Demo Day Spring 2024 Inspires Crowd with Groundbreaking Innovation
While campus life promises to come to a stall in the upcoming weeks, Demo Day Spring 2024 proved that Spark! students are always innovating, no matter the season.
BU students, faculty, staff, and Spark! partners alike filled Floors 1 & 2 of the BU Center for Computing & Data Sciences this past Thursday to celebrate a unique achievement – a semester’s worth of prototyping, as each student team presented the projects they’ve spent at least several months working on.
Demo Day was part of the Spring 2024 Experiential Learning Expo where students from the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, Cross-College Challenge, and the Learning Assistant Program, come together to inspire while presenting real-world solutions to problems that they or members of their communities face.
Dive into each project below, meet the members of each team, and learn just what makes Spark! students leaders in the computing and data science field.
Winner’s Circle
These projects were selected by an esteemed panel of industry professionals and Demo Day’s audience.
Cloudweaver — Judges’ Choice Award
Cloudweaver is LLM enhanced with RAG for the purpose of automating cloud project generation. It is difficult to understand the architecture of cloud infrastructure and we have developed a simple solution to bridge the knowledge gap.
Team members: Max Karambelas (mkaramb@bu.edu), George Trammell (gtram@bu.edu), Jimin Park (pjm@bu.edu), Luis Mavarez (mavaluis@bu.edu), Andrea Rojas Doupovee (andreard@bu.edu)
Links: GitHub | Jira | Product link | Poster
Chatsqrd — Audience Choice Award
Chatsqrd is a web application that enhances the children’s education experience with an interactive and engaging AI experience. Accompanied by an avatar, catered towards the behavior preferences of the user, the child will be able to engage interactively with an AI model that is specifically designed to help educate the user in a variety of subjects. The goal is to create an engaging and motivating learning experience for children in grades K through 3 to help improve the current educational environment with a tool that is being used by millions around the world.
Team members: Milo (Min Sung) Park (minpark@bu.edu), Jiehoon Lee (jiehoonn@bu.edu), Thanh Huynh (thanh910@bu.edu), Emmeline Chung (emmchung@bu.edu)
Links: GitHub | Jira | Product link | Poster | Presentation
Innovation Program Project Gallery
All of the projects presented at Demo Day were outstanding in their own right and showed remarkable innovation and creativity.
Hada: Language Learning Made Fun
Hada is a vocabulary learning assistant that enhances language acquisition by automating the process of creating customized learning paces and word repetition tasks. This prototype will focus on the Korean language but could be extended to other languages in the future. You do not need to know any Korean to use it.
Team members: Christian Rudden (crubber@bu.edu), Sangyun Kim (sykim25@bu.edu), Junyi Jenni Huang (mhiga@bu.edu), Wilson Zhang (wilson23@bu.edu), Emma Kim (emmak1m@bu.edu)
Links: GitHub | Jira | Product link | Poster | Presentation
Spot Me (formerly GymTutor)
SpotMe aims to solve the problem that many gym goers have with motivation, loneliness and not knowing what to do by creating a solution that streamlines connection between users. We will create a community that supports and motivates each other; inspires and rewards gym goers for their consistency; and also allows them to look back on how far they’ve come, and to pridefully show their achievements.
Team members: Hengsheng (Henry) Liu (lhs7714@bu.edu), Ray (Ruixiang) Yang (ryyang@bu.edu), Jiachuan (Kingson) Wu (wuj0209@bu.edu), Axel Almaguer Gaona (aalmag22@bu.edu), Zekai Wu (zekaiwu@bu.edu)
Links: GitHub | Jira | Product link | Poster | Presentation
DrivMi
DrivMi offers a unique service that transports cars home safely after a night out, functioning much like a designated driver version of Uber. While this app has gained popularity abroad, it is still gaining traction in the US.
Team members: Jay (Jewoo) Lee (jewoolee@bu.edu), Arnav Pratap Chaudhry (arnavpc@bu.edu),
Links: Product link | Poster | Presentation
UniMate
A web platform that connects prospective international students with a supportive community of mentors to access reliable and relevant information about studying abroad.
Team members: Nhan Ton (tdn26903@bu.edu), Nguyen Le (nguyenle@bu.edu), Hoang Nguyen (nxhoang@bu.edu), Xuru (ChiChi) Zhao (chichiz@bu.edu), Minh Dinh (minhd5@bu.edu)
Links: GitHub | Jira | Product link | Poster | Presentation
OpenPoll
This project aims to create a free open source alternative for in-class polling. The goal is to replace this core functionality which is currently offered by TopHat, one of the costly education technology services utilized by majority of professors at colleges, including Boston University. This solution will save students money and serve as an example of student-created and maintained solutions to common problems present in academic settings that impact them.
Team members: Saad Naji
Links: GitHub | Jira | Product link | Poster | Presentation
EduSync
EduSync simplifies the organization of content across the countless educational platforms used for class management—from Blackboard to Gradescope to Piazza, and more. As students juggle multiple classes and struggle to track assignments, exams, and deadlines, EduSync automates the collection and synchronization of information. Our goal is to provide a streamlined interface that alleviates the administrative burdens of academic life, ensuring students stay on top of their studies with ease.
Team members: Shaimaa Sabbagh (shaimaa@bu.edu), Anissa Patel (anissakp@bu.edu), Zai Sugino (zsugino.se@bu.edu), Samantha Pang (spang8@bu.edu), Emily Doherty (emilydoh@bu.edu)
Links: GitHub | Jira | Product link | Poster | Presentation
X-Lab and Practicum Presentations
WBUR: Field Guide Game DS488 / 688: UX Practicum
In the fall of 2023, WBUR launched a new online resource for Bostonians called the Field Guide to Boston. The Field Guide is a mix of articles, newsletters, events, podcast episodes, and on-air content. The project was to create a Field Guide focused weekly game, centered around the concept of living and exploring Boston.
Editor AI DS519: Software Engineering Practicum
A project aimed at aiding hyper-local news sites. This tool is meant to assist busy editors who are often working solo or with a limited staff producing news. It should keep editors in control, but provide them with helpful suggestions and edits.
MIT Lincoln Laboratory: Evidence Analysis Tool DS459: Machine Learning Practicum
The MIT Lincoln Laboratory is a Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems group that works with a wide range of domestic and international government agencies, non-governmental organization, research institutions, and other practitioners to find technology and data-driven solutions that can address complex global humanitarian challenges. The goal of this project was to design and build analytic software that will process images in order to extract information and generate metadata that will be used to help investigators interact with and analyze image-based evidence.
DC City Council: Southwest Health Dashboard DS594: Data Visualization
The “Southwest Health Dashboard” is envisioned as a dynamic tool providing a real-time overview of key indicators in the specific geographical area, Southwest Washington DC. Our goal is to empower policymakers, health officials, community organizations, and the public to monitor and assess crucial metrics.
WGBH: Debt Collection Court – Team B CS506: Data Science
To date, there has been no systematic investigation into debt collection practices in our local court system. The goal of this project was to analyze the historical rosters of court cases to get an idea of what the practice of debt collections court looks like in the state of Massachusetts.
MA Lawyers Guild: Analyzing Complaints Language XC410 B1: Data Science for Good
MA Lawyers Guild works to change the structure of our political and economic system. The organization requests BPD complaint data from BPD Internal Investigations and receives complaint PDFs for each calendar year. The goal of this project was to investigate deeper into whether the transcribed text/language is a predictor of more extreme policing behavior, such as excessive force, racial bias, faking detail over time, and more.
GBH: Maura Healey’s Words XC410 A1: Justice Media co-Lab Fall 2023
During Maura Healey’s run for the governor position, she made numerous promises to the residents of the state around a number of issues. The goal of this project was to examine the governor’s official, formal speech — her “mindshare.”
Thank you to our Demo Day judges, instructors, and mentors for making this event possible. The fire you’ve ignited in our students shines through in their work.
Missed Demo Day? Relive the night here.
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Housed at Boston University’s Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, BU Spark! is an incubator and experiential learning lab for computer science and engineering projects. Spark! provides the infrastructure to support student innovation projects and engagement in applied research or real-world technology projects, while fostering an inclusive, connected community around interdisciplinary computing and data science.