2025 senior projects: Data-driven decisions
MS&E seniors presented their capstone projects in March 2025. Across a wide breadth of industries and using a variety of MS&E techniques, the students offered data-driven solutions to help organizations make better decisions.
Students drew on their course work—including mathematical modeling, systems analysis, organization theory, optimization, probability, statistics, ethics, computer science, and economics—to inform their work on the projects. Teams of three to five students acted as consultants to their sponsor organizations, tackling real-world problems in real-time over 10 weeks.
Many of this year's projects made use of AI-powered tools such as Stanford's STORM, LangGraph, and even a custom-built AI-powered platform to aid in decision-making for their sponsor organizations. All of the students used a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to understand both the data and human factors at play.
Sponsors ranged from municipal governments like the City of Palo Alto, to established firms like State Farm, to non-profits like the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area that serve to impact the community at large. While the students wrapped their findings into a final presentation at the end of spring quarter, their work will continue to be utilized by their sponsor organizations long into the future.
Teams met regularly with their faculty mentors throughout the quarter to refine their work and fine-tune their final presentations. This year's faculty mentors included professors Riitta Katila, Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, Markus Pelger, Amin Saberi, and James Sweeney.
