On Tuesday, May 28, the College of Computing & Informatics (CCI) held its annual Senior Design Project Competition in the Quorum at its new home at 3675 Market Street.
Senior Design Project is part of a multi-term capstone experience involving in-depth study and application of computing and informatics where students work in teams to develop a significant product.
CCI’s Senior Design Project has a long history of providing an experiential learning platform for students to work with industry members to devise and design technology with real-world applications. Projects are often conceived by external stakeholders who guide the requirements process and ultimately use the resulting application. This year, for the first time ever, the College piloted a program to match CCI Corporate Partners with Senior Design teams. Corporate Partner eMoney Advisor’s team, Alexa Onboarding, earned second place at the competition.
CCI faculty, professional staff, students, and their friends and family members gathered for a reception and poster presentation after which the final four outstanding senior development groups presented their projects. Each of the four groups gave a 30-minute presentation, including a product demonstration, followed by a brief Q&A with the judges.
Projects are judged in a multi-level competition on originality, compliance with software engineering principles, completion and their successful deployment. This year’s judges included Assistant Professor Susan Gasson, PhD; Jim Thompson, Chief Engineer and Vice President, Engineering and Supply Chain at Unisys; Colin Kerr, Software Engineer, and Mike Stratoti, Principal Software Engineer, both from Bentley Systems; and Angelita Fasnacht-Cuellar, Engineer at American Water.
CCI would like to thank its Corporate Partners Program and Unisys for sponsoring this year’s Senior Design Competition.
This year’s prize winners and runners-up (with project descriptions) are listed below:
First Place: Overcoming MS
Students: Chris Deslongchamp, Vincent Finn, Cassandra Li, Julie Soderstrom, Justin Ickler, Emily Bendavid, Seamus Donaldson, Axel Mortimer, Steve Gross, Su Hnin Pwint, Corey Hensley
Faculty Advisor: Jeff Salvage
External Stakeholder: Alex Twersky (Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis)
Interactive Digital Media Advisor: Michael Wagner, PhD
Description: "Starting in 1999, the Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis (OMS) foundation has spent years creating a scientifically-backed management plan that has improved the lives of those suffering from MS worldwide. Participants track their exercise, meditation, diet, Vitamin D levels, medication, and social interactions with the MS community, while also keeping up with how MS uniquely affects them. Many participants tend to fall off the bandwagon or feel overwhelmed with tracking their data. The OMS app strives to simplify the process by tracking, analyzing, educating, and building social networks for all those affected by MS. By utilizing intelligent notifications and a simple data entry process, the OMS app creates a frictionless application that will serve as a daily companion to those suffering from MS."
Learn more about Overcoming MS
Second Place: Alexa Onboarding
Students: Safa Aman, Adam Feldscher, Jen Bondarchuk, Cam Graybill, Khanh Nguyen
Faculty Advisor: Jeff Salvage
External Stakeholder: eMoney Advisor
Description: "At eMoney Advisor, financial advisors work with clients, crafting unique financial plans to suit each client's needs. One of an advisor's toughest jobs is getting new clients through the onboarding process. Tedious forms, which contain lots of personal information, act as a huge barrier to entry for new clients. Alexa Onboarding is an Amazon Alexa Skill that seeks to streamline this process and introduce a conversational voice interface. The skill leverages external data sources to intelligently suggest form fields, while Alexa talks the client through each step of the process as a friendly advocate for the advisor."
Learn more about Alexa Onboarding
Runner-Up: EtherFx
Students: Anish Basu, Binod Bhandari, Sandesh Bhandari, Klimentina Krstevska, Chingiz Mardanov, Guruansh Singh, Mridul Singhai
Faculty Advisor: Filippos Vokolos, PhD and William Mongan, PhD
Description: "EtherFx allows users to perform computationally expensive tasks more efficiently by distributing the execution of the computation onto multiple nodes over a network. Modules and classes imported via the EtherFx library are parallelism-native - the computationally intensive tasks occur on different computers, asynchronously. By splitting the jobs into discrete, parallelly executable payloads over a low-latency network, significant improvements in execution time can be achieved. Speedup is defined as the ratio of the application's execution time on a single processor, T (1), to the execution time of the same workload on a system composed of P processors. EtherFx allows previously monolithic executions to be broken up and distributed over several different machines with little to no code changes on the part of the user or the library creator."
Learn more about EtherFx
Runner-Up: Fora
Students: Kent Huang, Donnie Dang, Jalal Kakar, Christian Kraft, Viet Le, Zixin Lin
Faculty Advisor: Rosina Weber, PhD
Description: "Out-of-class meetings are a hassle. You have to collect everyone’s schedules and contact information. Then find commonality among their availability, set up a location to discuss and send out invites. Sounds simple, how about there’s 20 people or when few can’t make it? Fora aims to simplify this process by automating where possible. After inputting your availability, Fora finds a time and day for you and your colleagues to meet. Finally, Fora will set up the meeting place; notifying and reminding you when to join."
Learn more about Fora