Spark! Hosts Most Successful Demo Day to Date
Over 200 people laid eyes on Spark! students at the conclusion of the Spring 2022 semester with one intention: to witness the debut of groundbreaking technology that the marketplace hasn’t seen. Attendees gathered in person and virtually in the George Sherman Union at Spark!’s most successful Demo Day to date.
Throughout the semester, students in the Spark! Innovation Fellowship, the Justice Media co-Lab, and Spark! Practicum courses spearheaded projects that solve problems across categories, including the environment, wellness, social justice, money management, and more.
Winner’s Circle
Beach Buddies — Judges’ Choice for Innovation Fellows
Beach Buddies is an innovative way for promoting environmental sustainability. It engages volunteers in freelance beach clean ups and offers automated community service hours accreditation for their contribution.
Team: Sarah Okon, Max Huang-DeBow, Christian Mark, Cici Chen, Samuel Leach
Contact: sokon@bu.edu,
Minute — Audience Choice for Innovation Fellows
Minute is a web-based application that will allow students and young adults to take part in one-minute exercises where a user will try to speak about a randomly generated topic with the least filler words possible to train public speaking confidence.
Team: Andy Vo, Myka Kugaya, Rebecca Chang, Ashley Kim, Elliot Cho, Jack Giunta
Contact:
Audience Choice for External Projects — Boston Children’s Hospital ALS Augmentative Communication Program
The goal of this project is to develop a tool that will support people at risk of permanently losing their ability to speak to have their own voice and messages incorporated into communication technology.
Team: Kevin Tu, Andrew Wang, Diego Sanchez, Gavin Tan
Contact: kevintu@bu.edu, andrew25@bu.edu, diegos@bu.edu, gavintan@bu.edu
Justice Media co-Lab
The Boston Globe: Prisoner Grievances
Every year, Massachusetts prisoners file hundreds of grievances alleging all manner of mistreatment behind bars, from excessive force to racism to harassment — all at the hands of prison employees. And year after year, state records show, prison officials reject almost all of them. A review of more than 1,500 prisoner grievances filed from 2018 to 2021 at six of the largest state prisons found that investigators fully corroborated the prisoners’ claims only nine times.
Team: Melissa Ellin, Jake Neenan, Allie Pirog
Contact: mellin@bu.edu, jneenan@bu.edu, apirog@bu.edu
Spark! Innovation Fellows
Cashmate
Cashmate is a social money accountability app that allows users to improve their budgeting experience by sharing their progress with friends. Friends will be able to hold each other accountable by reacting on each others’ spendings and remaining budget throughout the week.
Team: Fiona Mei, Hailey Moon, Hany Jasmine, Sharon Zou, Daniel Chen
Contact:
Resint
Resint is a platform aimed to help students with their job application journey by tracking and organizing wanted internships and jobs in a simple and effective manner. It can be as easy as a click of a button!
Team: Kolade Adegbaye, Fiona Wada-Gill, Bernard Mulaw, Dana Zheng, Jeffrey Jin
Contact:
ConnectO
ConnectO is a matching platform that connects people through their common interests and events they plan on attending! We aim to help our users make new friends before going to the event and stay connected with people after the event. We implemented a swiping feature to provide users a fun way to match with similar people.
Team: Anqi Lin, Mei Asada, Xiaojie Li, Marco Raigoza, James Chen
Contact:
Your Skate
Your Skate is a solution for skateboarders who don’t have an “in” to the skateboarding community. This app allows them to find skatespots that fit their specific needs and meet people to skate with in their area. This would solve the problems of gatekeeping skate spots and beginner skaters feeling isolated.
Team: Beck Sonstein, Lauren Had, Matthew Firmin, Sangjoon Lee, Aira Cosino
Contact:
Mart
A smart grocery shopping solution that takes your shopping list and displays the best deals and item availability compared to all local grocery stores within the user’s area.
Team: Selina Li, Sam Zorpette, Daniel Delijani, Alex Doval, Angela Castronuovo
Contact:
Innovation Fellowship Extension
OSLO
Oslo is a local, open source, voice assistant framework designed for privacy, speed, and extensibility.
Team: Aidan Gomez, Chase Maivald
Contact: agom@bu.edu, chase1@bu.edu
Spark! Practicum
CS506 Data Science: Boston Planning & Development Agency (BPDA): Brazilian Community Analysis
This semester’s team was given census data for the last 50 years, filtered by individuals that identify as Brazilian with the goal of analyzing the data for Brazilian community demographic changes over the last 50 years.
Team: Minghui Yang, Zhihao Gu, Xiohan Zou, Chenyang Zhang, Pengchao Yuan
Contact: yjasmine@bu.edu, zhihao97@bu.edu, zhangcy@bu.edu, yuanpc@bu.edu
CS/DS549 Machine Learning Practicum: Committee for Public Counsel Services (CPCS): Law Enforcement Accountability Database
This semester’s project goal was to create a comprehensive, searchable, statewide database of police misconduct in Massachusetts. Our hope is that by making information – such as civil lawsuits, criminal acts, and internal affairs – more easily accessible to lawyers and the public, we can end impunity for police officers.
Team: Nick Hall, Baiqing Lyu
Contact: njhall@bu.edu, baiqing@bu.edu
DS490 Directed Study: Database Infrastructure for Equity and Transparency in Boston Real Estate
Boston has a long history of inequity & secrecy when it comes to real estate development including challenges with affordable housing, gentrification, urban renewal, and environmental justice. This semester we interviewed Boston neighborhood leaders to understand what data is needed in order to make Boston real estate more equitable & transparent. In this project we built a database infrastructure consisting of a range of data to create a full picture of projects and affiliated people with each project. This comprehensive database is automatically extracted from the source sites and preprocessed in a hosted solution owned by Spark! and made available to the public.
Team: William Gao
Contact: willgao@bu.edu
