Over the past academic year, Northeastern partnered with Verizon to put on the Verizon Smart Campus Competition, in which interdisciplinary teams competed to offer new and innovative solutions to real-world problems using Verizon technology. In addition to the invaluable experience of collaborating with Verizon professionals, each of the three winning teams was awarded $3,000.  

From 5G to AI, participants used cutting-edge tools to tackle problems like reckless driving, food pantry inventory, and overwhelmed hospitals. This was Verizon’s first time partnering with Northeastern for this competition.

“There’s a kind of integration that’s really specific to Northeastern regarding collaboration and combined majors,” says Lauren Heywood, Khoury College’s former director of partnership relations and student engagement who worked closely with Verizon during the competition. “Northeastern students approach problems from a variety of interdisciplinary areas.”

The three-round competition started with video submissions from 23 teams and continued with a poster presentation. Seven top teams were selected to showcase a 10-minute presentation of their fully formulated plans. Pitches were judged not only on their use of Verizon’s existing technologies, but also on their strategies for implementing the ideas. Teams consisted of three to six students, all second- and third-year undergraduates, with at least three students in computer science or related technical fields.

One unique aspect of the competition was the access to Verizon employees, who acted as judges and mentors.

“Each team was given a resource from Verizon. For about three weeks to a month, they got access to those resources and had several meetings, exchanged several emails. They really acted as support for each team,” Heywood says.

The competition puts Verizon in the forefront of students’ minds as they enter the workforce and gives Verizon access to the next generation of talent. Additionally, the three winning teams, whose stories are included below, will get a chance to participate in the “Winner’s Circle,” a follow-up meeting with Verizon representatives to discuss the future of their projects.

The Real-Time Crash Defense System

Sage Batchelor, Justin Haime, Miles-Kabilito Magoola, Kelsey Hammel 

Verizon has many technologies related to safe driving. The students behind The Real-Time Crash Defense System strive to bring those disparate resources together into one unified system to reduce preventable crashes and make roads safer.

Multiple team members recounted their personal connections to road accident deaths, including the tragic death of Jacob Davis, a first-year Northeastern student who was killed by a drunk driver in 2024. Davis was a close friend of third-year data science and business major Justin Haime.

“We were considering a lot of different ideas, but this idea resonated with each of us the most and we felt it had the most potential to do the most good,” says third-year student Miles-Kabilito Magoola, who is doing an independent major combining design, animation, and software development.

The system combines three Verizon technologies: Verizon Smart Intersections, which collects real-time data at intersections to optimize traffic-light timing; Verizon Connect Dashcam, which uses AI to identify reckless driving through dashcams; and V2X, or Vehicle-to-Everything, a communication platform connecting drivers, pedestrians, and traffic infrastructure to send alerts to each other and improve safety.

“The traffic lights will change in such a way so that way there’s no one in the intersection as a reckless driver approaches it, whether that means holding everybody back by making all the lights red, letting a few people through, or stopping people in case the reckless driver is speeding through the light. Hopefully that prevents whatever incident might have occurred,” Haime explains.

The team found that working one-on-one with a Verizon mentor helped keep them focused on the practicalities of implementation.

“It’s one thing to talk to other folks, students, and professors, but we are only at the very start of understanding how the corporate world works,” Magoola says. “So getting that from someone who has both been in these industries for a long time and also understands what we’re trying to go for from a technological side — he really helped us connect the dots.”

While experience with hackathons and co-ops helped prepare the team for the experience, they found the competition entirely unique.

“This is a whole different type of competition,” Haime says. “For six months, you’re constantly thinking about it. It gets you thinking about the whole life cycle of a product, which is not something I’ve thought about before.”

VitaLink

Aran Dharma, Sriganesh Srinivasan, Divya Thoppae 

Patient care technicians (PCTs) juggle dozens of patients simultaneously, with vital signs checks often done every few hours. When hospitals get overwhelmed, it’s easy to fall behind on these checks.

VitaLink is a continuous monitoring service that uses a dashboard to alert PCTs when a patient’s vitals change or are likely to change. This can increase response time and help PCTs catch early warning signs in a patient’s deteriorating condition.

The VitaLink team proposes using Verizon’s 5G network to help handle the intense network load that can result from a hospital ward full of internet-connected devices.

The app uses federated learning to train AI models across different devices and servers without sharing actual data, which would help optimize the app’s prediction abilities while maintaining data privacy. It also takes advantage of Verizon’s 5G network slicing technology, which allows for a single 5G network to be partitioned into multiple, customizable virtual networks. Combining these technologies helps create a more efficient and adaptive product that stands out from the competition.

The VitaLink team hopes the app could save up to 10 minutes per patient per day, giving back hours of time to overworked hospital ward staff.

With Boston home to so many hospital workers, it’s no surprise that the team had personal connections to these issues.

“I have a lot of PCT friends and friends in the medical health care space, and every time I talk to them, they’re always recounting the tough experiences they have in the hospital. They work 12-hour shifts and they’re basically always doing the grunt work,” says third-year computer science and business major Divya Thoppae. “Our idea evolved during the competition as we said, ‘OK, let’s go talk to more people to try to understand the space a little more, especially since none of us personally are in health care.’”

Working directly with a Verizon professional also proved invaluable.

“Our mentor really helped us understand the business side of things,” Thoppae says. “Our second round was a poster presentation so it was quite technical, more research based. You’re trying to make that shift toward storytelling to make sure you’re getting the audience’s attention and hitting the serviceable, addressable market. He guided us through that process, since he does that day to day.”

FoodTrace 

Jack Dreifus, Benedikt Winkler, Wyatt Bracy, Aidan Kelly, Haylie Pederson, William Riser 

FoodTrace is a live tracking application for food pantries to monitor and inventory their available food supplies. The easy-to-use design uses existing barcode-scanning technology, which enables food pantry workers to scan and track supply items using a smartphone. The scanned item gets uploaded to a database and displayed in a dashboard showing food totals, all backed by Verizon’s 5G network for fast, reliable syncing across pantry locations.

The idea tackles a difficult problem for food pantries: avoiding food waste. Too often supplies can spoil or be distributed unevenly, preventing people from accessing the food they need. The application requires no new technologies and minimal onboarding for food pantry workers, making it practical and viable.

The group points out that one in eight Americans face food insecurity, and that the US wastes $2.4 billion of food annually. They hope that FoodTrace can help put meals back on the table for the most vulnerable among us.

“One of our team members was really inspired to help food pantries because of the recent issues with SNAP benefits and general food insecurity in the US,” says third-year cybersecurity major Wyatt Bracy.

Somewhat surprisingly, there are few inventory-tracking options for food pantries, and the ones that do exist are limited in scope.

“We did some research, and there weren’t any systems that were generally used by food banks that allowed them to both track their inventory and show what food they had available to anyone with allergies — or for people looking to donate, maybe see areas that they could help fill,” Bracy says.

While the Verizon mentors proved extremely helpful to every team, the group’s mentor was uniquely qualified to help FoodTrace.

“Our mentor actually went to culinary school and worked as a chef before coming to Verizon, so she had a lot of insight into what we could do,” Bracy says. “She suggested we could have sensors to monitor humidity and make sure that areas where food is stored are optimal, so things don’t spoil.”

As to what made their project stand out, Bracy says the answer is simple: “I think everyone likes a product that is meant to do a good thing in the world, especially for an underserved area.”