The Engineering and Computer Science (ECS) Graduate Student Challenge was held from February 7 to 9, 2025. Over 100 graduate students signed up in teams of three or four. Their goal was to build a software to help organize the ECS Research Day poster judging event. The challenge had 3 parts: (a) assigning judges to posters; (b) creating a secure WebApp for judges to enter scores; (c) finding a fair way to normalize the scores and rank the posters.

Fourteen teams submitted entries after working on the challenge for 48 hours. Then, in the next 24 hours they created a video that demonstrated their software product, showed how to run it, and explained the inner-workings of the code. The competition was curated and evaluated by faculty in ECS. After several days of judging running each of the codes, four sets of winners emerged.

Here are the ECS Graduate Student Challenge award winners.

“Best Web App for Research Day Poster Competition”  – Pranathi Nallala, Venkata Satya Sri Ram Giduthuri, Sai Vennela Gowreddy and Kamal Preetam Chittuluri

“Evaluators Favorite ECS Challenge Project Work” –  Roshni Rajmani Pal, Vinay Tiparadi, Narayan Anantha Krishnan and Chetanya Anil Rathi  

“Best Code for Poster-Ranking Using Judge Scores” – Shreya Kulkarni, Arpita Ashok Khot, Dhruvin Hasmukh Barot and Mathew Lobo

“Best Code for Research Day Poster-Judge Assignment” – Uddesh Shyam Kshirsagar, Shreyas Kumar, Shubham Melvin Felix and  Abhishek Umesh Gavali