CUNY AI Innovation Challenge 2026

• KM Labib – Team Lead
• Abdullah Nayem
• Victor Carrion
• Mamadou Oury Bah

Vortex is a browser extension that reads your DegreeWorks audit and answers like an advisor who actually knows your record — your courses, your GPA, your transfer path.

• Mahfoudh Senhoury – Team Lead
• Mecca Al-Maktoum
• Damilola Babajide
• Jordan Denton

Our mission is to empower individuals to make informed, financially sustainable housing decisions in increasingly unaffordable urban markets like New York City, where rising rent and cost of living make it difficult to find stable housing. Many existing platforms simply display listings without helping users understand whether they can realistically afford them or the risks associated with housing instability. We address this by building an AI-powered housing agent that combines predictive modeling with agentic decision-making to evaluate affordability and housing insecurity risk based on each user’s financial situation, then actively recommends suitable apartments. Unlike traditional platforms such as Zillow or Apartments.com, our system focuses on preventing financial strain and displacement by identifying hidden risks and guiding users toward safer, more affordable options, ultimately making housing decisions smarter, more transparent, and more equitable.

• Dhimy Jean – Team Lead
• Jorys Koutiebou
• Musaddik Choudhury
• Rafiatou Kone

AlfaTech is a hybrid intelligence system that transforms static policy into executable decisions using the Urban-Sync Civic Ledger to bridge the gap between needing help and receiving it.

• Quincy Pham – Team Lead
• Cortney Alleyne
• Darby Tabuteau
• Omorogieva Ogieva

LifeLvlUp exists to bridge the gap between academic intent and industry reality by providing every student with an AI-driven digital twin that orchestrates their journey from the classroom to a competitive career.

• Victor Moran – Team Lead
• Md Minhaz
• Astra Sayananon
• Hala Elhanafy

We're a small crew of CUNY undergraduates who got tired of digging through 8 different websites to find a deadline, an office hour, or a single room number. So we built the tool we wished existed — one place where any CUNY student can ask a real question and get a real, sourced answer. Compass scrapes your campus's live pages and reasons over them with Anthropic's Claude. It can hop between campuses too — ask about a Hunter event from your Baruch dashboard and Compass figures it out. No more tab-graveyards.

• Angel Escamilla – Team Lead
• Claren's Guibson Elie
• Abdelghafour el bikha
• Aissatou Diallo

A multimodal RAG platform for research teams. Ingest papers and documents, query them with a LangGraph agent, and synthesise answers backed by a knowledge graph and vector search.

• Muhammad Intisar Ahmad – Team Lead
• Fahima Fahima
• Natoya Hinds
• Sadman Sakib

Project tree path is a web-based academic recommendation system designed to support the goals of the CUNY Accelerated Study in Associate Programs by helping students explore majors, identify career-aligned pathways, and receive personalized educational guidance based on their interests.

• Erik Tapia – Team Lead
• Francisco Hernandez
• Kenneth Lee
• Patricia Flores

Our mission is to build an AI-powered web platform that helps CUNY students and their families find affordable, stable, and accessible housing options across New York City. We aim to reduce housing insecurity by connecting students with reliable housing resources, affordable listings, and community support systems.

• Oswaldo Fabrizio De Los Santos Ascencio – Team Lead
• Kadidja Traore
• Adrian Olivares
• Kyame Israel

A website that facilitates form understanding, submission, SGA elections, communication, and more between students, club officers and SGA representatives. Club officers would have easy access and detailed steps on forms they need to fill out for different materials, events, food, and activities. Club officers and SGA representatives would also be able to communicate more efficiently such as approving budget lines and constitutions.

• Sonia Morales – Team Lead
• William Bobmanuel
• Beatrice Mackenzie Alexander
• Saul Mendoza

Our portal ingests government documents, uses an LLM pipeline to extract structured data, and flags disclosure gaps where agencies fail to mention documented AI systems.

• Adham Alshaif – Team Lead
• Ariane Kouame
• Nadia Rahman
• Samandar Rabbimov

tartNow is an AI-powered contract work platform built for CUNY students and local small businesses. It is a two-sided marketplace that matches verified students with real paid work based on skills, coursework, and employer needs, without relying on unpaid internships, personal networks, or traditional job board filters.

• Sultan Sagatov – Team Lead
• Behruz Tolibov
• Tonatiu Ortega

Guide students from enrollment to employment by providing clear, personalized direction through every stage of their academic and career journey. We believe no student should have to figure out their future alone. By combining real student data with AI, we help transform confusion into clarity and ambition into action.

• Gilbert Opoku – Team Lead
• Efuah Akhimien
• KJ Eddie-Nkwoh

TANY is a tenant and homeowners best friend. On one hand TANY helps tenants know their right and know that they can fight back against landlord abuse, but on the other hand TANY creates awareness for homeowners by letting them know about potential opportunities to help improve their homes. The Goal of TANY is to help grow NY as a whole together not just Homeowners or just Tenants but everybody.

• Dylan Reaves – Team Lead
• Yeffry Fermin
• Shan Htet San

Task Agent is an AI-powered student planner that turns natural language inputs into organized tasks and study schedules to help students manage their academic workload more efficiently.

• Nashim Apurba – Team Lead
• Hnin Lwin
• Benjamin Link
• Jariel Cross

TenantLens is an AI-powered housing listing review platform designed to help New Yorkers evaluate housing options before they apply, pay, or sign anything.

• Summer Morrisson
• John Berich
• Joe Britton

Our solution is a website-extension that gives New Yorkers a clear look at what it’s actually like to live in a specific building. Most apartment listings only show the best parts of a place; we built a tool that pulls from the "receipts" the city already has.

• Judine Biggs – Team Lead
• Augustine Coraizaca
• Jase Nelson
• Berkay Isik

An automated analytical framework built in R/RStudio to quantify lived public health realities and make systemic friction visible.

• Averella Mcclean – Team Lead
• Derrick Kessie
• Aaron Ali
• Kelcity Blacky

An interactive map of mental health facilities across New York State, paired with dashboards showing access and risk by region. The public can find nearby services; planners can see where high-need areas lack coverage and where new facilities are needed most.

• Bintou Diakite – Team Lead
• Daliath Mansourou Alabi
• Dipannita Rai Saha
• Mohamed Kassim

Gap2Growth is a data-driven platform that identifies NYC high schools with low STEM exposure, explains the underlying factors contributing to their underperformance, such as limited course offerings, low academic outcomes, or resource constraints, and connects them with private funders to enable targeted and equitable investment in STEM education.

• Alison Wang
• Evis Saliaj
• Hadia Amin
• Malaak Ghanem

Finding suitable housing in urban areas is time-consuming, fragmented, and often stressful, especially for students and first-time renters. Users must manually compare listings across multiple platforms while trying to evaluate key factors such as affordability, commute time, and neighborhood safety. These factors are rarely presented together, leading to inefficient and sometimes risky housing decisions. We are building an AI-powered housing recommendation tool that allows users to input their preferences, such as budget, commute distance, and safety level and receive personalized apartment recommendations.

• Joshua Jones – Team Lead
• Kristian Johnson
• Bruna Garcia-Liskowiak
• Anniesha Henry

CUNY students face food insecurity, while nearby restaurants waste surplus food. A centralized system connecting surplus meals to students is needed.

• Lauren Short – Team Lead
• Joe Zacarias
• Chelsy Cabanas Paucar
• Shun Lei Hlaing

We aim to bridge the gap between student resources and financial literacy, making us a one stop shop for all things financial aid assistance.

• Valerie Fletcher – Team Lead
• Eny Jimenez
• Yuzhi Wu

• Alhousseiny Bah – Team Lead
• Luisa Murillo
• Maribel Vitetta
• Oumar Camara

Resolving the paradox of food waste and food insecurity through intelligent, real-time coordination.

• Amadou Diallo – Team Lead
• Fatima-Zahara Kamil
• Gloria Flores Lopez
• Jack Flores

An academic support website designed to empower student success.

• Eli Almonte-Perez – Team Lead
• Hande Dulger
• Zainab Ayuba
• Oliwia Grzeskiewicz

ZELIAH uses advanced AI to break language barriers, translate medical jargon, and empower physical therapists — so every patient gets the care they deserve.