Summary
Hosted by the Master of Public Informatics (MPI) program, the final round of the second annual RAISE-25 Informatics – Data Science competition was held Friday, April 11, 2025, at the Bloustein School. The competition challenge focused on “Our Future With AI: Utopian or Dystopian?”
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The competition aimed to tackle one of the most defining questions of our time: What will our AI-powered future look like? RAISE-25 was a great opportunity for talented students to showcase their informatics, data science, analytics, and problem-solving skills.
119 teams from accredited U.S. academic institutions joined RAISE-25 for the preliminary round, with separate tracks for graduate and undergraduate students. After an initial round of evaluations, 14 finalist teams were selected and invited to New Brunswick, NJ, to present their final submissions and attend the awards ceremony.
More information about the competition can be found on the RAISE-25 page.
Watch Dean Stuart Shapiro’s Remarks
Winners – Graduate Track
First Prize
NextGen Tech Thinkers, Montclair State University: Blessing Austin-Gabriel, Ernest Chianumba, Shibbir Ahmed Arif, Keerthana Gajari, Cristian Noriega Monsalve
Second Prize
Semantic Squad, Rutgers University: Shubham Patil, Sai Srichandra Ravuri, Mark Doughten, Arushi Gupta
Special Mention
HashNCache, Rutgers University: Gautham Nair, Sharan Varghese, Ranga Sai Reddy Yalaka, Vishal Varma Dantuluri, Abhinav S Bharadwaj
Winners – Undergraduate Track
Watch Undergraduate Presentations
First Prize
DeepSeek, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: David Fu, Aoyang Li
Second Prize (two teams)
ML Super-Man, University of Rochester: Sreejato Chatterjee, Shubhranshu Dutta
LIA, Rutgers University: Jordan Shamai, Arnav Anil Kumar, Ismail Eldessouky, Sahil Jena, Srihan Kakarlapudi
Special Mention
C00, Rutgers University: Yilan Liu, Yihan Deng
Judges
Cory Yemen, Ph.D. – Director of Data Science at Labcorp
Poonam Soans – Chief Data Officer (CDO) and Director of Application Development for the State of New Jersey.
Rick Anderson – Director of Virtual Worlds Rutgers University, The Game Research and Immersive Design (GRID) Lab and Co-Founder and Trustee of Fair Use Building and Research Labs
Karun Thankachan – Senior Data Scientist at Walmart
Madhumitha Karthikeyan – Senior Software Engineer at Blackhawk Networks
Udayan Bose – Co-founder and CEO of NetElixir
Balaji Dhamodharan – Global Software ANalytics Leader, AI/ML at AMD
Watch RAISE-25 Panel Discussion
Acknowledgments
We would like to congratulate ALL the teams for their brilliant presentations on the fear of “Our Future With AI: Utopian or Dystopian?” We would also like to thank Dean Stuart Shapiro, Prof. Clinton Andrews, Tamara Swedberg, Stephanie Crozier and the rest of the Bloustein team, MPI & RAISE Research Assistants from all over Rutgers University, our esteemed judges, the 119 national teams that registered for the competition, and all other participants that have collaborated with us to make RAISE-25 a success!
The RAISE initiative has facilitated a significant push for research on human enhancive AI, societal impacts of AI and the creation of new AI products and services innovations. We are looking forward to continued contributions from the RAISE initiative and especially the next annual event in 2026! We wonder what the theme will be… and anticipate that it will be no less exciting and engaging than prior RAISE events, looking forward to RAISE-26!
Thank you for joining us in the pursuit of informatics and AI for public good!
Best wishes,
Jim Samuel, Chair – RAISE-25.