The 2020 Parmee Prize for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise
Just how far would you go to secure a place at a good university?
Worryingly, it seems that a surprisingly large number of people are willing to hire a third party to do more than just give advice.
This is the problem that the creators of ValidApp, winners of the 2020 Parmee Prize for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise, hope to solve. Using the power of AI, machine learning, forensic linguistics and language processing, they believe their software has the potential to help admissions offices identify problematic applications.
Led by Victor Xia Li (2019), ValidApp has worked closely with Professor Patrick Juola, an expert in text analysis and applied stylometry (the study of linguistic style), to develop software which analyses a text with some strict metrics. These range from the simple number of words per sentence, to more complex ones that ValidApp have developed based on their research and testing.
ValidApp believes that this proprietary software is faster and more accurate at identifying ghostwritten work than its possible competitors, who manually analyse applications.
Victor believes that there is scope for universities to use ValidApp’s software to identify problematic student assignments.
The Parmee Prize for Entrepreneurship and Enterprise was set up by alumnus and William Pitt Fellow Dr Richard Parmee (1970) to reward the best business idea from the Pembroke Junior Members. The prize is co-ordinated by Pembroke’s Corporate Partnership Programme and also co-sponsored by DG Marshall of Cambridge Trust. The winner receives £2,000 to help develop their idea and all finalists receive personal mentoring from Dr Parmee. In total, five finalists were selected to pitch for this year’s prize.
FoodBay, presented by Evonne Lee (2018) and Sau Jee Lau (2018), aims to minimise food wastage by using AI and machine learning capabilities to identify which items are already in a household’s store cupboard when a family is out food shopping. It would also suggest recipes that could be made from remaining ingredients.
The Communality, developed by Samia Qader (2019) would enable sufferers of the chronic immunological condition Mast Cell Activation to better manage their condition through education and the purchase of products.
Footprint is an app which would estimate a person or household’s carbon footprint by bringing together information from phone health apps, heating and utility bills and the answers to a lifestyle questionnaire. First-year undergraduates Lucy Holland, Max Murphy, Bradley Mhangami and Rohan Shah believe that incentivisation and discounts could be used to drive habitual change.
John Land (2019) and Max Fischer (2017) pitched Atten.io, an AI-powered technology that aims to make a machine-learning system that can quantify audiences for speakers and then coach people to give more effective presentations.
With such strong proposals, the alumni judging panel of Dr Samantha Deacon (Goodwin), Piers Morgan (Verona Pharma), Simon Harris (Lambda Energy Ltd), Dr Mark Mann (Oxford University Innovation) and chaired by Robert Marshall (Marshall Group) took some time to come to their decision. This allowed the finalists to quiz their counterparts and swap ideas, while last year’s winner, Katie Fox (2014) explained how she had used the prize money to take InteliVet to the next stage of development.
After much deliberation, the judges returned and announced ValidApp as winners over a celebratory dinner in the Old Library. Our congratulations to Victor and his co-presenter Lan Yin on their victory and we hope the Parmee prize enables them to take their idea to the next stage.
About the Pembroke Corporate Partnership Programme
The Pembroke Corporate Partnership Programme was established in 1996 to facilitate mutually beneficial cooperation between the academic community (in both Pembroke College and the wider University of Cambridge) and external organisations.
The Pembroke Corporate Partnership Programme is unique among the Cambridge colleges. The College currently has 8 full Corporate Partners: AIG, BT, Cheyney, Grosvenor, Kylin Prime Group, Open Society Foundations, Roche, and Warwick International Hotels, and 2 Industrial Affiliate Partners: Willis Towers Watson and Toshiba Research Europe.
As part of its remit, the Pembroke Corporate Partnership office organises several annual marquee events: the William Pitt Seminar, the Parmee Prize and the BT-Pembroke Lectures.
About the Parmee Prize
Dr Richard Parmee (1970) studied Natural Sciences and Electrical and Information Sciences at Pembroke. He went on to work in the music industry and now runs successful enterprises focusing principally on X-Ray inspection services and quality control for the food industry. His company, Cheyney Group, joined the Pembroke Corporate Partnership Programme in 2009, and Richard is their William Pitt Fellow at the College.
Richard is keen to foster entrepreneurship among junior members of the College, and recalling the dearth of support in his early days as an entrepreneur has inspired him to endow an annual prize for the best business idea from the Pembroke Community.
The prize is also supported by the D G Marshall Trust.
For more information about the Pembroke Corporate Partnership Programme or the Parmee Prize, please contact Dr Kate Parsley, Corporate Partnership Programme Manager, kate.parsley@pem.cam.ac.uk, 07711 500519.
