Young innovators awarded in Warsaw

The competition "Innovators Under 35" is organized by "MIT Technology Review" - the oldest technology magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Participants are innovation leaders under 35 years of age, who have contribution to the development of new technologies.

The finals of the second Polish edition of the competition took place last Tuesday in Warsaw. Kathleen Kennedy of "MIT Technology Review" said that the magazine shows its readers the world of modern technologies that never before in history had such a role as it does today. The winners have a major impact on the development of these technologies.

The competition awarded ten inspiring Polish innovators: three women and seven men. Among them, two persons received special awards.

Patrycja Wizińska-Socha won the title of the Innovator of the Year. She was awarded for a comprehensive telemedicine solution - Pregnabit that allows to monitor the health of children in the womb. "We are thinking about the global market and hope that this award will allow us to find good partners for talks on foreign markets. We are still looking for new investors and I think that might help us find them" - the winner told PAP.

The title of Social Innovator of the Year was awarded to Rafał Flis - author of the citizenship promoting platform Social Wolves, which engages young people to work on community projects. With the platform, young people organized, for example, neighbourhood picnics, which involved the local community, and taught the elderly how to shop online.

Among the ten winners of the competition was to Marta Krupińska - author of the platform Azimo that enabled fast, easy and secure money transfers. Also awarded was Katarzyna Kamińska, who together with his team used the computer model TherVira to create a new type of drug the size of individual particles, which are designed to combat the flu. Another winner - Arkadiusz Stopczyński designed the Smartphone Brain Scanner - a small and inexpensive EEG system that uses mobile phone signal to send the results and allows to diagnose epilepsy in hard to reach places. Petros Psyllos developed a portable device - Matia that helps blind people, describing the world around them through words, music and stimuli. Another personal handheld device MySpiroo has been created by another winner, Łukasz Kołtowski. It enables remote monitoring of patients with chronic respiratory diseases, such as asthma.

In the second Polish edition of the competition Grzegorz Wróblewski was awarded for the technology that allows to create flexible and transparent electrodes - at low cost and on a large scale. Another winner, Bartłomiej Kołodziejczyk develops innovative technologies useful in the production of organic electronics, organic appliances and conductive polymers. Another winner - Krystian Piećko created the solution Date Walk based on analysis and data mining, designed to prevent fraud and money laundering.

The competition "Innovators Under 35" has been organized since 1999, and for five years "MIT Technology Review" has been looking for talented innovators also outside the United States. All over the world there are already 22 editions of the competition, six of them in Europe. Among the previous winners are: Mark Zuckerberg - founder of Facebook, Konstantin Novoselov - Nobel Prize winner in physics, Max Levchin - founder of PayPal, David Karp - founder of Tumblr, Sergey Brin - co-founder of Google, Linus Torvalds - founder of Linux.

PAP - Science and Scholarship in Poland

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