2024 Practicum Teams Share Their Success at the INI Practicum Showcase in Silicon Valley
By Evan Lybrand
Media InquiriesStudents, alumni and industry professionals gathered last week at Carnegie Mellon University in Silicon Valley (CMU-SV) for the annual Practicum Showcase, an event that celebrates the students’ completion of semester-long projects sponsored by tech companies, government agencies, nonprofits and academic institutions. For students in the bicoastal programs at the Information Networking Institute (INI), Practicum is a key feature of their degree that integrates the knowledge and skills they have built through coursework with an opportunity to contribute to real-world solutions.
Practicum is a core requirement for the INI’s two bicoastal programs: M.S. in Information Technology - Information Security (MSIT-IS) and the M.S. in Mobile and IoT Engineering (MSMITE). Students in these programs begin with the rest of the INI incoming class at the main Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) campus in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and conclude their studies at CMU-SV, where they are embedded in the heart of the tech industry and engage with the INI’s largest concentration of alumni.
This fall, 16 teams worked with a wide range of sponsors from across the country to solve complex problems with innovative solutions. Projects included: developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots to support user security questions; creating a public data portal to increase transparency of government information; and designing a sandbox to test AI model vulnerabilities without compromising user security, among others. Learn more about the 2024 INI Practicum projects.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) joined as a new sponsor for this past cycle, sponsoring the largest project in the history of Practicum: four teams contributed to a long-term effort at AWS to verify and enhance the memory safety of the Rust programming language.
“Working with our sponsor AWS was a wonderful learning opportunity for both technical and soft skills,” said Olivia Wu, MSIT-IS student. “We contributed to verifying the Rust Standard Libraries by writing harnesses and contracts with Kani, the open-source formal verification tool developed by AWS. Through this experience we worked alongside AWS engineers and they guided us on writing scalable and efficient code. Our team collaboration skills were also tested and solidified as we had four teams, a total of 20 students working together tackling five verification challenges.”
Meet the Teams
Amazon AWS: Verify the Rust Standard Library
Team 1: Sahithi Maddula (left) and Shivani Ghuge (Right). Not pictured: Alvaro Luna and Jianjun (Aaron) Lang
Team 2 left to right: Yen-Yun Wu, Rajath M Kotyal, Junfeng Jin and Lanfei Ma. Not pictured: Parker Qi
Team 3 from left to right: Szu-Yu (Leon) Lee, Yifei Wang, Mayuresh Joshi, Kai Cai, Surya Togaru, Mayuresh Joshi, Leon Lee, Yifei Wang, Surya Togaru
Team 4 from left to right: Jiun-Chi Yang, Daijian Tu, Olivia (Qinyuan) Wu, Grace Zhou, Dhvani Hemish Kapadia
Photo credit: Dhvani Hemish Kapadia
99P Labs/ Honda Research Institute: SANDS: Security and AI Network Defense Sandbox
From left to right: Xin Geng, Nithisha Shivakumar, Natasha Timothy, Pau Balcells Sanchez, Irtasam Ali Wains, Bhavesh Dhake, Darshil Kikani
City of Portland, OR: Open311 Implementation and an Open Data Portal
From left to right: Junan Pan, Jiali Xu, Taorui Wang, Skanda Chakkirala, Yang Fei
CMU/CISO: Information Security Office: Transparency Report and FAQ
From left to right: Sree Pragna Machupalli, Riyaz Ahmed, Yichuan Zhang, Chenhao Guo, Kartik Jain (not pictured)
CMU/CS: Exploring Interactions Between Congestion Control Algorithms, Network Jitter and Workloads
From left to right: Haoteng Chen, Disha Date, Serena Zhao
CMU/Heinz: The Effect of Tracking, Advertising, Anti-Tracking and Ad-Blocking on User Behavior
From left to right: Yunzhong Xiao, Yangmin Li, Fivos Allagiotis, Maria Balega, Chinomso Ashiogwu, Katherine Wang
Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond: Generative AI Assistant for NIST Security Control Responses
From left to right: Chenyue Zhao, Zhewei Tong, Shivam Bangia, Su Wang, Yashashvi Thakur, Samridhi Agarwal, Wenyi Qian
Post Road Foundation: Red Teaming Maine Transactive Energy Program (MTEP) System
From left to right: Ayako Sasaki, Prachi Doshi, Aditya Giri, Celine Wang, Mayank Malik (sponsor from Post Road), Aditya Sudhansu
Swift: AWS Microservice-based Synthetic Monitor
From left to right: Kehinde Adebayo, Wentao Wu, Yiying Jiang, Virgile Rapegno, Yiling Yuan, Lanting Hou / Not pictured: Zexin Yan
Volkswagen: Digital Twin Interactive Development Environment
From left to right: Ronith Reddy R, Zihan (Zoe) Qiu, Xiaowen (Eleanor) Shao, Canwen (Tina) Zhang, Shubham Kachroo
CMU/INI: Automating Academic Affairs
From left to right: Rita Sun, Apple Sun, Zane Wang
DemocracyLab: Exploring a new Model for Business Formation
Kate Zhang (left), David Tseng (right)
NASA Ames Research Center: A Structured, Requirements-Based Approach to Enabling a Futuristic Smart Building Vison for Sustainability Base
Chen Lou (left) and Harpreet Vishnoi (right)
Are you interested in becoming a part of Practicum? Connect with our Practicum team.