By Dave DeFusco

Students in the Katz School’s Department of Graduate Computer Science and Engineering recently gathered to share projects they had spent months building, testing, improving and sometimes completely rethinking. The ideas on display—artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data analysis and virtual reality—might have sounded complicated, but the energy behind them was easy to understand: this was a celebration of creativity and problem-solving.

“Today, we celebrate the innovation and hard work of our talented students who have gone beyond the classroom to explore new frontiers in technology,” said Honggang Wang, chair of the department. “This event is more than just a showcase, it’s a platform for our students to share their insights, tackle real-world problems and contribute meaningfully to the evolving landscape of computer science. The breadth of research presented reflected the dynamic and interdisciplinary nature of our field.”

That variety was immediately visible. In one project, Vaibhav Chemboli, Venkatalakshmi Kottapalli and Keerthi Sana, students in the M.S. in Artificial Intelligence, explored how to help large computer models learn new tasks more efficiently. Normally, updating these huge models requires adjusting millions of tiny settings inside them, which can be slow and expensive. Their research introduced a smarter, lighter way to make those updates. Instead of changing everything at once, their system identifies only the parts that truly matter and tunes those with the help of mathematical tools called Extended Kalman Filters. The result is a process that is faster, more efficient and easier to control—important for real-world uses where computers must adapt quickly without needing to be completely retrained.

Another AI project by Ruixin Chen tackled a very different challenge: translating Chinese Sign Language into fluent, spoken Chinese. Her system watches videos of people signing, figures out the meaning of each gesture and then uses a language model to turn that information into clear sentences. Because real signing can be messy or incomplete, her project uses a second AI model to clean up and correct the output, making the final translation far more natural and accurate. The goal is a tool that can bridge communication gaps for millions of people across the Chinese Deaf community.

Some students focused on improving everyday life on campus. Brighton Mukundwi, a student in the M.S. in Data Analytics and Visualization, presented a mobile marketplace called Stitch Affiliate, which lets students earn money by promoting products to their friends using their phones. Suppliers benefit, too, gaining access to a network of trusted micro-influencers embedded in campus communities. Early trials showed the idea works: students engaged quickly, repeated sales were common and useful patterns appeared in the data.

Practical problem-solving also guided the work of Ashish Yakub Beary, a data analytics student who created Katz Assistant, an intelligent system that answers questions based on large collections of documents. By combining a graph of connected concepts with a search tool that understands meaning rather than keywords, the system can provide clear and accurate responses to complex questions.

Cybersecurity students also brought forward inventive solutions. Mayukh Paul, Benjamin Kravchik and Yash Dekate introduced VISHWAR, a simulation environment that helps organizations understand and reduce human vulnerability to phishing and online deception. Instead of relying on short videos or multiple-choice quizzes, their system places users in realistic interactive scenarios and measures how they react. Over time, it helps people recognize tricks used by attackers and improves their responses under pressure.

Allan Munyira and Collins Katende presented an AI assistant for security operations centers, which are facilities that monitor threats and suspicious activity for organizations. Instead of requiring humans to manually sort through thousands of alerts, their tool quickly classifies messages and suggests actions, reducing fatigue and helping analysts focus on the threats that truly matter.

Meanwhile, data analytics student Xinyan Cui developed a lightweight method for detecting unusual data points, particularly useful for devices with limited computing power, such as wearables and sensors. Her approach avoids the heavy processing required by many existing systems and proves effective even in resource-constrained environments.

Other students applied artificial intelligence to healthcare. Lei Zhang developed a virtual-reality glove that can simulate pressure, vibrationand temperature, bringing touch into the digital world and opening new possibilities for sports, training and cultural education.

Several projects explored the structure of language. Tirth Joshi examined whether the sounds of words in different languages, when written in international phonetic form, could reveal deeper patterns of grammar. His early findings suggest that while languages tend to group by family, the connection between sound and grammar is weaker than many might assume.

Other students in the artificial intelligence program focused on public health and clinical research. Puspita Chowdhury used survey data to predict whether a person falls into a higher or lower health-risk category based on lifestyle factors. Prathamesh Joshi and Shivendra Gupta created an AI system that speeds up the long, difficult process of reviewing clinical studies for medical research—helping experts find relevant papers, evaluate them and extract data much more quickly.

Several presentations tackled cybersecurity from different angles. Dhwani Tarkas proposed an AI system that reads complex compliance documents and automatically answers regulatory questionnaires, saving companies time and reducing human error. Srujan Dasari designed an intelligent cyber agent that can help red-team and blue-team security groups automate their testing and defense tasks.

Finally, Namita Chhantyal with Regina Thapa built a healthcare chatbot powered by many information sources and a reliable retrieval system, ensuring that medical questions receive responses grounded in verified, authoritative data.

“Each project tackled a different challenge but were united by a shared purpose: using technology to make life smarter, safer and more connected,” said David Li, program director of the M.S. in Data Analytics and Visualiztion. “The students showed that innovation isn’t just about advanced algorithms—it’s about understanding the world’s problems and finding creative ways to solve them.”