CS&E Students Win Multiple Awards at 2025 Founder’s Day Event
CS&E students pose with their Audience Favorite Award poster for Vivarent
Photo credit - Craig Bares Photography

Department of Computer Science & Engineering (CS&E) students won multiple awards at the 2025 University of Minnesota Founder’s Day, including the Best Overall Award and Audience Favorite Award. 

Robotics MS students Abhishek Chaudhari and David Aviles Hinostroza, and Swapnil Puranik won the Best Overall Award for Omni Agrobot, and computer science students Lalitaditya Divakarla (PhD) and Nicole Vu (MS) earned the Audience Favorite Award for their project titled, Vivarent. Eleven additional CS&E students were featured at the event hosted by the Holmes Center for Entrepreneurship and UMN Libraries on May 14.

These additional CS&E projects include:

  • Atmospherix developed by computer science master’s student Aleksei Rozanov;
  • Counselling Chatbot ("Academic Chatbot") developed by computer science student Sultan Koroso and Carlson School of Management student Veeraj Chimanpure;
  • Evelyn (SmartSteer) developed by computer science student Ritesh Prabhu, aerospace engineering student Isai Alvarez, and computer science/mathematics student Micheal Zewdie;
  • Next Generation Intraosseous Needle developed by biomedical engineering students Dilshan Rajan and Shaliny Jadhav and computer science student Anuk Dias;
  • ThoughtX developed by computer science students Ashley Olson and Ilana Andrev; and
  • UniHustle ("Campus Concierge") developed by computer science students Aarussh Vaid, Srinivas Preetham Addepalli, Justin Mehes, and Aarush Bezalwar.


Founders Day welcomes alumni, students, and the business community to celebrate innovation and entrepreneurship across the University of Minnesota. In addition to recognizing the student, teacher and alumni Entrepreneurs of the Year, the 13th annual event highlights the MVP Challenge - a semester-long program that supports 25 teams with workshops, mentoring and grants to develop initial prototypes for customer discovery. Student and faculty participants across the 25 teams represented 13 unique colleges, department and research labs. 

Learn more about the College of Science and Engineering winners.

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