Symposium Events
CDSS Data Discovery Fall 2025 Symposium¶
About Data Discovery¶
The Data Discovery Program connects teams of Berkeley students with mentors across campus and beyond, using data to understand real-world problems in academia, industry, government and nonprofits.
The Symposium is the culmination of the semester as student researchers share their work through poster presentations. Please join us in celebrating their contributions to the data research community.
You can visit our webpage at https://
Schedule¶
All parts of the Symposium take place in the lobby of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building at UC Berkeley on Wednesday, December 10, 2025.
1:30 p.m. Poster session begins
2:00 p.m. Keynote address: Associate Dean of Students, Professor Narges Norouzi
2:15 p.m. Presentation of student awards
3:00 p.m. Event concludes
Posters¶
Health Community Data Optimization & Engagement Platform
Maryum Syed, Matthew Ho, Collin Nguyen, Joshua Davis, Nia Shelton
Mentored by Jolie Lam, CITRIS and the Banatao Institute - UC Berkeley
Analyzing AI Policies Across College Syllabi
Christopher Mach, Lynn Chien, Smrithi Senthilnathan, Sophie McKenna
Mentored by Igor Chirikov, Berkeley Center for Studies in Higher Education
Automated Deep-Learning Segmentation and Density Estimation of Polymetallic Nodules in Deep-Sea Seafloor Imagery
Manasvi Lodha, Inez Guadalupe Alvarez, Hitha Sri Varganti, Vihaan Khandelwal
Mentored by Kimberly Baldwin, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
Using Reinforcement Learning to Reduce Energy Waste for the Drying Process of a Wood Panel Manufacturer
Emily Hsu, Abraham Guan, Rohan Bhagavan
Mentored by Ricardo Perez, Umbo Energy
FLS Labeling - Hard Negative Mining for Sentence Transformers
Aditi Bordia, Tiana Zhou, Yi Hong Ng
Mentored by Yu Shen, BART
Continuous Glucose Monitors for Gestational Diabetes
Nathaniel Santoso, Allen Zhou
Mentored by Dr. Michael Kohn, Dr. Nasim Sobhani, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)
Analyzing California K12 Facility Master Plans With LLMs
Sierra Meisel, Hamza Khalilullah
Mentored by Sara Hinkley, Center for Cities + Schools
Knowledge graph question answering for FDA 510(k) submissions
Collin Lee, William Wu, Evelyn Shen
Mentored by Joey Yip, Medhive Ai
Tracking Inequities in California School Facility Funding
Kristen Li, Avery Schmit-Hipolito
Mentored by Sara Hinkley, Center for Cities + Schools
FDA Citizen Petition Analysis
Adithya Ayanam, Herman Ho, Kyaw Min Khant, Smriti Rangarajan
Mentored by Allison Schmitt, University of Oregon School of Law
Wildfire Data Repository for the East Bay Hills
Nicolas Bonville, Elise Chang, Sosie Casteel, Nicolas Sapountzis, Andrew Shoenen
Mentored by Alec Dara-Abrams, Berkeley FireSafe
Interpreting AlphaEarth’s Embedding Space for Environmental Monitoring
Aayan Rizvi, Eric Yu
Mentored by Huiqi Wang, The Keenan Group
Drug Discovery Lead Optimization with Agents and Deep Learning
Alivia Ding, Caroline Chen, Katherine Ge, Rhythm Goyal, Viraj Roy Gupta
Mentored by Alan Cheng, Alec Glisman, David Li He, Xiaodong Zhu, Merck & Co
Coursewise AI Support Chatbot
Miguel Contreras, Ethan Zhang, Michelle Li, Arnav Agarwal
Mentored by Angikaar Chana, Equivalence Systems
Mineralog: Mineral Composition Analysis for Geological Characterization
Kevin Geng, Raghavan Srinivas, Rebecca Bachtra
Mentored by Kimberly Baldwin, Kevin Smith, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management
Carbon Sustain: Sustainability Awareness and Compliance through Tools and Data
Tiffany Yeh, Anica Chen, Daniel Li, Cedric Xu
Mentored by Paul Bryzek, CarbonSustain.io
Trip Mode Segmentation, Classification, and Forecasting for Verified Carbon Credits
William Chang, Shiama Srikantan, Anthony Gomez-Mier, Dylan Stier
Mentored by Aurora Khatibi Garrity, HERO2
Hallucinations Detection in Medical Device Question Answering
Mark Shi, Amber Tien, Sean Yue, Arhaan Aggarwal
Mentored by Joey Yip, MedHive
Identifying Anomaly Aurora with Computer Vision Models
Tommy Duong, Alex Toohey, Sabrina Nazarzai
Mentored by Brian Harding, Claire Gasque, UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory
Safety Analysis of Autonomous Vehicles in Real-World Settings
Neel Panchumarthi, Scarlet Shi
Mentored by Dr. Peggy Wang, UC Berkeley Institute for Transportation Studies - California PATH Research Center
Quantifying carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. power plants using deep learning and simulated satellite data
Deleena Ghosh, Liberty Lauer, Rohin Juneja
Mentored by Prof. Ronald Cohen, Hikari Murayama, Naomi Asimow, Cohen Research Group
Interactive visual dashboard for Microbial Communities
Haaziq Kazi, Lia Shamir, Rohan Panchal, Fion Wu, Annie Gao
Mentored by Jennifer Kuehl, Arkin Lab
Geopogo AI
Sanatan Mishra, Akshay Sunkara, Chenghao Li, Yuanbo Pang
Mentored by Mike Hoppe, Dave Alpert, Geopogo
Predicting Student Chronic Absenteeism
Joshua Xiong, Erin Pan, Angel Tovar, Alex Zhai
Mentored by Ana Costa, Oakland Natives Give Back
CourseWise – Competitive Analysis and Candidate Metrics
Emma Cao, Amelia Jin, Geoffrey Kim, John Hu
Mentored by Angikaar Chana, CouseWise
Improving VerifAI Decision Quality
Keyue Liao, Victoria Fengyi Ruan, Ellie Wang, Amanda Wu, Zoe Yip
Mentored by Nikolaus Wischmann, GrapeData
C. Light Retina Agent
Diana Tao, Jenny Shang, Yash Thapliyal, Yuki Chen
Mentored by Yifan Zhang, C. Light technology
Expanding Our Understanding of Environmental and Climate Action in Schools; Emphasis on Future Goals and Funding
Aniruthan Ravisankar, Jesus Ochoa, Ojas Sathaye, Perseus Zhao
Mentored by Devin Ngo, Sarah Whiting, Judy He, Ten Strands
Enhancing RR\ID Editorial Workflows: Improving Reviewer Quality-Check Portal and Conflict-of-Interest Detection Tool
Riley Roggenkamp, Tracy Lian, Dominic Yap
Mentored by Reily Fairchild, Viraj Bhosale, Rapid Reviews\Infectious Diseases (RR\ID)
Exploring Electric Bus Effectiveness in Anaheim, CA
Brian Whitney, Jacqueline Vo
Mentored by Timothy Lipman, Matthew Elke, Transportation Sustainability Research Center (TSRC)
AI Governance Training for South Korean DPOs
Andre Leung, Deeksha Vaidyanathan, Erin Kim, Renta Oshima
Mentored by Christine Fostvedt-Mills, HewardMills
Automating Oxford Nanopore DNA Sequencing Pipeline
Jaina Gandhi, Bashar Kabbarah, Reina Kushihashi, Jennifer Sun, Alana Waterman
Mentored by Scott Geller, Brian McCarthy, UC Berkeley DNA Sequencing Facility
Why the FDA Takes So Long to Say No: A Computational Approach to Governmental Accountability
Abtin Khashayar, Anh Tran, Avani Kulshreshtha, Ashley Huang
Mentored by Allison Schmitt, University of Oregon School of Law, UC Berkeley Center for Law & Technology
Sharpen DTX AI Powered Recommendation Engine: A Framework to Personalize Mental Health Support for At-Risk Children
Krish Bala, Pranay Gonuguntla, Pedro Ochoa, Dhruv Syngol, Claudia Wu
Mentored by Tim Farrell, Robyn Hussen Farrel, Resiliency Technologies Inc.
Explainable Data Analytics: A Neurosymbolic AI Approach
Jason Park, Kaden Tang, Wayland La, Eric Li, Yinghan Sun, Daniel Firoozabadi
Mentored by Naveen Ashish, Inferlink Corporation
Does Human Capital Matter?: Analysis Of The Impact Of Dedicated Staff On Environmental And Climate Action In Schools
Pratham Rangwala, Huy Nguyen, Uichan Lee
Mentored by Judy He, Sarah Whiting, Ten Strands
FDA Citizen Petition Analysis
Adithya Ayanam, Herman Ho, Kyaw Min Khant, Smriti Rangarajan
Mentored by Professor Allison Schmitt, University of Oregon School of Law
CWN EmpowerHer
Jennifer Ren, Sarah Wan, Cindy Wang, Rebecca Kang
Mentored by Jolie Lam, CITRIS and Cal Women’s Network
Where are California’s Green Career Pathways?
Adrian Mar
Mentored by Sarah Whiting, Ten Strands
Quantifying Market Sentiment: A Multi-Model Analysis of Wall Street Reports
Amy Tran, Martin Li, Holden Carrillo, Amber Yu
Mentored by Ethan Yen, Gilead Sciences
Improving BART Chatbot Using MemGPT Tool Calling
Ethan Qiu, Neil Kamath, Audrey Wong, Ray Lin
Mentored by Yu Shen, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)
Exploring Time-Series Forecasting for Network Utilization in Scientific Data Flows
Hetvi Patel, Mehul Jaiswal, Hugo Fang
Mentored by John Wu, Alex Sim, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Generative AI in Surface Water Anomaly Testing
Akansha Jain, Diego Gutierrez, Himani Balaga, Tony Getsin
Mentored by Dan Wang, California Water Boards
IRIS
Hanjo Kim, Anupriya Islam, Gilbert Harijanto, Andre Ramos
Mentored by Ryan Lingo, Honda Research Institude USA
Redesigning an entity-linking model
Tanish Kher, Purva Marfatia, Nathan Tran
Mentored by Adam Anderson, Collin Duong, UC Berkeley D-Lab
Human vs. LLM Text Simplification for K-12 Learners
Khue N Do, Holden Fees, Senula James Wijeratne, Siya Patel
Mentored by Anastasia V. Smirnova, San Francisco State University - ECOLE Lab
Automating Anti-Displacement Policy Discovery: An LLM-Powered Web Scraping Solution
Allen Lopez Iyer, Ariana Siordia, Bo Wang, Zack Yu
Mentored by Karen Chapple, Madeleine Parker, Chenghao Li, Urban Displacement Center
AI Peer Reviewer Matching
Kovidh Singh
Mentored by Hildy Baker, RR\ID
Impacts of Operational Decisions and a Changing Climate on California’s Water Future
Isabelle Wang, Rain Zou, Isabelle Goebel, Sabi Can Ruso
Mentored by Dino Bellugi, James Gilbert, Laurel Larsen, UC Berkeley Department of Geography
Acknowledgments¶
We would like to thank everyone who’s contributed to the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society’s Data Discovery program and making the Symposium come to life. Data Discovery would not be possible without the leadership of Professor Deb Nolan. Sierra J. White-Koutsoubos and Associate Dean of Students Professor Narges Norouzi have provided invaluable guidance. Jessica McDaniels arranged crucial details of the event, and Camille Simsuangco Roxas helped execute it. CDSS Development contributed funds for the Symposium. Claire Chen, Keryssa Li and Leo Liao have helped keep Data Discovery running smoothly this semester. Ryan Lovett helped arrange access to computing resources and provided technical support, and we acknowledge the National Science Foundation’s National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Pilot for providing computational resources (award number NAIRR240387). Thank you to the experts who shared their time and expertise through guest lectures and panels for the Data Discovery course. Finally, we’d like to thank the Data Discovery mentors who provide the projects and mentorship that make the program possible.