Foxconn unveils website for 'Smart Cities' ideas competition
Foxconn Technology Group formally launched its “Smart Cities – Smart Futures” initiative Tuesday and unveiled a website for the competition.
The company will provide up to $1 million in prizes over the next three years to students, faculty and staff at Wisconsin colleges who generate winning ideas.
“The competition is aimed at finding innovative ways that technology can help enhance quality of life and working environments,” Alan Yeung, Foxconn’s director of U.S. strategic initiatives, said in a statement.
Those ideas could involve efforts such as “developing attractive streetscapes, building transportation networks, designing innovative living spaces, improving the way we learn or enhancing health care,” Yeung said.
Foxconn, which has begun building a $10 billion display panel manufacturing complex in Racine County, envisions its technology being applied in fields such as medicine and security that can benefit from high-resolution displays channeled over ultra-fast data networks.
Toward that end, the company has said it will open innovation centers in Milwaukee, Green Bay and Eau Claire to foster entrepreneurship around the technology. The Smart Cities – Smart Futures initiative aims at a similar goal.
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The competition is open to everyone affiliated with the University of Wisconsin System, the Wisconsin Technical College System and the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, which includes Marquette University, Carthage College, Milwaukee School of Engineering and 21 other private schools.
Submissions for the competition can be made beginning in late September. The deadline for the first round of entries is Oct. 31. Further details will be posted on the Smart Cities – Smart Futures website (https://wismartcities-smartfutures.com).