Demo Day Spring 2026: Student Teams Tackle Finance, Civic Data, Campus Life, and Beyond

BU Spark! closed out the Spring 2026 semester with a showcase that made one thing clear: student innovation at BU isn’t slowing down. On May 1, Demo Day returned as part of the Experiential Learning Expo, drawing students, faculty, industry partners, and community members to the Duan Family Center for Computing & Data Sciences to celebrate a semester’s worth of creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving. This spring’s cohort tackled the challenges that define daily student life and beyond — financial literacy, social connection, productivity, and accessibility — and built real, working products in response.

🏆 Winner’s Circle

The Judge’s Innovation Choice went to Percent for its groundbreaking approach to computational type design, while the Audience Choice Award was claimed by Senator Ed Markey’s Office: Federal Grant Cancellation Tracking for a tool that reintroduces transparency to today’s recent surge of government cuts.

Percent — Innovation Award

Percent is an interactive web-based tool that reimagines type design through geometry, visualizing letterforms as systems of dynamic, sphere-based structures. Building on a Figma prototype, the project has evolved into a technically robust platform that allows for an abstracted and simpler way to design fonts through a connected circle system across letters. Designed for students, educators, and designers, Percent combines visualization, exploration, and interactive web technologies to transform type design into a hands-on, computational learning experience.

GitHub | Product link | Poster | Presentation | Notion Scrum

Team members: Melih Yilmaz (melihyilmaz999@gmail.com), Yue Zhou (zhouyue@bu.edu), Margarita Gomez-Puche (Mmarga@bu.edu), Alara Kalfazade (akalfaza@bu.edu)

Senator Ed Markey’s Office: Federal Grant Cancellation Tracking — Audience Engagement Award

In partnership with the office of Senator Edward J. Markey, a national leader on energy, environmental protection, and equity-centered policymaking, this project tracks one of the quieter consequences of the current administration: the reduction or termination of federal funding, often without public announcement. Starting with Massachusetts, the team built a pipeline to identify grants cancelled, rescinded, or modified since January 2025 using USAspending data and a custom classification framework — delivering an automated ETL pipeline and Streamlit dashboard that maps when, where, and how federal grant cuts occurred across the state. This semester, the team expanded coverage, adding state-by-state and tract-level comparisons, and introducing time-series visualizations that make the full lifecycle and timing of funding changes more transparent.

Team members: Yeabsera Mekebeb (Ymekebeb@bu.edu), Enoch Ngan (nganenoch@gmail.com), Dheer Doshi (dheer@bu.edu)

Innovation Program Project Gallery

The innovation didn’t stop at the podium. Demo Day Spring 2026 brought together student-led projects spanning personal finance, campus connection, legal tech, civic data, urban infrastructure, and more. With many teams continuing to develop and refine their work beyond the classroom, the future of these projects and the students behind them is exceptionally bright.

Spent

Spent is a gamified financial tracking app that helps college students understand their past, present, and future spending in real time. The predictive calendar looks at user spending trends and Google Calendar events and forecasts upcoming expenses using AI so students can plan their life in alignment with their financial decisions. Location tracking with daily user spending entry allows students to easily enter their expense information and see their spending habits over time. Monthly summaries help the user compare their spending expectations set at the beginning of the month with their reality, guiding them towards healthier financial decisions in the future. Spent creates financial awareness during an ever-changing college experience so students can graduate with financial confidence.

Team members: Isha Borkar (ishab@bu.edu), Jacquelyn Henderson (jhender@bu.edu), David Yang (davidmy@bu.edu), Clarissa Chen (clchen5@bu.edu)

FinePrint

FinePrint is an AI-powered assistant that helps people understand fine print by analyzing contracts, terms of service, leases, and other complex documents in plain English. Users can submit text or links, and the system summarizes key clauses, flags unusual or risky terms—such as auto-renewals, data sharing, or cancellation policies—and explains legal jargon in an accessible way. Designed for everyday users—from students to small business owners—the tool empowers people to make informed decisions before agreeing to documents they encounter daily.

Team members: Stephanie Lu (stephalu@bu.edu), Daniel Thomas (diggyzar@bu.edu), Nolan Mackie (Nmackie@bu.edu)

GitHub | Product link | Poster | Presentation | Notion Scrum

Neary

Neary is a location-based social intelligence platform designed to combat “crowded isolation” by transforming campus spaces into active networks of spontaneous connection. The application enables intent-based check-ins—allowing students to signal availability for specific activities like dining, studying, or language exchange within verified campus zones. The system integrates generative AI to suggest context-aware icebreakers and vector embedding models to highlight high-compatibility peers, effectively lowering the social friction of interaction. By bridging the gap between physical proximity and social accessibility, Neary empowers students—especially international arrivals—to turn everyday encounters into lasting community.

Team members: Ibrahim Alburi (ibrah1m@bu.edu), Abdulelah Hamdi (hamdi@bu.edu), Seung Min Lee (seungml@bu.edu)

GitHub | Product link | Poster | Presentation | Notion Scrum

Me2You

Me2You is an AI-powered, interactive installation that transforms campus community spaces into playful environments that spark spontaneous social connection. Using a real-time computer vision pipeline and machine learning models, the system recognizes gestures and expressions—such as smiles, waves, or peace signs—and instantly displays matching user-submitted photos, names, and messages via a live, database-driven interface. Built with a full-stack architecture, Me2You blends AI, physical interaction, and participatory design to help students and staff recognize one another, break social barriers, and feel more connected within shared spaces.

Team members: Nora Amer (amernor@bu.edu), Shawn Lau (shawnlau@bu.edu), Sebah Beshir (sebahbr@bu.edu), Jen Tan (jetang@bu.edu)

GitHub | Product link | Poster | Presentation | Notion Scrum

Clock-In

Clock-In is a productivity and wellness-focused web app designed to help students combat burnout, stay organized, and build confidence in completing demanding tasks. Integrated with student calendars, the platform passively tracks work patterns and time allocation to help users realistically plan, follow through on long assignments, and improve productivity over time. Inspired by Pomodoro timers but built as a holistic productivity hub, Clock-In supports sustainable focus during intense academic periods like exam weeks while remaining useful for anyone managing demanding schedules.

Team members: Reese Stichter (Rsticht@bu.edu), Kevin Kupeli (kkupeli@bu.edu), Clara Lewis (clewis27@bu.edu), Alicia Lin (beans@bu.edu)

GitHub | Product link | Presentation | Notion Scrum

X-Lab and Practicum Presentations

XC473 Justice Media co-Lab: The Man in the Mirror

The Man in the Mirror examines the rise of “looksmaxxing” content on TikTok, particularly among teenage boys and young men, and explores how different types of appearance-focused advice are socially rewarded online. Grounded in social cognitive theory, the project aims to better understand how these trends contribute to body dissatisfaction and dysmorphia, while using the findings to inform potential content regulations and support efforts for individuals affected by body image and eating disorders.

DS488 – UX Practicum: BU Law: Human Trafficking

Attorneys, advocates, and policy advisors working on human trafficking issues currently rely on fragmented sources—peer networks, agency websites, broadly shared emails—to stay informed about legal and policy changes. This project aims to design a centralized, searchable resource that aggregates updates across legislation, regulations, case law, and enforcement actions. The UX team designed an interface that makes this information easy to find and navigate. Users include attorneys, policy advocates, survivor support organizations, and law students. Key design challenges include balancing comprehensive filtering with minimal click depth, supporting multiple user types with different needs, and incorporating trauma-informed features like quick exit buttons.

DS519 – SE Practicum: Barterloo

Barterloo is rooted in the ancient, time-tested practice of barter — a system that supported communities for thousands of years before money existed. What the team is building isn’t something new; it’s a remembered model of value exchange that honors what we each have to give outside of traditional currency. With today’s technology, Barterloo reawakens that system on a global scale through a community-centered platform where individuals and small businesses can exchange time, skills, services, and secondhand goods with ease. The goal is a self-sustaining, community-governed ecosystem where people connect not just for what they want, but for what they truly need — building longer tables that create equity, access, and mutual support across the world.

DS539 – DS Practicum: Center for Career Development: Employer Engagement Analysis Project

The Employer Engagement Analysis Project aims to help the Boston University Center for Career Development (CCD) better understand how employers interact with BU students and offices through the university’s career ecosystem. Using data collected from Handshake between Spring 2020 and Summer 2025, this project will analyze five years of employer activity, including job postings, event participation, and student applications, to identify patterns in engagement and hiring behavior. By integrating datasets that include employer information, event records, job posting data, and student participation, the team will explore which employers are most active, which engagement activities generate the highest student interest, and which factors are most predictive of successful hiring outcomes.

DS549 – ML Practicum: MISI: OnThePorch

The Public Safety and Community Sentiment project helps Dorchester residents and community leaders access timely, trustworthy information about local public safety issues and events by combining official city data with verified community reporting. Last semester, the team delivered an AI-powered community assistant with a chat-based interface and filterable event calendar, pulling from sources including Dorchester Reporter, Boston.gov APIs, community newsletters, and uploaded documents with automated daily updates. A guiding principle throughout has been avoiding AI editorializing: the system presents verified facts first, offering historical trends or sentiment context only when explicitly requested, positioning it as an assistive information tool rather than an interpretive one. This semester, the team is focused on strengthening reliability and expanding coverage, including a new audio ingestion feature that allows trusted partners to submit community meeting recordings for transcription, PII redaction, and indexed retrieval — ensuring the assistant can cite community voices with clear sourcing and timestamps rather than speaking for them.

DS594 – Data Visualization: Tech Policy

The Tech Policy Tracker aims to make U.S. technology legislation accessible and understandable for everyday users — not just policymakers and researchers. Rather than building a full policy search engine, this semester’s team is focused on creating an interactive storytelling and visualization tool using existing policy data provided by the client. The goal is a polished web-based dashboard where users can explore, compare, and contextualize tech-related legislation at both the state and federal level — seeing which bills have passed, failed, or stalled, and how policies differ across states and over time. Working closely with their client stakeholder, the team is emphasizing UX clarity and thoughtful visual framing, allowing users to enter the policy landscape through the lens of their own interests, questions, or location.

DS719 – Data Science Project Management: Habidy

Habidy seeks to leverage personalized AI mentors to translate desired identity into daily, psychology-backed habits, reinforced through feedback and reflection. This student-driven project was created to help new college students navigate identity exploration, habit building, and opportunities.

HackOurSpace: Faces of BU

None of this happens without the people behind the scenes. Thank you to our judges, instructors, mentors, and the entire Spark! team for showing up every week to push students further than they thought possible.