Eager students lined the aisles at the Advanced Computing Hub, the School of Computer Science’s downtown campus, ready to pitch their programming projects to staff, faculty and industry partners.

Undergrads, computer science graduate students and Master of Applied Computing (MAC) students showed off their CS Demo Day Winter 2025 pitches ranging from detecting sign language to agri-tech, and from crime prediction to education-focused platforms aimed at supporting student learning.

The students behind the women’s health project called PCOSCare: A Machine Learning and Simulation Framework for PCOS Risk Assessment and Treatment Analysis explored the hormonal disorder polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), which affects people with ovaries during their reproductive years and causes symptoms such as hair loss, irregular menstrual cycles and high testosterone.

The PCOS team — made up of students Spatika Girirjan, Namratha Muraleedharan, Saima Khatoon, Sana Sehgal, Yugank Ahuja and Yuchen Liu — designed the project to help predict and simulate the risk of having PCOS by creating a web form combining machine learning and agent-based modelling.

“This has never been done before,” says Girirjan.

“Three girls on our team have PCOS and if they were diagnosed earlier, it definitely would have helped them a lot. We wanted, as a user, as a patient, we need something that can say we have PCOS.”

The following winning projects received awards at the end of the day:

• Industry Choice Award: MHS (Make Hiring Simple) – Hemaprakash Raghu, Monisha Govindaraj
• Most Innovative Demo: Hand Gesture Control – Ved Prajapati, Om Siddhapura, Nisthaben Patel, Anshul Prajapati
• Best Undergraduate Project: Spotify Playlist Manager – Seun Samuel-Ipaye
• Best Overall Demo Day Presentation: PCOSCare: A Machine Learning and Simulation Framework for PCOS Risk Assessment and Treatment Analysis – Spatika Girirjan, Namratha Muraleedharan, Saima Khatoon, Sana Sehgal, Yugank Ahuja and Yuchen Liu
• Best Poster Presentation: Digital Transformation in Finance – Richard Nonso and John Othuke

The event consisted of 46 presentations and eight posters.