May 2020 - Computer and Information Science @ Penn Engineering

Alumni panelists:

Luke Carlson (Apple), Jenny Chen (Airbnb), Qi Fang ( IQVIA), Marty Gindi (Signant Health), Alwyn Goodloe (NASA Langley Research Center), John Hewitt (Stanford University), Derek Jobst (RaiseMe), Kavya Lakshminarayanan (Microsoft), Spencer Lee (Epic Systems), Sudarshan Muralidhar (Igneous Systems), Sneha Rajana, Ishan Srivastava (Microsoft – Applied AI Group), Joey Schorr (Red Hat, Inc (part of IBM)), Robert Zajac (Two Sigma)

Teams:

Team 1: RoadX: An Automated Road Defect Inspection System
Members: Mei Chung, Arnav Jagasia, Mark Lewis, Adele Li, Jeffrey Zhou
URL: https://github.com/arnavjagasia/RoadX

Team 2: PRECEPTA: Ethical AI for Safer Retail
Members: Xinran Han, Ho-Wa-Jonathan Mak, Philippe Sawaya, Rahul Shekhar

Team 3: Trailblazing in forestry: automatic biomass prediction
Members: Adam Kirsh, John Mings, Ethan Perelmuter, Nathan Rush, Maria Turner

Team 4: Gigfitter: A personalized scheduling App for Gig Economy Workers
Members: Cameron Cabo, Jeffrey Chen, Minjae Kwon, Hao Lei
URL: https://github.com/jordanlei/gig-economy

Team 5: CoParse: Performance-enhancing document reader for legal contracts
Members: Jacob Beckerman, Josh Doman, Sarah Herman, James Xue
URL: https://coparse.com/

Team 6: AMiAI: Using ML Models to Generate Product Reviews
Members: Sherjeel Arif, Srinath Makesh, Aavo Reinvald, Andrew Si

Team 7: Newsfluence: Identifying influential entities in news-related tweets
Members: Jack Buttimer, Matthew Kongsiri, Siyuan Liu
URL: http://newsfluence.org/

Team 8: Evidence Retrieval for Ethical Investing
Members: Edward Cohen, Samuel Davis, James Feng, Joseph Goodman, Thomas Kumpf

Team 9: Addressing news bias through browsing behavior
Members: Azzam Althagafi, Roopa Chandra, Claire Donovan, Jennifer Jun
URL: https://github.com/roopachandra/senior_design_9

Team 10: Forage: Savings for EBT recipients
Members: Jacob Goldman, Daniel Leiser, Salomon Serfati, Ajay Vasisht

Team 11: Spry: Aging at home made easier using IoT technology
Members: Tanusri Balla, Megan Kotrappa, Christopher Lin, Emily Tan, Spencer Weiss

Team 12: Compiler optimization for ELM
Members: Paul Palmer, John Powell, Vighnesh Vijay
DEMO: https://vimeo.com/412528445
URL: https://github.com/pzp1997/elm-compiler

Team 13: Remora: Transferring resource-intensive computational tasks between personal devices in real time
Members: Sam Akhavan, Hana Pearlman, Weizhen Sheng, Jane Xu

Team 14: Gamifying Physical Therapy Using Virtual Reality
Members: Alexander Chea, Yi Ching, Vijay Ramanujan, Anelia Valtchanova, Leon Wu

Team 15: doBetter deBugging
Members: Amit Gupta, Changwook Shim, Hannah Walsh, Zhijing Wu
DEMO: https://www.youtube.com/embed/82ITFJS1xUo

Team 16: Data Synchronization
Members: Suyog Bobhate, Tsz Lam, William Sun, Zeyu Zhao, Zhilei Zheng

Team 17: Personalizing Physical Therapy via Muscular Feedback
Members: Makarios Chung, Delender McCants, Vinaichandra Rachakonda, Saniyah Shaikh, Abdullah Zaini
DEMO: https://drive.google.com/file/d/135p6lL0RjS3mS1vGq_rWepT1ZFhKDZIU/view

Team 18: SmartCare
Members: Walter Chen, Kehao Lou, Ria Nagar, Haoxuan Yuan

Team 19: Online OH Queue
Members: Steven Bursztyn, Christopher Fischer, Monal Garg, Karen Shen, Marshall Vail

Team 20: Inventory Management and Predictions for Local Restaurants
Members: Mehmet Alaca, Natasha Gedeon, Maxwell Giancaterino, Deniz Kecik, Juliana Sales
DEMO: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xqzlu2jP6Vq1eBuAJktZM0-BDl8be9Uf/view

Team 21: Goal-laborator: A social platform that promotes wellness by establishing habits through collaboration and competition
Members: Pranjal Goel, Nishita Jain, Wellington Lee, Shirali Shah
URL: https://goal-laborator.herokuapp.com
DEMO: https://youtu.be/CEemC7cZgZg

Team 22: Batmanhood: A network driven portfolio manager
Members: Samuel Fleischer, Ranwei Hu, Michael Lu, Saran Mumick, Wei Zhang
Demo: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I-CBEXVgzmD_FjibjWML6NfX758aRUhh/view

Team 23: Keep.id: Empowering the homeless through secure ID storage
Members: James Bigbee, Connor Chong, Steffen Cornwell, Alexander Do, Gregory Kofman

Team 24: Lex: A Community for the Curious
Members: Sydney Essex, Vibhav Jagwani, Rohan Menezes, Pranav Pillai, Harrison Silver
URL: https://www.learnonlex.com/

Team 25: Online Music Streaming via Collaborative Recommendations
Members: Somil Govani, Dominic Holmes, Sanjit Kalapatapu, Nihar Patil

Team 26: Adio: Location-based audio advertising for rideshare
Members: Sneha Advani, Bharath Jaladi, Arjun Lal, Romit Nagda, Sneha Rampalli
DEMO: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gP__Q-by4EjCBGIrZES2f9nkyIRFgNWk/view

Team 27: BlockIt: Time blocking, made easy
Members: Griffin Fitzsimmons, Rishab Jaggi, Jaeyoung Lee, Ezaan Mangalji
DEMO: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tga2jw8s7qj6hyo/App%20Demo.mp4

Team 28: CityRun: The User-friendly scenic route generation
Members: Taras Bukachevskyy, Allison Domm, Luigi Mangione, Sierra Mills, William Morrissy
DEMO: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tXzxQUlYZku1cJLOIAp7-Ok28auNPU7l/view

Team 29: Sparrow: A Travel Itinerary Recommendation System for Groups
Members: Victor Chien, Jesse Cui, Alexander Lichen, Akshay Malhotra, Linzhi Qi

Team 30: Where2Go: Resource Mapping for Non-profits
Members: Vicente Guallpa, Katie Jiang, Stephanie Shi, Erik Zhao
DEMO: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1riaBG2VTN-K-Qz18QqmEErhA4Rq9WAf5/view

Team 31: PhilaForm: Simplifying the tax abatement process
Members: Stephen Eyerly, Vincent Gubitosi, Anant Kumar, Paul Lorenc, Tianyu Yin, Natalie Wiegand
URL: https://philaform.herokuapp.com/

Winners:

Technical sophistication: Team 5: CoParse: Performance-enhancing document reader for legal contracts

Creativity: Team 14: Gamifying Physical Therapy Using Virtual Reality

Societal impact: Team 19: Online OH Queue

Alumni’s choice: Team 16: Data Synchronization

By Ebonee Johnson

A still from video footage of Team 17 demonstrating their design, Personalizing Physical Therapy via Muscular Feedback.

On Friday, April 24^th, CIS students gathered to present their projects at the Spring 2020 Senior Design Alumni Presentations.

Due to the current COVID-19 crisis and its subsequent effects, “gathered” took on a virtual connotation: Seniors were asked to attend using video call platform Zoom.

CIS Associate Professor Ani Nenkova facilitated the event, and despite a few technical difficulties, Penn perseverance prevailed. Robert Zajac, one of 14 panelists, believes that the presentations shone bright although communication during these final months of development must have been undoubtedly more difficult.

“Ordinarily you would have a more human element when seeing the project in person,” said Zajac. “But I think the understanding among everyone is that we have to just do the best we can and try extra hard to have empathy for each other.”

Students were separated into breakout rooms (or sessions) on the call, with 3-4 teams presenting in each session for a group of assigned panelists. The seniors utilized PowerPoints to demonstrate their work via frontend and backend analysis, algorithm and tech evaluation, and planned improvements.

Team members included Jack Buttimer, Matthew Kongsiri and Siyuan Liu (Team 7) introduced an interface they called Newsfluence, which hopes to help users recognize their own biases by allowing them to see how media outlets are comparatively reporting. Studies that the group encountered suggested that those who are most susceptible to fake news are “tech illiterate,” so their most prioritized metrics included interface friendliness, intuitiveness and seamlessness.

Like Newsfluence, many of the groups have working models of the projects currently available.

The Online OH Queue project – winner in the social impact category and created by team members Steven Bursztyn, Christopher Fischer, Monal Garg, Karen Shen and Marshall Vail (Team 19) – has already been effectively helping students and faculty schedule electronic office hours during this global crisis.

“It is rare in this class to have a project deployed and used by 1000+ people before the end of the Spring semester,” said Nenkova via email. “This year is a first for that.”

Zajac, who received both his BSE and MSE in Computer Science in 2019, sat in on the presentation of a document reader called CoParse. Group members Jacob Beckerman, Josh Doman, Sarah Herman and James Xue (Team 5) posed the question, “What if we could navigate contracts like we navigate the web?” and replied with an app that allowed for just that. The project was awarded the panel’s technical sophistication honor.

“CoParse was a smart legal document reader that used natural language processing to build a rich representation of documents,” said Zajac. “It was impressive because the team received interest from industry in trying the product, which is not always common for senior design projects.”

Zajac, currently a Software Engineer with company Two Sigma, imparts words of wisdom to future presenters:

“Start your presentation with the problem you’re solving and explain why it’s meaningful! If we don’t first agree on why the problem is meaningful, we can’t begin to talk about the technical solution.”

The complete list of winners is as follows:

Technical sophistication: Team 5 (Jacob Beckerman, Josh Doman, Sarah Herman and James Xue): CoParse: Performance-enhancing document reader for legal contracts

Creativity: Team 14 (Alexander Chea, Yi Ching, Vijay Ramanujan, Anelia Valtchanova, Leon Wu): Gamifying Physical Therapy Using Virtual Reality

Societal impact: Team 19 (Steven Bursztyn, Christopher Fischer, Monal Garg, Karen Shen, Marshall Vail): Online OH Queue

Alumni’s choice: Team 16 (Suyog Bobhate, Tsz Lam, William Sun, Zeyu Zhao, Zhilei Zheng): Data Synchronization

Click HERE for a full list of participants and panelists