Fifth Annual UC Irvine ICS Project Expo Continues to Grow ‘Bigger and Better’
What made the UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences ICS Project Expo unique in 2025? “The most obvious answer is bigger and better,” said Hadar Ziv, ICS associate professor of teaching in Informatics and director of Capstone Programs. “This is the largest and best expo ever,” added Marios Papaefthymiou, ICS dean.
Watch an overview of 2025 Project Expo above or on YouTube.
In its fifth year, ICS Project Expo outgrew its former home at Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering Building (ISEB) courtyard and moved to a new location at the UC Irvine Student Center.
On May 29, the annual showcase of capstone projects displayed the work of more than 90 student teams and their industry partners. Approximately 800 attendees included local industry leaders, UC Irvine faculty and alumni, and ICS students with their family and friends. “It’s a celebration event,” said Ziv.
For the first time, a digital program guide was created to help attendees navigate the different rooms set up to house the projects on display, with all the ICS majors represented: Informatics, Computer Science, and Data Science, along with the Master of Computer Science professional capstone program.
Importance of Experiential Learning
The showcase is the culmination of almost six months of collaboration on capstone projects designed to help students apply knowledge they gained in class to the real world. At Project Expo, “real world” could be gaming, healthcare, housing, law enforcement, food technology and more.
Project Expo aligns academics, industry and innovative solutions for real-world problems as part of the ICS mission. “One of the priorities of the school is experiential learning,” explained Dean Papaefthymiou. “We want our students to have real-world experience with problems. Of course, the foundations are important, but experience with real-world problems is also important. So that’s one of the main mechanisms that they get that kind of experience. It’s also a great way to connect our students with future employers.”
Partnering for the Future
“The mentorship provided by industry partners is crucial to helping prepare our students to become future tech leaders and ensuring their long-term success beyond graduation,” said Mimi Anderson, Associate Director of the ICS Capstone Projects program. “Project Expo would not be possible without their support.”
Industry partners generously support student groups and their capstone projects. However, they also find great benefit participating in ICS Project Expo. “It was a tremendous experience – very, very rewarding,” said Rania Kodsy, project partner from Cotality. “The students came in with a true sense of commitment and a true sense of ownership for the projects.”
“We were inspired to partner with UCI for capstone projects because we see tremendous value in bridging the gap between academic innovation and real-world industry challenges,” said Kodsy. “The capstone projects give us this unique opportunity to collaborate with bright and motivated students in a low-risk, high-impact environment solving and exploring solutions for complex problems.”
Kodsy added, “One of the other factors that actually motivated us also to partner with UCI for capstone projects is the alignment between UCI’s academic excellence, specifically in the data science, software engineering and human-computer design along with the alignment of that along with the complex and high-impact problems that we’re working to solve in the real estate tech space.”
“The students really bring fresh perspective and fresh ideas to the table. And that’s a unique opportunity to work with them, lean in and mentor the next gen of tech professionals as well as gaining those insights.”
Simon Wong from industry partner RTX shares praise for Project Expo. “The experience working with our student team has been fantastic. They are eager to learn, and they have demonstrated a high level of professionalism. We have collaborated really well with them to transfer our domain knowledge in that air space management, mission-critical application to them while they are able to see the problem space with a fresh pair of eyes. The student team really impressed us in both their professionalism as well as their drive.”
Students Shine Solving Real-World Problems
“We say that you are partners not just in a project, but you are partners in the educational journey and in the college curriculum of the students,” said Ziv. “And the students get amazing mentorship and amazing active participation from the partners.”
ICS students work diligently applying classroom knowledge to experiential learning in the real-world. “It’s been a super positive experience where we were able to take a lot of the skills that we’ve learned in our classes and just take a project from start to finish from requirements all the way to delivering a product,” said Ivan Rigney, ICS computer software major, who worked with partner Edwards Lifesciences. “It was just super cool to be working within the industry like that.”
Rigney continued, “I think one key thing for us that we were all really in agreement about is some of the things we learned in class seemed kind of ethereal to us. We learned this stuff but how is this actually going to look in practice? Does this really matter? What this project really did for us is just kind of see us take all these different skills and different things we learned in our classes, especially some of the process-related stuff. They’re always talking about communication, and if we didn’t put them in practice, we wouldn’t have been able to complete this project.”
Joel Anil John, graduate student in the Master in Computer Science program and Team Refracto member, worked with SAP. “We learned the value of communication, being on top of tasks, and making sure our development velocity is sustained,” he said. “And professionally, we’ve been able to really delve into some of the cutting-edge tools that are used in industry right now that we know for a fact is going to pay dividends later on in reshaping how the software engineering realm is.”
“What was most fun about this was working with SAP and getting to know their culture, talking to their developers and talking to our project managers there and really having the chance to work on a tool for a company at this wide scale and helping to see how we can make an impact in their organization.”
“I’d like to really thank UCI as well as SAP for giving us the opportunity to partner with SAP and develop a product that we were really passionate about, and we’re really excited to see how it rolls out.”
Innovative Projects
First-place teams each received $1,000, while the second- and third-place teams received $550 and $375, respectively. The top honors student received $175, while the second- and third-place honors students received $125 and $75, respectively.
Here is a description of the winning designs from each category:
Data Science
An algorithm that determines whether a geographic region has a “hot” housing market.
Computer Science
Use of large language models (LLMs) and machine learning models to classify and tag video and audio footage from police data to streamline and organize police operations.
Informatics
A Bluetooth-enabled “nasometer,” a tool for speech therapists to more effectively assess and treat hypernasality (a speech disorder characterized by excessive nasal resonance during speech) caused by cleft palate.
Game Design
An innovative game design that reimagines various elements of existing games to use special ops to combat a zombie apocalypse, with a range of groundbreaking new features.
Master of Computer Science
Project Braille
An innovative smartphone designed for use by people with vision- and hearing-impairment.
Honors
Machine learning-based risk stratification for prostate cancer screening
Here is the full list of teams who took home honors in their categories. More details about the teams and projects are available in the program guide.
Computer Science
– 1st: CS 03 – Signal Hill
– 2nd: CS 02 – AeroAI
– 3rd: CS01 – SIGMA
Data Science
– 1st: DS 06 – Cotality #2
– 2nd: DS 02 – Cotality #1
– 3rd: DS 01 – CHOC #1
Game Design
– 1st: GD 01 – House of Rot
– 2nd: GD 06 – Rusted Shift
– 3rd: GD 07 – Hungry
Honors Program
– 1st: HON 03 (Anthony) Reece Malone
– 2nd: HON 01 – Kaixiang Zhuang, Yiwen Wu, Emily Gao Wang
– 3rd: HON 05 – Nathan Monette
Informatics
– 1st: INF 08 – Bluetooth Nasometer
– 2nd: INF 07 – HowRU Gamified Tasks
– 3rd: INF 24 – Team Iridium
Master of Computer Science
– 1st: MCS 17 – Project Braille
– 2nd: MCS 07 – AdVisor AI
– 3rd: MCS 04 – SPARx 2025
Find highlights and more photos at ics.uci.edu/expo
If you are interested in partnering on a capstone project, contact Mimi Anderson at yangmm@uci.edu.