Nokia Corp (ADR) (NYSE:NOK) Bell Labs has launched the fourth annual Nokia Bell Labs Prize competition. The competition is meant to award innovators with unique ideas in science technology, mathematics and engineering with the ability to change the state of human experience and existence by a factor of 10.
Scientists, researchers and innovators from participating nations around the world are invited to present their ideas proposals before May 1, 2017. The first, second and third winners will be awarded $175,000. They will also be given an opportunity to partner with some of the world recognized researchers from Nokia Bell Labs in developing their ideas.
The competition is aimed at sourcing innovative proposals that help in solving wider social and human day to day challenges. These may include ideas that offer disruptive and innovative ideas connecting senses, things, humans, infrastructure, systems or processes to mould a future that support creation of new knowledge.
President of Nokia Bell Labs & CTO for Nokia, Marcus Weldon said the innovation, energy and collaboration that comes with the competition to the industry and the research community is incredible.
The competition features Nokia Bell Labs’ rich culture of getting solutions to some of the biggest challenges that the information and telecommunication industry faces. Close 1,000 participants have sent their ideas to the competition since it was started in 2014.
Finalists in previous competitions have come from Canada, Belgium, Germany, Spain, Korea, the UK, Turkey, and the U.S. They include grand prize winners with ideas that allow a better better Internet of Things (IoT), as well as new means of simplying huge data to extract usable information and knowledge.
In 2016, two PhD students from the University of Southern California, Hooman Abediasl and Sungwon Chung together with their professor Hossein Hashemi developed plasmonic optical phased-array technology. They invented the technology tom allow several applications in biomedical diagnostics, free-space communications and inexpensive sensing for self-driving cars.
In 2015, Brandon Lucia a Carnegie Mellon University assistant professor developed new means for developers to bring their sensing applications into environments with littles amount of energy like inside living organisms
