May 2, 2025
By Dina Shlufman ’27
In between classes and extracurriculars, participants in the 2025 annual Bits On Our Mind (BOOM) event, which showcases students’ tech-based projects, could have been seeing friends or catching up on sleep, but instead they were using their free time to brainstorm, experiment, code, and create.
BOOM, now in its 27th year, took place April 23 in the Duffield Hall atrium. During the award ceremony, Thorsten Joachims, interim dean of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, said that in 1998, when BOOM started as a small event, “nobody then imagined it would expand to become the cutting-edge digital technology showcase for all Cornell students."
This year, BOOM, sponsored by Cornell Bowers, Infosys, and LinkedIn, featured 50 student groups collectively composed of more than 100 students, all there to present their technological projects and innovations.
Pradhi Pakkerakari’s ’27 and Aryan Kumar’s ’27 project aims to improve users’ careers.
Pakkerakari and Kumar created HireVision, which they said is the first transparent video interviewing platform that gives the same feedback, results, and metrics to both recruiters and candidates.
“You can teach someone how to make an Excel spreadsheet; you can teach someone how to pipette; you can’t teach charisma, and you can’t teach one person to fit into a group of people,” Pakkerakari said. “The recruitment process isn’t just ‘company interviews candidate,’ but it’s ‘candidate interviews company.’”
Pakkerakari and Kumar identified three problems with the leading digital interviewing platform: it always asks the same questions, does not give the interviewee feedback, and leaves recruiters dissatisfied as well.
On the contrary, HireVision aims to get to the core of who the interviewee is as a person by asking questions such as, “A server messes up your order. What is your reaction?” and “Tell me something you can speak for hours about.” The other questions are personalized to a user’s résumé using AI.
“We believe that people deserve to work for companies they love working at, and at the same time, companies deserve to hire people who love everything that they stand for,” Pakkerakari said.
While Pakkerakari and Kumar created their project at a hackathon, Tailai Ying ’27 created his over winter break.
“I wanted a way to use the stuff that I learned in CS2110: Object-Oriented Programming and Data Structures and apply it to a project,” Ying said.
Ying’s project, CritterEvo, is an artificial life simulator filled with critters. Each one has attributes that affect its survival. The critters reproduce asexually, but the offspring can mutate by 20%, so the creatures evolve via natural selection, leading to dominant traits emerging within the ecosystems.
Not only do the critters' physical attributes evolve, but as generations pass, their AI gets more complex, allowing their intelligence to increase as they make decisions and perform actions.
Ying’s project was inspired by Conway’s Game of Life, a similar self-evolving system developed by John Horton Conway in 1970. He hopes his game can aid in ecology research and plans to add sexual reproduction, more complex neural networks, and different biomes, seasons, and natural disasters to his simulator.
While some projects like Ying were created to be a solo passion project, others were created by an on-campus group.
Casper Liao ’27, a member of the Digital Tech & Innovation Project Team (DTI), presented one of their projects called CUApts.
“CUApts is a centralized platform to help students find off-campus housing,” Liao said.
Students can leave reviews on properties around Ithaca. In the future, they plan to add landlord ratings and on-campus housing reviews.
DTI decided to present at the event to get further feedback from students and professors about their product.
Happy (Yanran) Li ’26, along with her groupmates, created a video game called Catacombs in CS 3152: Introduction to Computer Game Design.
“Catacombs is an action, strategy game where a cat goes to Ancient Egypt’s pyramids and finds its way to the afterlife,” Li said. In the game, the orange cat must defeat mummies, birds, and the Egyptian god Anubis.
Her team just launched their game on Steam and decided to participate in BOOM to get more exposure.
After all of the teams showcased their work, the following awards were presented, along with trophies and $1,000.
Sponsor Awards
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Infosys: OOI: A search engine for project ideas
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LinkedIn: HireVision: Empower Talent
Faculty Awards
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Computer Science: Carriage Renewed
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Information Science: Pollen P.I.E.
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Statistics and Data Science: Cite Geist
BOOM Award
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Chitter Chatter
All BOOM projects and descriptions are listed here.
Dina Shlufman ’27 is a student writer for the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.