Awards
Stay updated with the latest achievements, events, and news from the University of Florida Data Science and Informatics community.
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DSI President Matheus Kunzler Maldaner collaborated to make FortBlox, which won Best Use of MongoDB Atlas. While DSI Treasurer Pranav Bhargava won the Tender for Lawyers Track, Sponsored By Morgan & Morgan.
DSI had the pleasure of hosting Leslie Valiant, a Turing Award winner and Professor at MIT, who spoke to our members about his work in artificial intelligence and computer science.\n\nLeslie Valiant is a Professor of Computer Science at MIT and a Turing Award winner for his contributions to the field of artificial intelligence. He is known for his work on the theory of computation and his development of the Valiant-Vazirani theorem, which is a fundamental result in computational complexity theory.
DSI successfully hosted its fourth General Body Meeting of the 2025-2026 academic year, bringing together members for updates on upcoming events and opportunities.
Join us in congratulating Matheus Kunzler Maldaner, Raul Valle, James Woekle, Kristian O'Connor, and Stephen Wormald for winning 1st place at this year's AI Days Hackathon with their project Plato's Cave!
DSI had the pleasure of hosting Michael Vega Sanz, who spoke to our members about his company Gail and their current recruitment opportunities.
DSI members came together for our Internship Applyathon, creating a collaborative environment where students could hang out and work on job and internship applications together.
DSI successfully hosted its third General Body Meeting of the 2025-2026 academic year, bringing together members for updates on upcoming events and opportunities.
Join us in congratulating Will Parkin, Alex Hart, Ethan Ahmed and Felix Chang for winning 2nd place overall at this year's OSC MiniHack with their project PosturePal!
Out of 1400 participants, our students Daniyal Abbasi and Joshita Arora won the first-place prize offered by Google Cloud by building BrainSafe, a browser extension that protects infant brain development by detecting harmful content in real time.
DSI members participated in ShellHacks 2025, Florida's largest hackathon, showcasing their skills and creativity in a competitive environment.
DSI hosted its second General Body Meeting of the 2025-2026 academic year, featuring exciting updates on future opportunities and a special guest speaker presentation.
DSI members had the incredible opportunity to explore UF's HiperGator supercomputing facility through a series of three exclusive tours.
DSI successfully hosted its first General Body Meeting of the 2025-2026 academic year, bringing together executive board members and students to discuss projects, J-board applications, upcoming HiperGator tours, and more to come.
DSI and UFIT Research Computing are breaking barriers for accessible, hands-on AI and data science learning at UF. With HiPerGator's supercomputing power, DSI students tackle advanced projects like reimplementing Google's Titans architecture, early fire detection, and quantum-level simulations for space materials. The partnership allows students to utilize the University of Florida's supercomputer to tackle advanced projects.
Join us in congratulating one of our students, Kalim Qazi, in winning first place nationally at Sentient's Hackathon!
Matheus Kunzler Maldaner, Ishan Kumthekar, Aadhitya Vijaisenthi, Aaron Goffstein and Adit Potta won Best Visualization at DataFest 2025!
DSI members Matheus Kunzler Maldaner, Kristian O'Connor, Danush Singla and Pranav Bhargava won the Best AI Hack at SwampHacks 2025, University of Florida's Largest Hackathon, by programming an interface to visualize the inner workings of Differentiable Logic Gate Neural Networks.
Raul Valle, Landon Nayab, Matheus Kunzler Maldaner and Stephen Wormald won Most Popular Award for their FPGA Implementation of a Differentiable Logic Gate Neural Network.
DSI and UFIT hosted a Deep Learning Workshop at Nvidia's Auditorium in Malachowsky Hall. The workshop was led by Matt Gitzendanner and attended by 400 students. At the end of this four part series, students who successfully completed the course were able to earn an official Nvidia Deep Learning Certificate for free!
Thanks to the financial support of Dr. Juan Gilbert and CISE and AIIRI's collaboration, DSI was able to send 54 students to compete at ShellHacks 2024, Florida's largest hackathon with over 700 participants! DSI members Raul Valle, Matheus Kunzler Maldaner, Emily Jiji and Evan Partidas won the Most Popular project and several other UF students won specific company track prizes.
Eric Chao, Justin Witter, Patrick Leiman, Matheus Kunzler Maldaner and Raul Valle won Best Overall at DataFest 2024!
DSI members Matheus Kunzler Maldaner, Raul Valle and Sebastian Sosa won the Best AI Hack and 2nd Place Overall at OSC Mini Hackathon by programming a Discord Bot that can use sentiment analysis to predict when undesired content is posted in a server.