CS Expo Showcases Student Software and Hardware Projects
CS expo
In April, UIC’s Association for Computing Machinery Student Chapter and the Women in Computer Science (WiCS) co-hosted the second CS Expo, offering undergraduate students the opportunity to showcase projects they’ve been working on outside of their coursework this year.
The student-run CS Expo featured software, hardware, and research projects developed by students through their participation in either a Hackathon, a student organization, or simply as a side project.
The event was held in the CDRLC atrium, with over two dozen exhibitors participating. Students demonstrated their projects to their classmates and faculty members.
“This event is great for students who want to show off their work and gain practice presenting it,” said Mehtab Kaur, vice president of WiCS. “It’s also great for attendees of the Expo, especially undergraduates who may not know all of the types of things they can do.”
OnStage
Zainah Ahmed, Sara Alaidroos, Teresa Chirayil, Jeanette Nguyen, and Dilpreet Sidhu presented their award-winning project from SparkHacks 2026. They developed OnStage, a discovery platform for film and creative professionals that helps scriptwriters, actors, directors, and crew find collaborators based on creative alignment rather than simply credits or connections, through profiles and short reels. The group was under the time constraints of the Hackathon but worked through some merging issues with GitHub to nab first place in the Creative Empowerment / Digital Storytelling category.
Sig Math Spectral Method
Lam (Max) Nguyen, a leader for the ACM’s Sig Math, a special interest group dedicated to exploring the intersection of mathematics and computing, presented the group’s semester-long project, which simulates the dynamics of partial differential equations.
The group implemented the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm and accelerated computations using a graphics processing unit with C++ and a CUDA framework.
Nguyen is a graduating senior who is headed to the University of Chicago for a master’s degree in computer science.
Jargon Edge Transcription
Arneal Montejo and Sam Stuckey, both seniors who expect to graduate next fall, developed a tool for their CS 494 Edge Computing Systems class. The tool is a real-time transcription device that will also define buzzwords, acronyms, and random technical terms that a user encounters when listening to a lecture, for instance. The tool runs on an edge device, with a speech-to-text model. One challenging aspect of the project was quantifying how relevant a word was when training their large language model. The duo said there is a slight delay of five- to ten-seconds in processing speech but that they would work to shorten that window if they continue work on the project.
