“It’s one of those must-do classes. Honestly, there's not going to be a better opportunity to really dig into a specific project and see it to fruition.” That’s how fourth-year computer science student Cooper Hawley describes the UC Santa Barbara Computer Science (CS) Department’s two-quarter capstone course sequence, which brings together student teams and industry leaders to tackle real-world problems. After spending six months working on challenges from supporting stroke survivors through a smartwatch app to allowing property managers to easily schedule repair and maintenance work, eight student teams presented their projects in March at the annual CS capstone day.

The event draws undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, alumni, and industry partners for the presentations, a poster session, awards, and networking opportunities for the forty students participating in the capstone project. At the event on March 9, the teams presented their projects in front of a judging committee made up of Chris Bunch from Google, Wei-Tsung Lin from Salesforce, and Alexis Cole from Amazon. 

“Over the years, I've seen the capstone projects evolve from isolated technical prototypes into highly sophisticated, production-ready systems. There is a noticeable trend toward solving high-stakes, real-world problems,” said Chandra Krintz, computer science professor and associate dean of the UCSB Graduate Division. “The sophistication has increased because students are no longer just coding,” noted Krintz, who taught this year’s winter-quarter capstone project course. “They are acting as systems architects, integrating complex distributed agents, leveraging recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and incorporating advanced cloud services.”

This year, three teams took home awards. First-prize winner Team Altera created one of those sophisticated, production-ready designs, Krintz said. “They tackled the notorious bottleneck of healthcare referral coordination by transforming the multiday medical-referral process into a pipeline that allows patients to schedule referral appointments in less than an hour.”

Team Cadense took second place for the smartwatch-based therapy system they developed to support stroke survivors as they retrain their walking cadence. And third-place winner Team RapidRecall, sponsored by Cottage Health, designed and built a system that automates the analysis of recalls from the FDA and industry suppliers, accelerating a hospital’s ability to intercept harmful medical devices and pharmaceuticals before they reach the patient.

“The judges have repeatedly told us, ‘This is the best day of our year.’ And we have senior people in the industry who see a lot of cool things,” said computer science professor Dahlia Malkhi. She said that, while she knew it was a cliché, the capstone students were all winners. “They all worked so hard, they had phenomenal achievements, and they went from being forty individual students in the fall to being eight cohesive teams, each with a mini company or mini startup in a completely different domain. And their presentations were just staggering.”

Students began the capstone project in Malkhi’s fall-quarter course. (A capstone project in either computer science or computer engineering is a graduation requirement for computer engineering majors, and an optional elective for computer science majors.) In the first few weeks, students formed groups, then heard pitches about potential projects from industry partners AppFolio, Artera, Cadense, Cottage Health, Mysten Labs, Planet Labs, SpaceComputer, and Visual Layer. Groups ranked their preferences, and Malkhi and her team matched the groups with projects. 

From there, students met both in class and then with a mentor as they conceptualized and developed their approach to the problem. Rithwik Kerur, a second-year computer science PhD student and the capstone teaching assistant, also supported the teams from project selection to their final presentations.

Faster, More Accurate Medical Referrals

Hawley and his teammates — fourth-year computer engineering majors Aden Jo, Benjamin Soo, David Duenas, and John Hagedorn — worked with sponsor Artera, which provides a platform used by healthcare organizationsto improve patient access, engagement, and outcomes. With the help of Kerur and Anav Sanghvi, a senior software engineer at Artera, they designed a process that allows doctors and patients to set up and schedule referrals with the help of an AI agent — a process that typically takes several days, but that the team shortened to less than an hour.

Doctors and other health-care providers have access to their patients’ intake interviews and their progress throughout the system, Hawley noted, so that there is human input and oversight at every step.  

Hawley said that the change in his team’s project between the two quarters was unmistakable. “In the first quarter, it felt like it was not coming together. But by the time we entered the second quarter, with the break between the two, we could look back more transparently and see that we’d set a really nice foundation.”

Keeping Movement on Track for Stroke Survivors

Team Cadense — fourth-year computer engineering students Vincent Cheong, Jim Wang, Christopher Lai, Scott Ricardo Figueroa-Weston, and Jeremiah Wong — was inspired by a stroke survivor named Kevin and his efforts to relearn how to walk.  While closely supervised in physical therapy clinics, stroke survivors and others with movement disorders practice movements so that the brain re-learns through practice, repetition, and feedback. But at home, these exercises can be more challenging to maintain, which can affect a patient’s progress.

To address this problem, Team Cadense developed both a device and an app that helps patients continue to train at home. The device attaches to a walking stick and provides an auditory beat that allows patients to sync their movements to visual, audio, and haptic cues. The smartwatch app, which can be used independently or with the device, gives patients feedback as they walk. 

“At first, when we were designing the app, we designed with ourselves — students — in mind,” Figueroa-Weston said. “But when we gave the app to the patients, they didn’t know what to do.”  They used this feedback to create a user-friendly interface with a simple design and large buttons that would be easy to use for older patients who have  physical impairments.

“The most rewarding part of this process was being able to talk with the patients,” Figueroa-Weston said. “That was something that I definitely would not have gotten outside of the class. And it has shaped my process of how I would build things in the future. Now, I know it’s important to talk to your users as soon as possible.”

Capstone Projects Kickstart Careers

While some projects wrap up once the course ends, others continue to grow. Three of the eight capstone projects from last year went live in some form, Malkhi said, including one team that formed a startup that was subsequently funded by the City of Santa Barbara’s incubation program. 

In other cases, student projects become the seeds for further academic research. “I’ve already admitted several students who want to continue their projects,” Malkhi said, “so we’re going to incorporate them into the research we have in my lab.”

Malkhi noted that no matter the outcome of the capstone project itself, the experience has long-term ripple effects. “Some of the students get jobs from the companies they’ve interacted with. Some get jobs from the judges or spectators that came to the capstone event,” she said. “And all the students that come back to talk with me say that in their job interviews, they have a story to tell beyond their transcripts. They can talk about the project and the teamwork, the challenges they’ve encountered, and the full-fledged design and product. They tell me that this is the one thing that gets them job offers, and that they also feel good about interviewing, because they have something to show for themselves.”