2020 UW Computer Sciences Nest Software Contest – congratulations, participants and winners!

We are pleased to announce the winners of the eleventh annual UW Computer Sciences Department Nest Software Contest – an annual software contest for UW-Madison students to innovate and develop new software technologies. This program was started by Prof. Patel, who continues to oversee this program. Over the last two years, as the contest grew in popularity, gener8tor was brought in to help run this program. A key partnership was also developed with WARF, who is now the key sponsor for this program. 

This year the CS NEST contest was held (virtually, of course) on April 22. Of the 22 teams that participated in this year-long program, 12 teams made it to the final contest day. The students on these teams, and the winners of the CS NEST contest this year, are:

The teams:

Full Reign is the first peer to peer routine recommendation engine for beauty and personal care products. The first MVP is focused on helping those with wavy to curly find the right hair care regimen.
Team: Rita Roloff

Sundream Studio provides a simple, all-in-one solution for website creation. Sundream differentiates itself by focusing on simplicity – building a website is as simple as selecting one of our pre-designed templates and filling out the content. It’s a process that anyone can do, regardless of tech background, and the entire process can take just a few minutes.
Team: Nick Peterson

VARMP is a stock exchange platform for art, which can be used by artists to sell shares from their visual art pieces and collections and other users to buy shares from the art pieces.
Team: Mehmet Ali Tever

Bleisure is a platform that helps quarantiners deal with loneliness. We do this by finding you a group of quarantiners to do fun virtual activities with. These preselected activities are specifically curated to alleviate stress, encourage social interaction, and combat overall loneliness while in quarantine.
Team: Yu-Lin Yang, Taylor Kemp and Ruthvik Konda

Myxr builds relationships through events. By utilizing chat boards, swiping, and curated icebreakers online users find themselves having rich and engaging conversations with others who share their passions and interests! Myxr builds lasting connections at events of all shapes and sizes. Virtual or in person, entertainment or professional, and everything in between – find yourself meeting who you’re looking for on Myxr.
Team: Samuel Brown, Roice Liu, Robinson Cook and Yona Chen

Visual Debugger is a web-based debugger that pictorially represents a Java program’s call stack at each step of execution. The tool is web-based and runs code of all sizes and complexities. Initially designed to better understand specific Java runtime issues, the Visual Debugger’s purpose can also help novice programmers learn faster and allow instructors to explain concepts more clearly. In addition, the web-based system is a quick and easy way to run code without the hassle of an IDE.
Team: Nikhil Trivedi

dbook is a home-based clinical trial platform that helps pharmaceutical companies at Phase 3 and 4. We aim to save time and cut down expenses of the clinical trial R&D for both pharmaceutical companies and participants by moving clinical trial to individual homes.
Team: Kenta Shibasaki, Anh Phan and Yukun Li

Modern Market is a mobile application enabling farmers’ markets to operate with proper social distancing. The application provides customers with access to locally-sourced foods and empowers farmers during this time of economic hardship.
Team: Jack Weissburg

Quiver Quantitative scrapes alternative stock data from across the internet and aggregates it in an easy-to-use web dashboard designed for non-professional investors. Quiver allows these investors to tap into the power of big data, and have access to actionable, easy to interpret metrics.
Team: Christopher Kardatzke and James Kardatzke

Demovate is a crowdsourcing Ideation Platform to help accelerate entrepreneurship globally.
Team: Roshan Verma

Requesta is an education marketplace that helps users find more personalized tutorials, and helps experts create them faster. By bringing the gig-economy to education, Requesta empowers users to communicate their needs and experience so they can get personalized help accomplishing their goals. Mentors with relevant expertise harness an intuitive interface to stitch reusable, bite-size pieces of content together to quickly create comprehensive guides.
Team: Matthew Kramer

Mosaic is a social media and e-commerce app that provides a platform for artists and creators to directly sell to and engage with their customers. Mosaic’s marketplace welcomes any kind of artistic creation, whether it’s painting, sculpting, Photoshop, etc. Mosaic uses location-based technology to support the arts industry by encouraging local, person-to-person sales. A major part of Mosaic’s marketplace is the ability for artists to sell commission work. This makes it easy for customers to request personalized pieces from their favorite artists. The app’s location-based technology will also help young creators and students find creative opportunities nearby. Not only does Mosaic want to support the current art industry, it wants to ensure the success of the next generation as well.
Team: Eleanor Bogart-Stuart, Jason Carrington, Max Johnson, Zachary Easton and Robinson Cook