The CITRIS and the Banatao Institute Tech for Social Good Program provides funding support to UC Merced undergraduate students, groups, teams or organizations developing hardware, software, events or programs that support healthy, sustainable, connected, and equitable livelihoods in the United States and abroad.
Established January 2020, CITRIS provides technical support and mentoring to student teams from Merced College and UC Merced. The teams combine coding, database management, communications, and marketing skills with user experiences to address societal problems.
ABOUT
The CITRIS and the Banatao Institute Tech for Social Good Program supports
student-led
learning and technology development for healthy, sustainable, connected, and
equitable
livelihoods in the United States and abroad.
To achieve its mission, the Tech for Social Good Program provides funding
support to
undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students, groups, teams or
organizations
developing hardware, software, events or programs that support healthy,
sustainable,
connected, and equitable livelihoods in the United States and abroad.
Recent Tech for Social Good events:
HackMerced
HackMerced is an annual student-organized hackathon, and is the largest hackathon event in the San Joaquin Valley. In recent years, CITRIS has sponsored tracks including AgTech and Health for Social Good.
NASA SpaceApps
The NASA Space Apps Challenge is a global hackathon that typically occurs annually and is sponsored by NASA's Earth Science Division. It brings together problem-solvers, coders, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, artists, and technologists from across the globe. The goal is to use NASA's open data to tackle real-world problems on Earth and in space. CITRIS at UC Merced is a host site for this competition.
Previous Tech for Social Good projects and competitions:
Digital AgAth0n
CITRIS at UC Merced hosted teams that competed in AgAID’s Digital AgAth0n 2023. This 48-hour hackathon focused on solving two challenges in digital agriculture using AI.
TensorFlow for Social Good
The CITRIS TensorFlow for Social Good program, funded by Google Research, was designed to give undergraduate students a start in TensorFlow, Machine Learning; build camaraderie and teamwork, and add a project to their resumes while developing something of use to society.
Developing solutions for the Merced Food Bank
12 student teams at UC Merced worked on projects to benefit the Merced County Food Bank. Students developed their tech skills, learned from an entrepreneurial mentor, and helped the community partner with challenges including:
- Poor information environment leads to poor optimization of allocation
- Human error for accounting is high because of low-verification options
- Culturally relevant food systems are limited.
Mobile App Challenge
A semester-long competition in which interdisciplinary teams of students from the University of California, Merced developed mobile apps that have a positive impact on communities.