19, to attend an awards banquet and receive his prize money.
“I would like to use it for something really cool,” he said. “But in reality it will end up as tuition money.”
-chelseyg@cc.usu.edu