On Tuesday, May 29, the College of Computing & Informatics (CCI) held its annual Senior Design Project Competition in Nesbitt Hall. Senior Design Project is part of a multi-term capstone experience involving in-depth study and application of computing and informatics. Students work in teams to develop a significant product, and the projects are often conceived by external stakeholders who guide the requirements process and ultimately use the resulting application. CCI faculty, staff, students, and their family members gathered for a reception and showcase during which the final four outstanding senior development groups presented their projects. Each of the four groups gave a 20-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 Erin McAlister, Vice President, Brand and Digital Marketing at Unisys; Colin Kerr, Software Engineer, and Mike Stratoti, Principal Software Engineer, both from Bentley Systems; and Nick Dillisi, Head of Technology at eMoney Advisor.
Teaching professor Jeffrey Salvage, who served as the event’s emcee and as the faculty advisor for StratHub, described the high quality of the projects making up the final four: “This year's competition was the closest ever, with the judges stating the documentation was the tiebreaker. I was particularly proud of the wide variety of projects incorporating new technology like smart lights, Google Home, and virtual reality.”
CCI would like to thank Unisys, Bentley Systems, and eMoney Advisor for sponsoring this year’s Senior Design Competition.
This year’s prize winners are listed below:
First Place ($2000): StratHub
Description: An extendable framework and hardware pairing used to control smart lights without the worrying about a wall light switch.
Team Members: Christopher Macco, Elizabeth MacLean, Derrick Dieso, Kevin Driadon, Alvin George
External Stakeholders: Stratis IOT
Faculty Advisor: Jeffrey Salvage
Second Place ($1000): Smart Security
Description: Provides an affordable, multi-functional, and transportable security alarm system that utilizes a smart home device (Google Home).
Team Members: Tiffany Wong, Helen Hua, Aruna Srinivasiah, Josie Spencer, Connie Diu, Dericka Logan
Faculty Advisor: Yuan An, PhD
Runner Up ($500): Operation Exodus
Description: An immersive, virtual reality, cooperative stealth game focusing on communication between two players to help solve puzzles, fight artificial intelligence based enemies, and interacting with the world environments.
Team Members: Alex Cheth, Greg Kilmer, Eric Saputra, Thomas Skerletts, James Swanick, Roger White
External Stakeholders: Valentina Feldman
Faculty Advisor: Christopher Yang, PhD
Runner Up ($500): Trials of the Rift
Description: A top-down, couch co-op, dungeon-crawling game where two teams of apprentice wizards race to complete a series of tasks.
Team Members: Jeff Brown, Sam Caulker, Joe Chew, Noah Nam, Zak Olyarnik, Dana Thompson
External Stakeholders: Tony Rowe
Faculty Advisor: Filippos Vokolos, PhD
In addition to the final four teams, the following outstanding projects received special recognition and gave poster presentations during the first half of the reception on Tuesday night.
Honorable Mention: Gait 4 Dogs
Description: The Gait4Dogs application aids veterinarians by analyzing the motion of a dog's legs while it rehabilitates from an injury.
Team Members: Edward Aryee, Kyle Fishler, Hollis Liu, Hayden McPhee, Phillip Minsker
External Stakeholders: Dr. Russell Howe-Smith
Faculty Advisor: Jeffrey Salvage
Honorable Mention: ScanMe
Description: ScanMe is an innovative mobile application for the sharing of contact information. It allows users to create multiple profiles and modify the contact information associated with each. Every profile has an associated QR code which imports contacts directly when scanned in.
Team Members: Adam Grochocki, Kathy Lu, Thomas Rossi, Linh Tran, Ashik Vaghjiyani, James Yavorsky
External Stakeholders: Bradford McCarron
Faculty Advisor: Christopher Yang, PhD
Honorable Mention: Virtual Medical Assistant
Description: Virtual Medical Assistance (VMA) is a mobile application that will guide and help patients through procedures.
Team Members: Mike Corrato, Dave Krestynick, Colin Quinn, Lisa Wen, Sandy Weng, Stanley Yu
External Stakeholders: Dr. Ira Kelberman
Faculty Advisor: Filippos Vokolos, PhD
Honorable Mention: WikiQA
Description: Utilizes an existing knowledge base with entities and relations extracted from Wikipedia articles in order to answer user-specified queries.
Team Members: Craig Carr, Cheng Chen, Hongzhou Fang, Vincent Juliano, Hayme Morelos
Faculty Advisor: Yuan An, PhD
You can read a more detailed description of each project, and learn more about the Senior Design Competition process, at this link.