By Rachel Robey
In early April, students convened in Union South to compete in a “reverse pitch,” a competition in which participants pitch their best solutions to a previously identified problem. Hosted by the N+1 Institute and UW’s longtime collaborator GE HealthCare, April’s reverse pitch tasked students with improving the global accessibility and reliability of healthcare monitoring technology.
To the winners went the spoils: scholarships, lucrative networking opportunities, and awards like wireless speakers and smart notebooks. For most, however, the chance to hone professional skills was the real draw.
The event was the second of its kind for Computer Sciences’ (CS) N+1 Institute. The first, hosted with Google last fall, focused on artificial intelligence (AI) sustainability. Unlike the CS capstone course, which pairs industry mentors and students on projects tailored to a specific business’ need, N+1’s reverse pitches encourage students to think at a higher level.
Winning Teams:
1st: CognizantCare (Ashwin Avula, Sumanth Karnati, Elly Kruse)
2nd: Brooks (Arnav Srivastav, Arav Kuruppumadhom, Divyansh Gupta)
3rd: SiloSense (Aaron Zhu, Gauruv Chopra, Alan Liang)
“These competitions require students to build on their classroom skills by applying them to the real world,” says N+1 Executive Director David Ertl. “We’re asking students to solve lofty problems facing entire industries, not just a single company.”
By keeping the scope broad, participants are forced to shift from a project-based mindset to a problem-solving one. The result: In future roles, they won’t need to be told what the solution is—because they’ve already gone ahead and built it.
Real-world problems. Real-world stories.
In the midst of Wisconsin’s thriving biohealth industry, it’s easy to forget that many regions globally still lack immediate access to advanced medical facilities and skilled physicians. This was at the heart of GE HealthCare’s competition brief, which tasked students with using clinical data and edge-based computing to create a solution capable of improving global healthcare accessibility and outcomes.
The winning team—CognizantCare, composed of Ashwin Avula, Sumanth Karnati, and Elly Kruse—stood out for its innovative and well-communicated idea. Their five-minute pitch began with a story about David, an Ohio man whose wearable device helped prevent a second heart attack. “David’s experience highlights the potential for preventative healthcare,” says Avula. “But for now it’s not scalable to rural areas. That’s where CognizantCare comes in.”
The CognizantCare team went on to describe their proposal as “a real-time, standardized interface bridging key players” like researchers, hospitals, clinicians, patients, and medical device producers. In today’s fragmented medical ecosystem, they want to bring these groups together and expand their reach to remote communities. The presentation—especially their storytelling and the cost analysis Kruse made sure to include—impressed the judges.
Delivering “a simple, key insight”
“You’re going to have great ideas—that’s a given—but how you deliver them is critical,” said Tom Westrick, president and CEO of Patient Care Solutions at GE HealthCare, in his concluding remarks. “Data is a hard concept for many people in industry. Breaking it down to a simple, key insight? That’s a skill.”
For the CognizantCare team, being able to communicate their “simple, key insight” was a result of their interdisciplinary structure. Kruse has no engineering background, so when Vula and Karnati—both Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) students—got overly technical, she reigned them in.
“I think that was really helpful,” says Karnati. “Everyone brought their own expertise. So from three different perspectives, we were able to form a complete data pipeline.”
A neuroscience major, Kruse served as project manager and came up with the zero-trust model that protected patient data. Avula contributed low-power computing optimization ideas inspired by the work of his advisor, ECE Professor Joshua San Miguel, director of UW’s Systems and Technologies Across the Computing Stack (STACS) lab. Karnati, who formed the team, designed a machine learning pipeline that flags early signs of patient deterioration and the differential privacy protocols that keep patients anonymous while sharing data with researchers.
Clearly, it was a winning combination.
Teaching interdisciplinary collaboration
For Ertl, this is exactly the point of these competitions.
“Throughout their academic lives, students work most closely with peers who are learning very similar content to themselves,” says Ertl. “But we know that some of the best innovation happens when we collaborate across disciplines. And for most students, it’s something they’ll have to do constantly in their professional careers.”
It also helped that CognizantCare had a previous competitor on its roster. Avula and Karnati competed in the first reverse pitch competition hosted by Google—which, coincidentally, was also won by a team with ties to the STACS Lab.
“The judges were really helpful and generous with their feedback,” says Avula. “That was cool to see—that they were taking the time to give advice to every group.”
Kruse discovered that “jumping into a field without expertise is exhilarating,” and appreciates her newfound self-assurance. “I gained confidence in what I bring to a project,” says Kruse. “I now have professionals outside of my current and past jobs who can attest to what I can bring to the table.”
Similarly, reverse pitch participants like Google and GE HealthCare have a lot to gain from these competitions—a presence on campus helps support the companies’ recruiting efforts.
“You’ve got some good students here,” says Westrick, addressing Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, director of the School of Computer, Data & Information Sciences, who was also in the audience. “[I’m] just telling the room: We’re always looking for good talent.”
Everyone laughed, but more than one student’s ears perked up at that last comment. Several lined up to discuss it a bit more.