

Get in the KNOW
on LA Startups & Tech
X
Image courtesy of Geekwire.com
LA Tech Week: 3 Student Projects Emerge from NASA’s Space Accelerator Program
Andria Moore
Andria is the Social and Engagement Editor for dot.LA. She previously covered internet trends and pop culture for BuzzFeed, and has written for Insider, The Washington Post and the Motion Picture Association. She obtained her bachelor's in journalism from Auburn University and an M.S. in digital audience strategy from Arizona State University. In her free time, Andria can be found roaming LA's incredible food scene or lounging at the beach.
Almost every company in existence today has some sort of diversity and inclusion initiative. NASA, however, took theirs one step further — providing $50,000 in funding to three underrepresented groups in academia.
NASA’s Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) partnered with Starburst Aerospace and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) to work with students as part of their beta space accelerator program. The course was designed to serve as a platform for innovators to build businesses to support technology and economic development.
In the program, students from the University of Massachusetts Boston, California State University and Fayetteville State University, along with faculty mentors, spent 10 weeks developing venture-backable businesses that have applications in multiple markets.
On Wednesday, the projects were presented as business proposals as part of L.A. Tech Week.
“L.A. has long been the aerospace capital of the world, and as we enter a new space economy, it continues to be, and we want to continue to build the industry here,” said Elizabeth Reynolds, managing director at Starburst Aerospace.
The first proposal, Mission Proteus, presented by Nhut Ho, a professor and director of NASA-Sponsored Autonomy Research Center for STEAHM (ARCS) at California State University, was designed to eliminate inefficiencies in existing autonomous software development methodology.
Photo by Andria Moore
Developers designing for autonomous software face many of the same obstacles as traditional developers, but they also face unique challenges. Proteus wants to provide a platform that unifies development tasks and workflows and allows for rapid testing. Building on NASA’s hard-won knowledge in autonomous development, the goal of Mission Proteus is to enable these systems to grow much more rapidly in other industries. Ho explained that his team wanted to eliminate the “pain” surrounding technical limitations of existing software.
The second proposal, ITX Drones, was presented by Thomas Materdey, senior lecturer of engineering in the College of Science and Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. The ITX team felt that, while revolutionary, drones today are missing a “real-life component.” The goal of ITX Drones was to create technology that would allow drones to more specifically respond to niche customer needs in ways that existing drones cannot—deliver medicines, provide surveillance or communicate with other drones. “Imagine being able to personally deliver a gift to your sister in Europe without having to wait a week,” Materdey said to the room of onlookers.
To make that a reality, their proposal aims to create drones that are capable of sending and receiving long-range data, have longer battery life and the ability to fly at any time of day. Their design incorporates fixed-wing rotors, precision landing capabilities, and lidar navigation, which would allow the drones to operate with extreme precision in novel environments.
SpireNeural, the final business proposal, would act as a software development company focused on enabling near-real-time data processing for autonomous systems with existing integrated devices. In other words, software that will speed up decision-making for our increasingly connected world.
Grace Vincent, an electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. candidate at North Carolina State University, explained that her team created SpireNueral in response to the California wildfires and the inefficiency of the tech used to detect them.
“How can we reduce overall response time?” she asked the room. “Edge computing.”
Edge computing is computational analyses that are done near the source of the data. SpireNeural was designed as an edge computing software solution that hopes to eliminate issues with wasteful computations, slow response times and power restrictions, instead making informed decisions at the edge.
For example, edge computing software could evaluate and make decisions about how to combat a forest fire at the site of the sensor rather than relaying that information to a central hub, waiting for it to be processed alongside other data and then relaying it to first responders.
The presentations were followed by a brief panel discussion on “Supporting Diversity in industry through investment,” where industry leaders from various venture capitalist firms discussed how the tech industry can work to be more inclusive.
Andria Moore
Andria is the Social and Engagement Editor for dot.LA. She previously covered internet trends and pop culture for BuzzFeed, and has written for Insider, The Washington Post and the Motion Picture Association. She obtained her bachelor's in journalism from Auburn University and an M.S. in digital audience strategy from Arizona State University. In her free time, Andria can be found roaming LA's incredible food scene or lounging at the beach.
Subscribe to our newsletter to catch every headline.
Meet the Founders Who Are Creating the Google of Lawsuits
10:04 AM | December 20, 2022
Andria Moore
Earlier this year, Kaylee Zhu, a portfolio manager at Actuarial Management Corporation (AMC), was pouring over documents when she noticed that Black Rifle Coffee, a corporation both AMC and many of their investment clients are stakeholders in, was in breach of contract. She brought the matter to AMC Holdings CEO Jonathan Wallentine who decided to file a lawsuit against Black Rifle Coffee in May, accusing the coffee company of securities fraud.
It was, however, only after AMC had spent $100,000 on lawyers and countless hours drafting the lawsuit, that Zhu learned there was a similar lawsuit, from a different company, already in the works. “It was the first time we realized that, oh, it's actually hard for people to find a complaint,” said Zhu.
So Wallentine wondered, “Why did we just pay $100,000 to draft this when we have the same exact complaint? We could have saved a pile of money, because it's just a copy and paste.”
That’s when he and Zhu decided to create a public platform that houses information about legal complaints in one place. Or, Google for lawsuits. That’s the best way to describe laWow, a digital search engine designed to serve the public by providing access to records of lawsuits and legal complaints. Earlier this month, laWow closed a $1.75 million funding round to continue bettering their platform.
“What we're building is we're putting all the information out there that doesn't exist online,” said Wallentine.
Wallentine and Zhu hope that laWow will help others avoid the headache of redoing work that already exists. By presenting all of the legal facts about a corporation including any existing legal actions brought against it, laWow helps people decide how they want to structure their own lawsuit.
“So, the real big idea is, 'why does this still have to be such a shadowy black market, when the public is entitled to this information, and it would actually do a lot more to benefit society, if [people] could actually read other complaints that are similar and be more knowledgeable?'” Wallentine said.
laWow works in the same way Google does — by prioritizing the information the user is searching for as the top results. Users can search lawsuits by corporation name or by using keywords, and the site will present all of the claims against that company in a growing database of more than 260,000 lawsuits.
“So when you search, like, ‘McDonald's sexual harassment,’ for example, you're going to get the top read result,” Wallentine explained comparing laWow to a micro internet. He added that, “Each complaint has its own website.”
Beyond the practical applications for journalists, civilians, and courts, Wallentine also thinks laWow will be immensely helpful to investors.
“So right now you have a situation where stock investors — they're buying into companies that have massive litigation and lawsuits against them and don't even disclose to their own owners that they exist,” he said. “So a lot of the [laWow site] traffic is like stock investors saying, ‘I'm not going to buy into this company unless I can at least go through laWow and check to see how many lawsuits are filed against them.’”
So, the next time you are interested in investing in a company, or curious about their morals, maybe check laWow. The evidence you find might surprise you.
From Your Site Articles
- Activision Blizzard Slapped With Another Sexual Harassment Lawsuit ›
- A Look at Activision Blizzard's Workplace Harassment Lawsuit ›
- Jury Rules in Favor of FIGS, Tosses Out False Advertising Lawsuit ›
- Tech Layoffs Continue and Influencers Are Being Blamed - dot.LA ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read moreShow less
Andria Moore
Andria is the Social and Engagement Editor for dot.LA. She previously covered internet trends and pop culture for BuzzFeed, and has written for Insider, The Washington Post and the Motion Picture Association. She obtained her bachelor's in journalism from Auburn University and an M.S. in digital audience strategy from Arizona State University. In her free time, Andria can be found roaming LA's incredible food scene or lounging at the beach.
PG&E Is Seeking EV Owners for Its New Program to Sell Energy Back to the Grid
06:00 AM | December 12, 2022
Photo courtesy of Ford
Pacific Gas and Electric is in the midst of enrolling customers into an ambitious new pilot program that seeks to use electric car vehicles as a means of powering daily life and stabilizing the grid.
The “Vehicle to Everything” pilot envisions a future in which automobiles not only draw their power from the electrical grid but can also strategically add electricity back in when demand is high — and generate some money for their owners along the way.
The concept of bidirectional energy flow using EV batteries isn’t new, and dot.LA has covered various vehicle-to-grid endeavors in the past. But having a utility company as large as PG&E onboard could begin to transform the idea into a reality.
Though the program’s website has been live for a few weeks, PG&E officially began to invite customers to pre-enroll starting on December 6th. The pilot has space for 1,000 residential customers and 200 commercial customers. PG&E isn’t releasing the numbers for how many people have signed up so far, but Paul Doherty, a communications architect at the company, says he expects the enrollment period to take several months, stretching into Q1 2023.
On the residential side, customers can receive financial incentives up to $2,500 just for enrolling in the pilot. That money, says Doherty, goes towards the cost of installing a bidirectional charger at the customer’s residence. The cost of installation varies according to the specifications of the residence, but Doherty says it’s unlikely that $2,500 will cover the full cost for most users, though it may come close, with most installations ranging in the low thousands.
But there’s more money to be had as well. Once the bidirectional charger is installed, customers can not only use the electricity to power their homes but also begin selling electricity back to the grid during flex alerts. Southern California residents may remember back in September when the electric grid was pushed to its breaking point thanks to an historic heatwave. During such events–or any other disaster that strains the system–customers can plug their vehicle in, discharge the battery and get paid.
Doherty says that users can expect to make between $10 and $50 per flex alert depending on how severe the event is and how much of their battery they’re willing to discharge. That might not seem like a huge sum, but the pilot program is slated to last two years. Meaning that if California averages 10 flex alerts per year like in 2022, customers could make $1,000. That could be enough to offset the rest of the bidirectional charger installation or provide another income stream. Not to mention, help stabilize our beleaguered grid.
There is one gigantic catch, however. PG&E has to test and validate any bi-directional charger before it can be added into the program. So far, the only approved hardware is Ford’s Charge Station Pro, meaning only one vehicle–the F-150 Lightning–can participate in the program. That should change soon as the utility company tests additional hardware from other brands. Doherty says they’re expecting to add the Nissan LEAF, Hyundai’s IONIQ 5, the KIA EV6 and others soon since it’s just a matter of testing and integrating those chargers into the program.
One name notably absent from that list is Tesla. So far, the country’s largest EV presence hasn’t announced concrete plans for bidirectional charging, meaning there’s no way for Tesla owners to participate in the pilot.
“We hope they come to the table as soon as possible,” says Doherty. “That would be a game changer.”
The commercial side of the pilot looks similar to the residential. Businesses receive cash incentives upfront to help offset the cost of installing bidirectional charger and then get paid for their contribution to stabilizing the grid in times of duress. PG&E says electric school bus fleets, especially, represent attractive targets for this technology due to their large battery capacity, high peak power needs, and predictable schedule–a strategy that mirrors what V2G pioneer Nuvve described to dot.LA back in October.
If California’s plan to transition all new car sales to electric by 2035 actually succeeds — which would require it to add nearly two million new EVs to state roads every year — that’s two million rolling, high power batteries with the potential to power our homes, our jobs and the grid at large. Getting there will be a colossal undertaking, but PG&E’s pilot should be a litmus test of sorts, assuming they can figure out how to get more vehicles than the Ford Lightning into the program.
From Your Site Articles
- 'It's the Right Time': Experts Weigh in on California's Ban on New Gas Cars ›
- Are EV School Buses the Key to Charging California’s Power Grid? ›
- CPUC Votes to Change Rooftop Solar Energy Compensation - dot.LA ›
Related Articles Around the Web
Read moreShow less
David Shultz
David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.
RELATEDTRENDING
LA TECH JOBS