UCI engineering students develop innovative solutions to challenges in Hawaiʻi

August 27, 2026 –  From harvesting water from Hawaii’s mountain fog to sending swarms of autonomous drones across the ocean, two UC Irvine engineering students spent their summer developing innovative solutions to challenges facing their home state.

The two projects were developed this summer as part of Oceanit’s internship program in Honolulu, Hawaii. Oceanit is an innovation lab and engineering consulting firm. The highly competitive program received over 1,000 applicants for eight spots in this 2026 cycle. Jasmine Chang, an environmental engineering senior, and Ian Kuo, a  mechanical engineering junior minoring in computer science, were delighted to be of the few selected.

Born and raised in Oahu, Chang and Kuo got the chance to return to their hometown, now as UCI engineering students, with the opportunity to tackle challenges affecting Hawaiian communities. “I lived in Hawaii my whole life, so it was refreshing to see more of the world by going to Irvine,” said Chang. “Coming home has made me appreciate the land I grew up in much more.”

Chang’s project explored how Hawaii’s abundant mountain fog could provide an alternative source of water for communities in areas where access is limited. She became passionate about sustainable water solutions through a water resources class she took at UCI. Her project aims to develop an effective way to identify the most ideal conditions for fog harvesting, adapting the technology to the islands’ unique environment because much of the existing technology was developed for desert environments. Chang is continuing to develop the project with the goal of helping the Native Hawaiian community living on Kahikinui improve its access to water.

“The Innovation Summit required me to go beyond my comfort zone,” said Chang. “This internship allowed the other interns and me to think and create an innovation, small or big, that we hope to change the world and our daily lives.”

Kuo developed a concept for a swarm of lightweight, low-cost autonomous surface drones that could assist search-and-rescue teams in finding people lost at sea. Designed to primarily move with ocean currents, the energy-efficient drones could be deployed in large numbers, allowing them to collectively search a wider area than a single vessel.

His interest in rescue teams stems from personal experience. In 2016, his father was swept five miles offshore before being rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard. As a diver and spearfisherman himself, Kuo wanted to explore how the drone technology he worked with at Oceanit could be used to improve ocean safety and help rescuers bring more people home.

Over the nine-week internship, he worked with multiple engineers and the Honolulu Fire Department to ultimately build a prototype for his final presentation.

While developing his project at Oceanit, Kuo found himself drawing on lessons from his swarm robotics research thousands of miles away at UCI’s Robot Ecology Lab. Kuo said, “It’s also been exciting to use things I’ve learned at UCI to solve real-world problems. Bringing those experiences back home and applying them to ocean search and rescue was very rewarding.”

The Oceanit program encourages interns to identify a problem they are passionate about solving and develop their own innovative solution. At the end of the summer, the company hosts its annual Oceanit Intern Innovation Summit which gives the interns a chance to present their innovative solutions in a Shark-Tank style presentation.

“Having judges from different backgrounds was especially valuable,” Kuo said, “because it gave us the opportunity to be challenged on our ideas and receive feedback on both our presentation style and how we communicated our information.”

After a summer of turning classroom knowledge into real-world problem-solving, Chang and Kuo left Oceanit inspired to one day use engineering to improve communities they call home and beyond.

This story was originally written by Caroline Lu and published by the University of California, Irvine newsroom.