Iqra Mustafa, an MTU doctoral student in the ADVANCE SFI Centre for Research Training, has just been awarded the President’s Award at the MTU Student Entrepreneur of the Year Innovation Showcase. Iqra is doing her doctoral research in the field of Cybersecurity with the Department of Computer Science in collaboration with the Nimbus Research Centre. She was shortlisted from 43 applicants down to 16 where she went through rigorous phases of business proposals, presentations, marketing promotion and finally a 30-minute panel interview before she was announced the President’s Award winner for her proposed company “
The concept came from her admiration of the work done by Elon Musk in NeuraLink. NeuraLink aims to implant wireless brain-computer interfaces to help cure neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s, dementia and spinal cord injuries and ultimately fuse humankind with artificial intelligence. “In these type of surgeries, we need medical imaging techniques that can give us a true picture of the real world images especially as we are going to treat the very sensitive and complex organ of the human brain” states Iqra. “This is where Optimum Solution comes in as it can transform images to make the process more exact and precise faster, in real time and with a smaller memory footprint”.
Iqra developed this concept based on artificial intelligence and focused on differentiating from other services by targeting ease of implementation in Android and Windows mobile applications. Optimum Solutions can be used as an integral component for networked imaging devices as it has lower network demand and memory footprint over other counterparts.
Through market research, surveys and benchmarking of the existing competitors in the market, Iqra developed improved techniques to create the optimum solution, wherein lies the name of the company. Iqra believes there are other applications for her concept and she aims to expand on her findings and continue to develop more services.
When asked how she found the process of the Student Entrepreneur of the Year Innovation Showcase, Iqra commented “It was quite difficult & competitive especially as many were in groups and I worked individually. On the other hand, winning this award has given me confidence that I can successfully handle projects independently even though I’ll always be a believer in collaboration and team work”. Iqra plans to encourage other research students to work with on the next stages of development of Optimum Solutions.
Iqra’s doctoral work focuses on working on developing an Engineering Framework for Robust & Verifiable Blockchain Deployments and is funded by the Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research Training in Advance Networks for Sustainable Societies (Advance CRT).
