The 2025 Stevens Innovation Expo takes place Friday, May 9. The Charles V. Schaefer, Jr. School of Engineering and Science has plenty of exciting Senior Design projects to display at Stevens' annual showcase for student design, innovation and entrepreneurship. Here are three to know ahead of the Expo.

LegisLoop

During a time in which American political discourse can be so toxic and divisive, one Stevens Senior Design team is looking to cut right through the noise and make important legislation simple to understand and increase civic engagement.

The web tool is titled LegisLoop, an inter-department group hosted by the Department of Systems and Enterprises and faculty advisor David Darian Muresan.

LegisLoop aims to improve legislative awareness by providing a comprehensive platform that integrates civic engagement tools with an online community. Using AI models, it organizes legislative information into customizable feeds, offers bill summaries tailored to reading levels, and provides tools to identify representatives and visualize their voting records. The platform uses a depolarizing algorithm to promote balanced content, potentially reducing polarizing interactions by 76 percent and increasing civic awareness and engagement across the political spectrum.

LegisLoop has a competitive edge with its depolarizing algorithms and complex organization of local legislative data, positioning it as a promising platform for meaningful civic engagement. LegisLoop's business model includes free access to its tools and community, with subscription benefits that ensure profitability.

"Without access, democracy is just a word," said team member Stephanie McDonough on the team’s YouTube page. "And that democracy only works when the people are informed. And right now, we don’t have the right tools to navigate the system."

LegisLoop is a semifinalist for the prestigious Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition, which features student teams in a high-stakes contest to persuade prospective investors to help them turn their Senior Design Projects into effective businesses, with prize money awarded to the top three teams.

Team members include Anthony Ford, Damien McDevitt, McDonough, Jonathan Memoli and Sean Tu.

AI Agent for College Class

College students have had the ability to digitally take notes in class for years now, but the process of poring through a lengthy transcription is still tedious. AI Agent for College Class is a project that aims to refine and simplify that process to the benefit of the student and educator.

An inter-department undertaking primarily consisting of students from the Department of Computer Science, AI Agent for College Class is an AI-powered tool that listens to classroom discussions uploaded by students and adds context to the transcription, including summaries, relevant course materials and links to additional information. The tool also learns the user’s learning style and tailors the outputs to that end.

"Our project focuses on delivering a tool that can be used to streamline the experience of a college student," said Savva Petrov, one of six students on the Senior Design team. "We focus on leveraging current technology to shorten the time a student spends on absorbing information and increasing the number of tools they have on hand to tackle classwork all bundled in a single place."

Specifically, the group’s website is built using Vue, with Firebase as the database used for user authentication and transcript storage. Cloudfare workers look through and extract text from PDF files, storing the text, and OpenAi Whisper Turbo transcribes lectures. A retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system then takes the chunks and uses it as context for generating the study guide.

The other members of the team include William Collazo, Tylor Jacobi, Hargun Sawhney, Michael Tomaszkowicz and Zhe Zhao. The faculty advisors are David Klappholz and Matthew Wade.

Coastal Solutions

The Coastal Solutions Senior Design team is working on a project with WSP in accordance with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation to enhance storm resiliency at Sunset Cove Park, a 12-acre site in Broad Channel, Queens. The project aims to demonstrate natural shoreline stabilization techniques, protect against sea level rise and restore shellfish habitat creation.

Aiming to restore ecological function, improve public access, and enhance overall park usability while adhering to environmental regulations, the $2 million project includes a 12-foot-wide timber boardwalk with a covered overlook platform, a regraded parking lot featuring integrated green infrastructure, and an educational oyster garden accessible via a gangway and floating dock. Additional improvements consist of ADA-compliant pathways, a prefabricated comfort station, interpretive signage and seating areas.

These enhancements have turned a vulnerable coastal site into a resilient, sustainable and welcoming space for both people and wildlife, supporting habitat regeneration and reducing stormwater runoff while enriching the visitor experience.

"In the most beautiful city in the world, Sunset Cove Park deserves a solution that is both innovative and practical," said team member Vincent Casale. "Through four years of engineering experience, our project addresses the park’s many challenges with sustainable, coastal and civil engineering at its core."

The team includes five students from the Department of Civil, Environmental and Ocean Engineering – Hailey Achille, Casale, Carson James, Felice Peluso and Katherine Petrusenko – with Weina Meng serving as faculty advisor.