Hewlett Packard Enterprise Data Science Institute

The Hewlett Packard Enterprise Data Science Institute and the University of Houston Department of Computer Science hosted the biannual AI and Data Science Showcase on December 2, 2025. Each year, the event provides a platform for the innovative research of undergraduate and graduate students at UH.  

Presentations by 35 teams at the fall semester event were evaluated by a panel of judges based on innovation, feasibility, impact, and presentation quality. Winning teams received certificates of achievement for their outstanding work. 

The December showcase is part of the HPE DSI’s mission to foster research and cross-disciplinary collaboration in emerging data science fields. It also reflects the University's continued investment in student-led research and its dedication to preparing the next generation of AI and data science leaders. 

First Place 

Team: Dylan Berens, Dominic C. McDonald, Shruthi Yenamagandla 

Project: Bioacoustics: Assessing Ecosystem Biodiversity Using Transformers 

Second Place 

Team: Ayush Gupta, Kosar Rahimi 

Project: Using Deep Learning to Explore How RNA Molecules Fold and Unfold 

Third Place 

Team: Javier Alvarez, William D. Steward, Niket Gupta 

Project: Dual-Pipeline Lung Cancer Detection System: AI-Powered Lung Cancer Detection System 

Fourth Place 

Team: Xinyu Qin, Ruiheng Yu 

Project: Interpretable and Interactive Deep Survival Analysis with Time-Dependent Extreme Gradient Integration 

Fifth Place (Tie) 

Team: Junhee Park, Aryan Prajapati, Nathan Loredo 

Project: Cardiovascular Disease Prediction 

Fifth Place (Tie) 

Team: Siyu Gan, Liang Ma 

Project: A Conditional Diffusion Model for Ocean Wave Height Forecasting 

Judges 

Rohan Chaudhary, Guoning Chen, Ishita Sharma, Jerry O. Ebalunode, Andrew J. Kapral, Pam Qian, Nouhad Rizk, Kishan Yerneni 

Organizing Committee: Claudia Neuhauser, Nouhad Rizk, Andrew Kapral, Ishita Sharma