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Spring 2018 Informatics Student Project Showcase Closes Out the Academic Year
Nineteen projects were on display at the Spring Informatics Student Project Showcase on June 11, with approximately 100 students representing three project courses. “This was our biggest showcase yet,” says Informatics Lecturer Darren Denenberg, who taught Informatics 191 A and B (Senior Design Project). “It really is wonderful to provide students the opportunity to share what they’ve done, to appreciate the sponsors and to bring everyone together to experience the positive impact the class provides.”
Indeed, in welcoming the crowd that gathered to hear the student presentations, André van der Hoek, chair of the Department of Informatics, referred to the capstone classes as the “jewel” of the school. “These projects can make or break the future of our students.” Specifically, he noted how the hands-on experience gained while working on these real-world projects leads to a very different level of engagement in interviews, giving these students an edge in the job market.
Van der Hoek graciously thanked the almost 40 corporate project sponsors and hinted at the need for continued support, given the nearly 900 new freshman and transfer students expected this fall. According to Professor of Teaching Hadar Ziv, who taught Informatics 117 (Project in Software System Design) this quarter, “we received praise from project partners for the dedication and quality of work delivered by the student teams.”
The Informatics 191 A&B student teams were as follows:
- Team Fluent.ly developed IoT Exchange, a matching system that helps information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) companies partner with one another via an automated process based on company skills (Christian Pile, Julia Hoang, Kyle Mamiit, Shereen Jayme and Victoria, partnering with The Channel Company).
- Denenberg’s Workshop partnered with UCI’s Institute for Clinical & Translational Science (ICTS) as part of the Healthy Campus Initiative to create a website that will become a centralized hub for health-related information (April Huie, Celine Deleon, Patrick Galicia, Calvin Nguyen, Christopher Christian and Allisah Solorio, partnering with ICTS).
- The Half of Us worked on TAGonist, crowdsourcing character demographics data to determine the diversity of video game characters (Dan Ackerman, Victoria Cabrera, Garry Chalal, Ney Congjuico, Matt Kenneth Legaspi and Audrey Ryan, partnering with Dan Gardner and Josh Tanenbaum).
- DesDev6 created the Project Elevate web application to help small service-based businesses create their own subscription plans and offer them to their customers to enhance loyalty and retention (Jacqueline Lee, Diana Sandil, Vivian Long, Hongming Chen, Marc Orbe and Susan Tham, partnering with Agapay).
- Team Darkstar developed HRadvocate, an employee self-service mobile application offering features such as the ability to clock-in and clock-out and quickly access company information (Benjamin Alcala, Kyle San Clemente, Jason Chen, Jason Dong, Luhanzhi Li and Sarah Espinosa, partnering with Neudesic).
- Half & Half created a home-buying experience that gives consumers decision-making information and provides valuable analytics data to support the decision-making process of lenders and mortgage/real-estate companies (Adoriel Bethishou, Alyssa Deeb, Andrew Mehta, Kim Lam, Jimmy Sigala and Jean Truong, partnering with CoreLogic).
- Georgia O’Keeffe 2.0 developed Follow Me, a real-time security web application that monitors live security camera feeds, analyzes people and objects using Veritone’s facial and object recognition AI, and provides continuous video timelines of each identified profile (Brett Benner, Vincent Chang, Gabe Cupino, Kent Han, Giang Ngo and Dennis Tian, partnering with Steve Shaffer).
- Team Foobar, in an effort to help patients with Aphasia receive speech therapy, developed the Speech Restore web application, which connects patients with therapists via a video call (Alexander Arrieta, Ramin Attai, Chris Posdaljian and Christian Galindo, partnering with Jeff Greenberg).
- WayFinder created a centralized online registration system for the youth STEM initiative AppJam+, streamlining the registration process for parents, the school coordinators and system admins (Jerry Granillo, Quang To, Nick Chau, Saul Hernandez, Alejandro Reynaga and Tony Hua, partnering with Dreams For Schools).
- Team 1 developed Statracker, a program that tracks flag football game statistics at the recreational level and publishes the data online (Nathan Padrid, Dion Kim, Alan So, Kenny John, Jacob Jo and Felix Fung, partnering with Jess Gillespie and Tom Frank).
- Alpha Beta Python collaborated with Team Kids, focused on encouraging social engagement and philanthropy, so the nonprofit could take its Digital Challenge to a national audience by making it available on mobile devices (Andrew Blake, Eric Chou, Byron Padilla, Atrina Pebdani and Ricky Shields, partnering with Team Kids).
- Spectre7 developed Vesta, a property-matching web application specifically designed for the younger generation (Michelle Choi, Calvin Dinh, Melissa Garcia, Kevin Mao, Emmanuel Reyes and Alexander Wong, partnering with CoreLogic).
- 4HIRE worked with Veritone to create a new type of voice-recognition engine that can achieve 97 percent accuracy under any condition, making anyone audible anywhere (Eric Carb, Alex Khauv, Ting-Wei Lin, Daniel Rios, Lisa Tran and Yusong Wong, partnering with Cornelius Raths).
The Informatics 117 student teams were as follows:
- Jeff 2.0 created WALT, a virtual interviewer that helps job seekers improve their soft skills in order to stand out in the job market (Nicholas Dadeh, Micah Rutrough, Jiaxin Du, Saman Missaghian, Jason Padilla, Qirui Zhou and Szu-Hua Su).
- PlantID designed an iOS/Android app that lets non-experts identify plants in the UCI Nature Preserve by asking them questions about the plant (Apurva Jakhanwal, Cesar Venegas, Dennis Quach, Junyong Shim, Patrick Farrell, Sid Kasat and Tony Pham).
- Taylor and the Swifts worked on IdentifiTech, a health-management application (Kenny Matsudo, Gevorg Gabrielyan, Khuong Tiet, Cody Han, Kristen DeVore, and Joseph Bustamante).
The showcase also included projects from the new pilot course, Informatics 295/190: AR/VR Theater. This novel two-quarter pilot course, taught by Informatics Professor Josh Tanenbaum in collaboration with Broadway/film producer Tim Kashani, aimed to develop three augmented and virtual reality theater projects in collaboration with Kashani’s nonprofit organization, Apples & Oranges Arts. These student teams were as follows:
- CrewView developed an AR/VR scenic design tool that improves communication between creative teams (Ke Jing, Christopher Ayuso, Max Collins, Melisse Yutuc, Aparajita Marathe, Fernando Penaloza, Tyler Scrivner and Hannah Tran).
- The Next Fairy Tale offers a VR conversation between magical sisters about the fate of their fairy-tale world (Minnie Wu, Mary Wang, Nicholas Persa, Saumya Gupta, Meena Muralikumar, Ace Loweder, Edward Lok and Parker Scott).
- Higher Education lets players act as a guardian angel and conduct an emotional symphony to help a young woman come to terms with the death of her father (Allisah Solorio, Archana Senthilkumar, Brayden Decker, Conner Ward, Jackson Greaves, Jeffrey Araki and Yihui Liu).
The presentations were followed by a reception with food and drinks, and attendees could visit the EVOKE Lab to test out the AV/VR prototypes or could walk around outside, visiting the various demo stations. Photos are available online. As both Denenberg and Ziv noted, “the showcase was a great success!”
— Shani Murray