Innovation Expo 2025 Showcases Business Students' Creativity, Collaboration and Critical Thinking

After nearly a year of effort, teamwork and problem-solving, Stevens School of Business students put the results of their Senior Design projects on display at the annual Innovation Expo.

The SSB portion of the university-wide event was divided into three areas: entrepreneurship, research and consulting.

“The most important thing I’ll take away from this experience is how fast you have to move in the real world,” said William Fulton, a quantitative finance major who chose the entrepreneurial track. “I think when you're starting a business, speed is one of key differentiators between you and every other company. Big companies have a lot of people, and they move pretty slow, but when you're starting up, it's only a few people, and your real advantage is moving quickly. I think going further in my career and life, I’ll try to move quickly and get things done fast.”

Fulton and his teammates, Nicole Certisimo, Isabelle MacRae and Kara Pietrowicz created Savor, a vendor management platform for restaurants that helps them pay bills more efficiently. The group noted that a restaurant with 20 vendors must set up 20 different logins to pay their bills, but Savor allows them start transactions and communicate with their vendors from one location.

The Savor team was chosen as a finalist in the 10th Annual Ansary Pitch Competition. Every year teams of students present three-minute “elevator pitches” to a panel of judges to compete for one of the Ansary Prizes for Entrepreneurship, totaling of $17,500.

The Savor team presents their work at the Ansary Pitch Competition. “It was kind of surreal,” Kara said. “My roommate was listing off the names of the groups that made it to the finals, and I was like, ‘Did you just say Savor?’ It was awesome to hear that a School of Business project made it through.”

“I think what made it stand out was that we're addressing a real-world problem,” she continued. “We have platforms like Grubhub and Uber Eats that connect restaurants to consumers, but there's no unified platform that connects restaurants to all their vendors in one location. It seems like such a simple platform that would already exist, but doing our market and competition research, we realized that we actually have a shot to enter this market.”

The Consulting Track

Best Consulting Project (2): Datatinga® & Hot Yoga 4 You Rockville Centre

Team Datatinga®

• Ava Benson

• Angela Mikelinich

• Erin O’Sullivan

• Arlene Reynoso

• Olivia Shusta

• Professor Choudur Lakshminarayan (Faculty Advisor)

As an emerging AI startup, Datatinga® faced the challenge of establishing a strong market identity while creating a product that delivers valuable user insights. With rising competition in the AI and data analytics space, aligning brand messaging with business objectives became essential to enhance platform capabilities and attract prospective customers. The project focused on driving strategic marketing alignment, advancing product development and integrating AI to optimize client value. The results boosted marketing outreach by more than 400%, improved dashboard functionality for clearer and more actionable insights, enhanced the Co Tinga® AI assistant and helped develop the external data hub that powers its insight generation.

Team Hot Yoga 4 You Rockville Centre

• Christina Kim

• Noah Porcelain

• Matthew Rutledge

• Eduardo Terlaje

• Professor Theresa Howard (Faculty Advisor)

Hot Yoga 4 You is an independent Hot Yoga Studio located in Rockville Centre, New York. The team advised the studio on business matters related to administrative organization, membership structure, pricing, branding, marketing and the expansion of a second studio location. The team formalized better teacher support, established workplace expectations for contractors, revised the original instructor contract and crafted a uniform employee handbook. They also conducted a competitive pricing analysis, revamping studio membership options and pricing, and focused attention on consistent marketing efforts. Since September 2024, Hot Yoga 4 You Rockville Centre’s total monthly revenue has increased by 41%, and total studio members have grown by 65%.

The Research Track

Best Research Project: Empirical Assessment of Mean Reversion in Interest Rate Stochastic Processes: Theoretical Implications and Model Calibration Under Arbitrage-Free Constraints

The Team

• Umang Chulani

• Arosh De Silva

• Sai Gogineni

• Arjun Patel

• Sagar Patel

• Professor Thomas Lonon (Faculty Advisor)

• Kexin Gu (Ph.D. Student Advisor)

The research project explored whether mean reversion is necessary in modeling short-term interest rates across different market conditions. It compared the Ho-Lee, Vasicek and CIR models using U.S. Treasury STRIPS data from 2012 to 2024, highlighting the strengths and limitations of each model before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The results suggest that while mean-reverting models (Vasicek, CIR) perform well in stable markets, the non-mean-reverting Ho-Lee model offers greater robustness during volatile periods. It also applied techniques like Maximum Likelihood Estimation and decaying weights to improve calibration and evaluate model accuracy.

The Entrepreneurial Track

Best Entrepreneurial Project: Chiller Email Extraction

The Chiller Team

• Frank Barton

• Tristan Cocozza

• Mohan Dichpally

• Fayha Farooqi

• Kayli Gregory

• Professor Jay Woodruff (Faculty Advisor)

Chiller is an email experience redesigned from the ground up, showing users the information that is important to them in the least cluttered format. It connects to all of a user’s inboxes (Gmail, Outlook, etc.), shows them the most important data across all emails and makes connections across multiple emails using an AI processing engine. For example, Chiller can display emails about the same upcoming flight. The platform uses a feed instead of an inbox, prioritizing what’s most important rather than what came most recently. Just like a social media algorithm, Chiller learns from the user’s interactions on the app to tailor their feed.