TDRR Recap

On July 15th, the Office of Technology Development hosted its fifth annual networking event, Tech, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll (TDRR), from 4-8pm at Boston University. Registration for the conference opened on May 1st.

TDRR is a networking event designed to connect scientists and engineers with entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators.  The event showcased emerging technologies from research programs in life and physical sciences, medical technologies, new ventures, and student entrepreneurship programs.

Project SearchAdditionally TDRR held its first Social Entrepreneurship award. Four student projects, hoping to impact global health, competed for a $3,000 prize. The winner was determined by attendees who texted their vote during the event.  SEARCH, a smartphone enabled with biometric identification software that can identify people by imaging their ears, won this year’s prize.

Gloria Waters (Vice President and Associate Provost for Research) announced this year’s Innovator of the Year Award (IOTY). This award recognizes entrepreneurial faculty at Boston University who have translated their research for the benefit of humankind.

The Office of Technology Development honored Mark Crovella, faculty in Computer Science this year with the Innovator of the Year award.  Congratulations Mark!

IOTY award“Professor Crovella is an entrepreneurial scientist, whose inventions have been licensed to two start-up companies,” announced   Gloria Waters.  “His accomplishments in the past year include ten peer-reviewed papers published, five patent filings and $30.0 million invested in BU-spinoff Guavus.”

The IOTY award highlights translational research with commercialization potential and broad community impact.  It encourages faculty to become entrepreneurial and role models who can inspire graduate students. Past winners of the award have been:  Mark Grinstaff (Biomedical Engineering), Avi Spira (School of Medicine), Jim Collins (Biomedical Engineering), and Ted Moustakas (Engineering).

TDRR crowd networkingProfessor Crovella is Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department, where he has been since 1994. He also currently serves as Chief Scientist of Guavus, Inc., a venture-backed company he co-founded with his graduate student. Professor Crovella also cofounded Commonwealth Networks, now part of Network Appliance.

“Mark has been a prolific academic entrepreneur but this past year was especially productive with the rapid growth of Guavus,” said Vinit Nijhawan (OTD Managing Director).

Professor Crovella’s research interests seek to improve understanding, design, and performance of parallel and networked computing through data mining, statistics, and performance evaluation.  In the networking arena, he has worked on characterizing the Internet and the World Wide Web.  He has explored the presence and implications of self-similarity and heavy-tailed distributions in the network traffic and Web workloads.  He has also investigated the implications of Web workloads for the design of scalable and cost-effective Web servers.  In addition he has made numerous contributions to the Internet measurement and modeling; and he has examined the impact of network properties on the design of protocols and the construction of statistical models.  As of 2013, Google Scholar reports over 19,000 citations of his work.

ParsonsfieldTDRR prides itself on finding great entertainment through live music that fosters socialization and networking. We welcomed the live music of Parsonsfield, formerly Poor Old Shine, an alternative americana band based in Mansfield, CT.

We’d like to thank this year’s  Tech, Drugs, and Rock n’ Roll sponsors:  Nixon Peabody, Pfizer, Sanofi US, Shore Chan DePumpo, and Wolf Greenfield.

One Comment

Doora posted on July 11, 2023 at 12:44 pm

Don’t give up. Keep continue.

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