INI Practicum Showcase 2022
Twenty teams of Carnegie Mellon master's students will exhibit and present their practicum projects. Learn how the teams tackled problems, piloted new ideas and developed solutions in collaboration with industry sponsors.
Questions? Email ini-practicum@andrew.cmu.edu
2022 Practicum Project Summaries
Adobe: Prototype SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) Chat Assistant - NLP
The Chat Assistant acts as a robot Site Reliability Engineer (SRE). Built with the goal of reducing the workload and disruption of SRE teams, the Chat Assistant aims to process a users' request and provides the most appropriate response using deep learning and natural language processing.
Adobe: Monitor Creative Cloud Express with AIOps
We built a Machine Learning system, based on incoming metrics, to help site reliability engineers (SREs) analyze the large amounts of data and provide monitoring and anomaly detection. Given the incoming metrics from Prometheus, we decided the right statistics for the metrics in the system and created corresponding alerts for these statistics.
Adobe: Automatic Memory Leak Debugging in Node.js
We developed a tool called NLeak for automatically detecting memory leaks in NodeJS applications.
The system iterates over the user application based on a user-defined configuration file and locates, ranks memory leaks identified and provides stack traces. The NLeak viewer can be used to display all information needed to debug the memory leaks.
Democracy Lab: Empower People Who Use Technology for Public Good
Democracy Lab is a non-profit organization that connects volunteers and social impact technology projects.
Our project aims to improve the search feature including supporting fuzzy search and sorting by relevance. As well as Implementing the notification feature, to allow volunteers to opt-in to receive alerts/notifications when new opportunities that match their interests become available.
Honda Development & Manufacturing of America: Smartphone-based Peer-to-peer Blockchain-enabled Compute & Workload Sharing
Today, smart cars rely on cloud based services for computational needs such as predicting efficient routes and preventing accidents. Can we offload computation tasks to idle cars? In our project, we designed a system where idle cars may perform computation tasks requested by other cars and earn cryptocurrency in return.
NASA: Simulation and Analysis of Airport Surface Operations
This project's objective is to build tools to investigate transportation logistics problems, specifically the surface movement of aircrafts at a busy airports.
The tool can be used to simulate flight itineraries, controller commands, aircraft movement and uncertainty. As well as help conduct experiments to automate some decisions and discover more efficient ways to resolve the scheduling problem.
She Built This City: Information Technology and Security Evaluation and Recommendation Report
She Built This City (SBTC) is a non-profit organization focusing on training youth, women and marginalized individuals between the ages of 7 to 34 to enter the workforce of construction trades & maker spaces. They do not have a dedicated Information Technology or Information Security department.
Our project aims to offer simple and usable solutions for administrative and operations team at SBTC by creating documentation for IT operation, risk assessment and conduct a security awareness program.
SLAC: Smart Grid Management Platform
Smart Grid Management Platform (SGMP) provides a software solution for smart grid to optimize energy usage, supporting Stanford SLAC’s mission on reducing greenhouse gas emission and add more renewable energy and distributed energy resources into the electric grid.
SLAC: TESS API
TESS is a Cloud+IoT platform provides transactive energy services for electric grid users, grid operators, and researchers. We empower users to leverage their idle power devices like generators and batteries, to reduce their cost of electricity and balance the energy distribution in less-developed communities.
TESS API project aims to build a front-to-back infrastructure and database APIs on AWS using scaffolding technique and set up CI/CD development pipelines for TESS developers. It’s the core component for the TESS projects.
SLAC: TESS Control Room App
TESS Control Room App is a web application that enables operators to monitor and manually dispatch renewable energy resources (if requested) under the transactive energy service structure. This project consists of web interface built with React and Python, Flask supported back end supporting resources data to the front end.
SLAC: TESS User App
We designed and implemented a clean and attractive frontend interface for the SLAC Participant Web application, as well as created necessary functionalities to connect the frontend and backend. This web application aims to support users successfully participating in transactive systems to have the control and communication infrastructure necessary to control their at-home devices through our app in a practical and usable way.
SLAC: PVInsight2: Algorithms and Tools for the Photovoltaic Industry
With an increasing demand for insight into photovoltaic (PV) systems, the team developed a hub for validating and comparing fully implemented statistical algorithms for solar data science. More than a simple data repository, the validating hub will allow users to submit algorithms to run on data sets and obtain analytics summaries in the form of a leaderboard.
SLAC: TrustDER - Keymaker
A software-based decentralized verification system is that the identity of devices can be verified while preserving privacy, meaning it does not need an additional protection mechanism.
There are numerous applications for the blockchain-based identity Provisioning and Verification System.
Typically, devices are present in heterogeneous environment. The presence of multiple devices produced by different manufacturers makes identity verification through software-based approach more enabling and efficient.
Staris Labs: Impact Oriented Programming Prototype
Programming is very complicated and often difficult for a human to fully understand, especially when it comes to bugs and vulnerabilities.
The team created a VSCode Extension that provides insights into any block of C code using numerous modern static and dynamic analysis tools.
The prototype enables the developer to identify bugs and potential security vulnerabilities and assess the impact of the code better by leveraging a left-shift approach in the development process.
Turn the Bus: STEM Education via Animation Interactive Mobile and AR/VR Experiences
It is hard for students in rural India and other communities with less resources to access high quality, secondary Science, Technology, Engineering and Management (STEM) education, and the problem is even worsened by the self-perpetuating cycle of intergenerational poverty.
Due to the maturity of the smartphone industry, smart devices are gradually becoming prevalent in rural India. This project aims at providing an Android Application to these students through which they can access the STEM lab experiments and educate themselves.
Venafi: Let's make Kubernetes easier with A Test Wizard for cert-manager
Our Project helps us test cert-manager by introducing it to chaos caused when a certificate request is send to our custom configurable chaos issuer.
We’ve made a CLI for our testing wizard using which an SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) can use to deploy various resources which include cert-manager, applications, certificates, our chaos issuer and conduct tests. After SRE has performed tests on the cluster, it can get a report explaining the set of events that took place when tests were conducted and the outcome.
The current scenarios which our chaos issuer supports is a certificate request signing delay scenario and a network chaos scenario.
iSeaTree: Mobile Game App to Identify and Document Tree Benefits with the iTree API
A react-native app called iSeaTree to collect data for the iSeaTree project, which is an accessible tool for people to record and get to know trees in their environment.
We provided an improved UI/UX for the tree directories, incorporated state-of-the-art ML algorithms for image classification, and performed Vulnerability Assessment. We hope to make an impact on people's awareness towards such an irreplaceable resource.
INI Project: Automated Pipeline to Deploy Applications in a Metaverse Environment
An end-to-end pipeline that builds, tests, and deploys a Metaverse codebase.
Additionally, it also packages the application which can be installed and viewed on Meta Quest VR devices.
INI Project: Electric Vehicle Route Planner
Electric vehicles are one of the ways to move toward a more sustainable environment, but the switch from gasoline to electric vehicles has been a slow change due to range anxiety. This project aims to create a route planner application that reduces range anxiety for people driving electric vehicles.
INI Project: IoT Security
Our project aims to highlight the importance of IoT security in commonly used household IoT devices such as smart bulbs, video doorbells, etc. We want to demonstrate how some of these devices can be easily discovered by wardriving and how they can be a potential attack vector for malicious actors to enter into a home networks.
Our IoT reconnaissance tool can help detect, identify, and even perpetrate unauthorized operations on few of such IoT devices inside a network.