Students celebrated the completion of their capstone projects on March 19 during the Winter 2018 Informatics Student Project Showcase, where teams of students presented novel solutions to real-world problems. The projects addressed a variety of problems, ranging from finding available spots in a busy parking structure or preparing for a job interview, to helping people better manage their healthcare and prevent treatment delays following a diagnosis.

“Thank you for going through this experience,” said André van der Hoek, chair of the Department of Informatics, as he welcomed students to the annual showcase. “We know we’re tossing you into situations that are perhaps unknown [and] that require you to adapt and step up, but when we hear from our alumni, this is unequivocally the class they remember.” The 11 projects presented were the culmination of Informatics 191 A and B (Senior Design Project) and Informatics 117 (Project in Software System Design), and family and friends were on hand to congratulate the students and view demos of their creations.

Also on hand were the corporate, individual and UCI sponsors who provided inspiration for the projects: Jeff Kleid, Adigami, Identifi Tech, SendGrid, NeoGenomics, Families Forward, Yao Du (with Professor Reich), Dr. Steven Cramer, Professor Darren Denenberg, Professor Mark Backman and the course organizer, Professor Hadar Ziv. Van der Hoek acknowledged their support by noting that “there is literally nothing more important to our students and their résumés than what you have just provided them.”

The sponsors were similarly grateful for the experience. According to the representative from Identifi Tech, “this was just as rewarding for me. We got some cost-effective prototypes and [the students] did a fantastic job.” The Adigami sponsor agreed, stating, “we are definitely going to use this product.” The other sponsors all chimed in as well, expressing their appreciation for the students’ hard work.

Ziv, who has been leading the capstone class for many years now, was impressed by the response. “I was very touched by what people were saying,” he said, adding that many were first-time sponsors, and he was pleased to hear them speak at the event, praising the students and noting their accomplishments.

The student teams tasked with collaborating with the sponsors were as follows:

• Team ID designed an IoT parking-monitor system that could be used in lots such as the Anteater Parking Structure (Yujie Ding, Tiffany Lee, Nathan Sou, Abhimanyu Tripathi and Lansen Zhao).
• Team IdentifiTech developed a health-management application to help patients better take control of their health (Eamon Sheehy, Emil Mombay, Kenzo Makitani, Yuda Chen and Nick DiGeronimo).
• Team SendGrid optimized an email management system for SendGrid and its customers (Grace Tsai, Andrew Cho, Jonathan Chew, Vinh Lam and Stephanie Mondragon).
• Team NeoGenomics implemented a scheduling framework for patient diagnosis and treatment (Neff Rogers, Suha Sattar, James Huynh, Xiaoning He and Philip Nguyen).
• Team ThinkFast developed a rehabilitation game for stroke patients (Julia Hoang, Alex Khauv, Phuc Nguyen and Lisa Tran).
• Operation Denenberg created the ZivBase system for streamlining both communication and planning for this capstone class (Carolyn Lai, Preston So, Jorge Ahumada and Paul Nguyen).
• Team Jeff trained WALT, an iOS app that chats with users to help them prepare for a job interview (Lina Yoo, Joshua Jacoby, Nicolas Gomollon, Yaroslav Dukal and Sander Tang).
• Team Crypto created a new source of information for the Coinvita website to help Cryptocurrency users understand the market (Imran Chowdury, Diego Andres Felix, Nicolas Nouchi, Mauro Serrano and Jimmy Liu).
• Team Adigami built an online bridge to help the company Adigami better communicate with its clients and share custom analytics reports (Tianyi Zhang, Kelvin Man, Xiaoyu Wen, Hayden Van Todd and Xiaosong Weng).
• Yao’s Team developed a suite of games for diagnosing children with language-based learning differences (Gustavo Figueroa, Chianne Higgins, Eleanor Meriwether and Katrina Vergara).
• Team Voyaging Researchers provided an updated volunteer management system for Families Forward, a local nonprofit that helps families who are homeless (team representative: Srivarsha Nandula).

A video of the event includes the introductions and projects presentations. You can also view photos of the event. And almost as soon as the showcase was over, Ziv was already working on the two spring courses, with close to 100 students and 20 new sponsor projects!

— Shani Murray