Carnegie Mellon University

Students gathered around a poster pointing and talking

January 06, 2025

2024 Practicum Teams Share Their Success at the INI Practicum Showcase in Silicon Valley

By Evan Lybrand

INI Communications

Students, 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 

aws-team-1.pngTeam 1: Sahithi Maddula (left) and Shivani Ghuge (Right). Not pictured: Alvaro Luna and Jianjun (Aaron) Lang

aws-team-2.pngTeam 2 left to right: Yen-Yun Wu, Rajath M Kotyal, Junfeng Jin and Lanfei Ma. Not pictured: Parker Qi

aws-team-3.pngTeam 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

aws-team-4.pngTeam 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 

99p-labs.pngFrom 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 

city-of-portland.png From left to right: Junan Pan, Jiali Xu, Taorui Wang, Skanda Chakkirala, Yang Fei 

CMU/CISO: Information Security Office: Transparency Report and FAQ 

cmu-ciso.pngFrom 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 

cmu-cs.pngFrom left to right: Haoteng Chen, Disha Date, Serena Zhao 

CMU/Heinz: The Effect of Tracking, Advertising, Anti-Tracking and Ad-Blocking on User Behavior 

cmu-heinz.pngFrom 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 

federal-reserve-bank.pngFrom 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 

post-road-foundation.pngFrom 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 

swift.pngFrom 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 

volkswagen.pngFrom left to right: Ronith Reddy R, Zihan (Zoe) Qiu, Xiaowen (Eleanor) Shao, Canwen (Tina) Zhang, Shubham Kachroo

CMU/INI: Automating Academic Affairs 

cmu-ini.pngFrom left to right: Rita Sun, Apple Sun, Zane Wang 

DemocracyLab: Exploring a new Model for Business Formation 

democracy-lab.pngKate Zhang (left), David Tseng (right)

NASA Ames Research Center: A Structured, Requirements-Based Approach to Enabling a Futuristic Smart Building Vison for Sustainability Base 

nasa.pngChen Lou (left) and Harpreet Vishnoi (right)

Are you interested in becoming a part of Practicum? Connect with our Practicum team.