Category Archives: Student stories

Students Celebrate Culture at SJSU Showcase April 21

The Third Annual SJSU Cultural Showcase will be held Thursday, April 21, at 6 p.m. in the Student Union Ballroom. The event will feature cultural performances followed by a reception. Tickets are on sale now: $3 with a student ID or $5 for the general public. The event was originally founded in 2014 by Salzburg Scholars. The students, who attended a Global Alliance Seminar in Salzburg in summer 2014, were charged with promoting global citizenship upon their return. They coordinated the planning and execution of the event in its first and second year. Below are some photos from the 2015 SJSU Cultural Showcase event, which featured dozens of performers, an art display and cultural foods.

Business Student’s Startup Competes on the National Stage

Business student Sargon Jacob presents at the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards; he competed in the regional and national finals.

Business student Sargon Jacob presents at the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards; he competed in the regional and national finals.

Sargon Jacob, ’16 Management Information Systems, is hoping to turn his experience as an SJSU student into a business opportunity. He is working with software engineering students to develop an application to help undergraduates pick courses and stay on track for a timely graduation.

Jacob’s entered his startup project – an interactive academic scheduling tool to help students choose courses and plan their path to graduation – into the Entrepreneurs’ Organization Global Student Entrepreneur Award (GSEA) for the Northern California Region in February. After winning the regional competition, Jacob flew to Miami to compete in the GSEA United States National Finals in March. He was one of 24 finalists to compete.

“The GSEA Silicon Valley Regional competition was useful in connecting me with successful startup founders within the Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs’ Organization network,” Jacob said. “At the national event, the greatest benefit was learning from and exchanging ideas with other top student entrepreneurs in the country.”

Jacob’s application includes a scheduler and a planner component that he says offers an interactive interface with a single page view that more accurately matches student behavior than other existing applications.

“It was a combination of recognizing an issue that I and many of my peers struggle with every semester at SJSU – finding and picking appropriate classes,” Jacob said, noting that it also allowed him to utilize methodologies, ideas and creative practices he learned from business professors.

Sargon Jacob, right, poses for a photo after the GSEA competition. From left, Christian Arechiga, David Head, EO USA Director, Mark Sanna and Sargon Jacob.

Sargon Jacob, right, poses for a photo after the GSEA competition. From left, Christian Arechiga, David Head, EO USA Director, Mark Sanna and Sargon Jacob.

Jacob developed a business strategy for his plan in the Lucas College and Graduate School of Business Venture Lab course. The chair of his department, Dr. Tim Hill, his academic  advisor Darlene Guerrero and lecturer Richard Sessions supported his efforts. Jacob is currently working with a team of software engineering students including Sarmad Syed, Jordan Peterson and Lisa Efrid. Ishie Eswar, a lecturer in software engineering, introduced Jacob to the engineering students whom Eswar advises.

The Venture Lab course allows students to develop and test ideas for a new enterprise, according to Dr. Anuradha Basu, a professor of entrepreneurship and the director of the Silicon Valley Center for Entrepreneurship in the College of Business.

“By the end of the course, they are expected to have completed a prototype and be able to demonstrate the business opportunity,” Basu said.

She said Jacob received an award for his idea at the Silicon Valley Innovation Challenge in 2014 and professors encouraged him to enroll in the Venture Lab course.

“Venture Lab was very helpful in providing the skeletal fiber of transforming ideas into a business,” Jacob said. “I also found the presentation skills from the course beneficial during competition.”

Guiding Eyes Works with SJSU to Improve Seeing-Eye Dog Program

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND2HfNnss3M

The process of selecting and training a seeing-eye dog is a costly, timely endeavor for Guiding Eyes, a nonprofit that trains canines for blind and visually impaired people. Training for one dog takes nearly two years and cost up to $40,000. Fewer than 37 percent of puppies complete the program successfully. The puppies need to have the right health profile, temperament and ability to interact with humans, but many of the necessary traits only reveal themselves with time and training.

SJSU Computer Science Professor Chris Tseng and his students have been working with Guiding Eyes on data analysis to help the nonprofit find a pattern that predicts which puppies are most likely to complete their training successfully. Through its Canine Development Center, the nonprofit has collected health records of more than half a million dogs and 65,000 temperament records that they have migrated to IBM Cloud.

Tseng’s students are using IBM Watson Personality and Natural Language Processing on IBM Bluemix, to analyze the vast amounts of data. By May, the group is hoping to establish a process for identifying data patterns and correlating traits, characteristics, environmental conditions, and personalities – of both dogs and trainers – to help improve Guiding Eye’s dog graduation rates, and to better match young dogs with trainers and ultimately owners.

“Guiding Eyes, is a great example of how IBM Cloud can help organizations innovate new business models and processes that were heretofore unthinkable,” said William Karpovich, General Manager, IBM Cloud Platform. “Through the IBM Cloud, Guiding Eyes is now able to advance even further its critical work in breeding, raising and training service dogs for those in need.”

Read more on the research online.

SJSU Student Research Forum This Week

Flyer for 2016 Student Research Forum

Flyer for 2016 Student Research Forum

SJSU’s Office of Research and the SJSU Research Foundation will be hosting the 37th Annual SJSU Student Research Forum, on Thursday, April 7, from noon to 2 p.m., in ENG 285/287. The event will include a student poster presentation, an awards ceremony and reception. The six students, who will be honored with their faculty mentors, competed in the SJSU Student Research Competition March 2 and 3.

A total of 12 students competed in categories that included engineering and computer science; physical and mathematical sciences; biological and agricultural sciences; interdisciplinary; business, economics and public administration; behavioral and social sciences; and health, nutrition and clinical sciences. They were each allotted 25 minutes to do a short presentation on their research and answer questions from a panel of faculty members on the selection committee.

The top student researchers who will be honored on Thursday will share their research with a poster presentation. The students include:

  • Michael Balderrama, Charles W. Davidson College of Engineering, with faculty mentor Claire Komives: “Bioengineering an Alternative, Cheap, and Reliable Anti-venom: The LTNF-11 Peptide”
  • Wilson Florero-Salinas and Dan Li, College of Science, with faculty mentor Guangliang Chen: “Efficient and Accurate kNN Based Parameter Tuning for SVM”
  • Angela Gates, College of Applied Sciences and Arts, with faculty mentor Debra Hansen: “A (Blind) Woman’s Place is (Teaching) in the Home: The Life of Kate Foley (1873-1940)”
  • Evelyn Henry, College of Science, with faculty mentor Lionel Cheruzel: “Immobilization of Light-Driven P450 Biocatalysts Using Cross-Linked Enzeyme Aggregates (CLEAS)”
  • Sushmitha Kasturi, College of Social Sciences, with faculty mentor Colleen Haight: “Why Is It Riskier for Microfinance Institutes to Lend Loans to the Women in Indian Than to the Women in Bangladseh?”
  • Aneesha Kulkarni, College of Science, with faculty mentor Tzvia Abramson: “Modeling Endothelial Cells t Study Inflammatory Responses in a Bordetella Pertussis Infection.”

The six SJSU Student Research Competition winners will compete in the statewide CSU Student Research Competition on April 29 and 30.

Please RSVP to the April 7 event to foundation-osp-infoservices@sjsu.edu