The Carnegie Mellon University Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Site has announced its 2015 spring cohort of 16 startup companies that are commercializing innovations ranging from online tools for identifying sex traffickers to technologies for bio-printing 3-D tissues for regenerative medicine.

The objective of the I-Corps Site is to help students and faculty members hone their entrepreneurial skills and collaborate with industry professionals as they transition research out of the lab and into commercial sectors.

The 2015 Carnegie Mellon I-Corps Site teams include:

• AE Dreams: Provides families with a series of connected toys, games and resources, each inspiring magical interactions and hands-on playtime.
• BioFab3D: Develops innovative 3D bio-printing technologies for applications in soft materials fabrication, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.
• Broken Colors Inc.: Provides neurologically based mental and emotional state tracking for market researchers, including scalable, low-profile measurement solutions.
• D-PowerNet: Enables a networked control platform for ever-increasing distributed entities, such as renewable generations and flexible loads.
• FacioMetrics LLC: Enables face recognition, facial feature tracking, facial expression analysis, facial attributes (e.g., gender, ethnicity, age), facial expression transfer and gaze tracking.
• HEBI Robotics: Enables the rapid development of inexpensive, high-quality, safe robotic systems through the use of intelligent robotic modules.
• Invisible Intelligence: Provides automation and analytics for distributed robotic systems.
• LeanFM Technologies: Provides a software solution to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of commercial building operation and maintenance using a cloud-based 3D environment.
• Legal Analytics: Provides a smart software solution for law firms to intelligently estimate and track costs for client engagement.
• Marinus Analytics: Identifies, tracks and analyzes trends and behaviors involving sex trafficking, as evidenced by publicly available data.
• Nebulus: Presents a real-time, cross-platform collaboration solution for musicians that works with desktop audio workstations.
• NoRILLA: Works on a mixed-reality platform bridging physical and virtual worlds to improve children's learning, understanding and enjoyment of science in a collaborative way, using both software and hardware components.
• PalpAid: Works to develop a novel, low-cost technology that will provide women and their primary care clinicians an alternative to invasive, stressful and costly methods of tracking benign breast masses.
• RistCall LLC: Provides a wireless wearable nurse call bell that helps hospitals and skilled nursing facilities improve patient safety and satisfaction scores.
• SitWith Inc.: Represents a social discovery platform that helps businesses build better culture and create innovation by forging the communication ties that make an organization run well.
• VIT: Applies the Internet of Things Movement and the Quantified-Self Movement into biotechnology, aiming to change an industry lacking consumer-driven designs and functionalities by providing simple, elegant solutions.

I-Corps is designed to create an effective and replicable process to commercialize innovations based on customer discovery and product adaptation. This year's teams include Carnegie Mellon faculty members, alumni and students at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

The I-Corps Site at CMU was created with the support of a three-year, $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to the Carnegie Mellon Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE). CIE supports the culture of innovation across all of Carnegie Mellon and works to accelerate the commercialization of university research and innovative ideas.

"The diversity of participants, representing every college on campus together with the incredible mix of undergrad, grad, alums, postdocs and faculty, is extremely exciting and gives the CMU i-Corps program a unique character," said Lenore Blum, CIE co-director, professor of computer science and the principal investigator for the I-Corps Site. "When the teams get together for their monthly progress meetings to share successes and challenges, the creative sparks really fly!"

The creation of the CMU I-Corps Site has involved many members of the CMU community. The I-Corps program itself was started by CMU President Subra Suresh when he was the director of the National Science Foundation. In addition to Blum, the co-PIs for the site include David Mawhinney, co-director of the CIE; and Robert Wooldridge, director of the Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation.