The Tapia Student Poster Competition is a major component of the Tapia Conference and provides undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to present their latest research results and methodologies to a broad audience, network with their peers, and receive constructive feedback from poster judges.
The Tapia 2025 Student Poster Competition was held on Thursday, September 11, with 26 student poster presenters. Awards were presented for the Graduate and Undergraduate categories by Poster Co-Chairs, Dr. Roshan Venkatakrishnan and Dr. John Porter III, at the Tapia Awards Reception on Friday, September 12. Monetary prizes of $1,000 for 1st place, $750 for 2nd place, and $500 for 3rd place were awarded.
Congratulations to the following Tapia 2025 Student Poster Competition Winners:
Graduate Recipients:
First Place: Promise Ekpo – MARLHospital: A Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning Environment for Medical Decision Making (Cornell University)
Second Place: Oluwagbeminiyi Johnson – Investigating the Use of AI Tools in Student Informal Technical Preparation and Workforce Readiness (University of North Carolina Charlotte)
Third Place: Chinelo Njoku – Understanding, Explaining, and Handling Rumor-spreading Dynamics – an LLM (Large Language Model) Augmented Visual Analytics Approach (Purdue University)
Undergraduate Recipients:
First Place: Isaac Adjei – Improving Machine Translation With Context-Aware Entity-Only Pre-Translations using GPT-4o (Howard University)
Second Place: Osita Odunze – The Future of Gaming: Integrating AI and Brain-Computer Interfaces for Inclusive Play (Morgan State University)
Third Place: Sofia Mata Avila – C-FIT: Providing Novice CS Freshmen a Leg Up for CS 1 (University of North Carolina Charlotte)
Tapia 2025 also hosted the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC), where select poster presenters advance to a second round to showcase their research in brief presentations to a panel of judges. Monetary awards of $500 for 1st place, $300 for 2nd place, and $200 for 3rd place were given by ACM, and the winners qualified for the ACM Student Research Competition Grand Finals.
Congratulations to the following 2025 ACM Student Research Competition Winners:
Graduate Recipients:
First Place: Howard Prioleau – AfriMamba: How State Space Machines Can Help African Language Identification (Howard University)
Second Place: Arturo Gonzalez – Trajectory Analysis for Congestion Detection in Foraging Robot Swarms (University of Texas Pan American)
Third Place: Nusrat Jahan Mozumder – Identification of Relevant Latent Subspace for Efficient Neural Network Validation (University of Virginia)
Undergraduate Recipients:
First Place: Tanvi Ganapathy – Sequence-Level Model of the Kinetics of Annihilation in DNA-Based Neural Networks (California Institute of Technology)
Second Place: Jensen Coonradt – Breaking the Sequence: Faster AI Reasoning with Diffusion-Based LLMs (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Third Place: Francisco Morales Puente – Eyes in Motion – Utilizing Eye Tracking for Assistive Technology (Pomona College)