Winners of the First iDream Student Challenge by Honda Revealed

Honda (News - Alert), the well known automobile manufacturer from Japan that has been operating in the U.S. since the year 1959 after it established American Honda Motor Co., Inc., the company's first overseas subsidiary, has announced the winners of the first iDream Student Challenge at the 2010 'Honda Initiation Grant' Technical Horizon Symposium held in Columbus, Ohio.

The iDream Student Challenge is a scholarship program that emphasizes upon the technologies that enhance the human life, and aims at promoting innovative ways to find solutions to everyday challenges and encouraging the spirit of leadership amongst the youngsters.

19 teams of Ohio State University science and engineering students participated in this year's competition, who presented their projects at the event to provide creative engineering solutions and innovative technologies in three different categories which were Electronics, Mobility, and Materials. In order to boost the confidence of the winning teams, the top three teams and the viewer's choice winner who was chosen by online voting collectively received a total of $60,000 as prize money.

In the Electronics category, first prize went to the No Abandonment team for the Baby Wireless Sensor project, while in the Mobility the Solar Solutions team emerged as the winner for the project named Solar Thermal Electric Car Charging Station. Similarly, in the Materials category the first place winning team was Smaller Memories to Remember who grabbed the award for its Oxide Nanowires for Next Generation Solid State Memory Devices project, while the Viewer's Choice award went to the OSU Gait Trainer Team for its Gait Trainer for Children with Cerebral Palsy project.

According to Lara Minor, Principal Engineer at Honda R&D Americas-Ohio and organizer of the HIG and iDream Student Challenge programs, 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.

The company has also been awarding grants to well known academic professors for boosting their research in a variety of areas including automotive, materials, computer and robotics, safety, intelligent vehicle, and environmental technologies, right since the year 1997 onwards. This year too, the company awarded a number of professors and offered them a grant worth $50,000 as its 'Honda Initiation Grant' or 'HIG.' These names include Andrea Thomaz from Georgia Institute of Technology for Socially Guided Machine Learning for Humanoid Robots; Alan Black (News - Alert) from Carnegie Mellon University for Conversational Speech Synthesis; Michael Harold from University of Houston for Enhancing Liquid Fuel Yield During Algae Pyrolysis in Structured Catalytic Reactors; Donald Bliss from Duke University for Light and Flexible Multi-Element Structures that Resist Sound and Vibration Transmission; and Yaser Sheikh from Carnegie Mellon University for Dynamic Visual SLAM: Reconstructing Dynamic Environments from Mobile Cameras.

In April 2010, Honda announced to select Toshiba's SCiB (News - Alert) battery as the power battery module for its new commercial-use electric motorcycle, the EV-neo.