2026 UC Irvine ICS Project Expo Breaks Records

The 2026 ICS Project Expo broke new records with 1,000 attendees – a 50 percent increase from prior years – gathering to see 125 (up from 90) student teams present their Capstone Projects. The student teams worked with industry partners to solve real-world problems and compete to win top honors. The event was held June 4 at the UC Irvine Student Center.

ICS Project Expo showcases projects from UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) undergraduate capstone programs from Informatics, Computer Science, and Data Science, as well as the Professional Master of Computer Science capstone program. Projects from the ICS Honors Program, Master of Human-Computer Interaction & Design, and Butterworth Design Competition were also highlighted.

“I want to congratulate all the students for not only the biggest, but the most exciting expo that I’ve seen in years,” said ICS Dean Marios Papaefthymiou. He thanked the judges, industry partners and internal partners across campus, faculty, and staff.

For the second year, a digital program guide helped attendees navigate the event to ensure they could visit projects that were of particular interest to them. 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.

William Marsh Gary, associate director of corporate relations, welcomed attendees, students, students’ families and friends, industry partners and community members. He noted, “The importance of this event is celebrating student creativity, innovation, and hard work.”

Hadar Ziv, ICS associate professor of teaching in Informatics and director of Capstone Programs, said, “This is the best and biggest event yet. We are gathering here to celebrate the accomplishments of our students.” He praised the quality project partners from connections across campus and throughout Orange County. He especially applauded “repeat customers,” industry partners who have participated in ICS Project Expo more than once.

One such “repeat customer” is Staci DePatie, founder of Gluki (Glucose Key Indicator), an app for diabetes education and management. For the past three years, DePatie, also a UC Irvine alumna in sociology, has worked with ICS student teams through capstone projects to develop games for the app and to fully realize her vision. “I couldn’t be more grateful,” she remarked to the audience. “The students throughout the last three years of the expos have significantly helped me and helped my vision come to life with creating games and an AI element that you’re going to see today.”

She added, “I just can’t say enough to thank everybody who has created the expo and given us and the students the opportunity to achieve their best. It has just been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever accomplished, even more, probably, than graduating from UC Irvine.”

DePatie also noted the valuable experience for students, “Congratulations to everybody who is graduating. You’re going to do amazing out there because you have the ability to take on a capstone project and you’ll have the ability to work with others in the real world.”

Papaefthymiou highlighted the importance of the expo and partners, “The capstone projects are under the umbrella of experiential learning, which is becoming more and more important as we have AI supercharging the kinds of things we can do. It’s an invaluable part of the experience.” He added, “I would like to encourage our partners to stay connected, stay engaged, and work together with us in the mission of educating our students.”

Computer science graduate student Giuseppi Pelayo praised the experience of building Clutch, which won first place in the Master of Computer Science category. “To think this was just an idea ~6 months ago is surreal,” he said via LinkedIn. “Building this from scratch and pushing the limits of AI and computer vision taught us more than we could have imagined.”

Jadon Tapp, informatics senior, expressed the impact of the experience:

“This ended up being more than just a capstone project for me. As Orange County continues to develop, local wildlife habitats are becoming increasingly fragmented and threatened. We had the privilege of partnering with UCI Nature Reserves to help build a solution for the processing of wildlife camera trap data used for local conservation efforts.”

“I’m grateful to have spent my final year working on a project that created real-world impact beyond the classroom.”

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:
1. CS -09 Siemens: Electromyography-based Myoelectric Biomechanical Realtime Arm Control Engine (EMBRACE)
2. CS 02 – Children’s Hospital of Orange County + UC Irvine BioENGINE Program: BioENGINE: Portable Nasometer for Accessible Speech Diagnostics
3. CS 11– Tata Consultancy Services: EthicChat: Building Intelligent Machines for Context-aware Persuasion

Data Science:
1. DS 04 – Cotality
2. DS 14 – UC Irvine Health Emergency Department: UCI Health #4
3. DS 05 – Cotality #2

Game Design:
1. GD 05 – Cafeteria Championships
2. GD 09 – Buggers
3. GD 10 – Burnt Out Games

Honors:
1. HON 05 – Rei Shindo
2. HON 06 – Diptanshu Sikdar
3. HON 02 – Yoav Feigenbaum

Informatics:
1. INF 21 – Arizona State University, Dr. Cassie Bowman/NASA: 24R
2. INF 06 – Data To RAG: Hexa Capstone
3. INF 03 – Acrylic.LA: ZotRecordz
3. INF 29 – UC Irvine Sleep Lab: Dream Team

Master of Computer Science:
1. MCS 09 – Clutch
2. MCS 02 – Ableware
3. MCS 04 – Teacher’s Pet: AI Teaching and Learning Assistance

Find highlights and more photos at ics.uci.edu/expo

If you are interested in partnering on a capstone project, contact William Marsh Gary at wgary@uci.edu.