A team of four engineering students took home first prize at this year’s Business Plan Competition at FAU.

The team created the company known as PAPER — Protection Against Physical Element Removal and is composed of Alyssa Harris, Quintin Warren, Kris Stewart and Wesley Klemas. The four started working on the company while they were enrolled in the same senior engineering design course earlier this year.

Harris came up with the idea for PAPER after working in the defense industry as an intern. She wanted there to be a way to detect whether or not people were leaving defense center premises with pages containing classified or proprietary information.

The group came up with the idea of printing RFIDs while taking a senior engineering design class, according to an FAU news release.

RFID stands for radio-frequency identification, which uses electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track tags containing electronically stored information, which are attached to objects. PAPER utilizes conductive nanoparticle ink to tag classified documents, allowing its system to detect if documents are being removed from the premises.

According to Andrew Duffell, president and CEO of the Research Park at FAU and one of the judges for the competition, the PAPER company has the potential to receive numerous grants, some from the government, to work on this project.

For winning first place, PAPER received $10,000 in addition to another $1,000 for receiving the designation of Best Interdisciplinary Team.

Ripple, a marketing agency that “empowers local celebrities by allowing them to rent their social media real estate,” won second place and received $5000. Idle Automation, which uses an app to send self-driving shuttles to needed areas, came in third place.

Benjamin Paley is a contributing writer with the University Press. For information regarding this or other stories, email [email protected] or tweet him @benpaley92.