Hundreds of young researchers showcased ingenuity and impact across disciplines at Northeastern’s RISE 2025 Expo.
Second-year Northeastern University computer science and neuroscience students Nikhil Mukraj and Thomas Consi built a robot that plays poker.
The goal of the project, Mukraj says, was to improve pick-and-place robotics algorithms used in manufacturing and warehouse settings.
“In various manufacturing and warehouse settings, you want to have precise control over a given object or item,” he says. “Robot’s motions need to be very precise.”
The poker-playing robot was one of nearly 480 projects by Northeastern’s undergraduate and graduate students featured at RISE 2025 — the university’s annual Research, Innovation and Scholarship Expo. And Matthews Arena was buzzing with big brain energy.
Neat rows of poster boards filled the arena. Another 41 projects could be found in an online gallery, allowing participation from students across the university’s 13 global campuses.
Projects spanned every college, covering fields ranging from engineering and material science to public health, environmental science, and AI and computing for impact.
Students presented research on diverse topics, including post-stroke aphasia, real-time air quality forecasting, methods used to bypass safety mechanisms in large language models, and how squid sequester color.
Poker, Mukraj and Consi say, is an ideal model for pick-and-place tasks as it requires both precision and decision-making.
Their robot features a modular design with 3D-printed parts, an arm with a suction cup to manipulate cards and omni-directional wheels for accurate movement.
The biggest mechanical challenge, Consi says, was getting the motors to move in ways that allowed the robot to pick up, place and flip cards. They used a vacuum-powered suction cup to solve this problem.
On the software side, the robot needed to recognize cards from images and manipulate them according to the game’s rules. That presented a challenge, Mukraj says, to develop a card recognition algorithm that balances image processing efficiency with accuracy and could run on the robot’s very small computer.
Their solutions could be applicable in a variety of situations, he says, from drone manufacturing to self-driving cars.
“Poker is a semi-random game — you don’t always know what’s going to happen next,” Mukraj says. “The algorithms that we developed to solve poker can be applied to other unpredictable environments. We see this coming up quite a bit in navigation.”
The students hope to upgrade the robot to also eventually deal cards.
Francesca Pendus, a second-year computer science and business administration student minoring in Spanish, conducted a study on how students perceive feedback from ChatGPT on Spanish essays compared to the class instructor and their peers.
“ChatGPT gets more and more integrated into our lives, and there haven’t been that many studies or investigations into how it will affect people in school and learning,” she says.
For the study, Pendus’ classmates submitted their essays written in Spanish class to ChatGPT, requesting feedback on sentence structure, word choice, formality, organization and more.
“Overall, students had a positive experience,” Pendus says. “They felt they learned a lot of transferable skills and became a lot more comfortable writing prompts for generative AI after completing this activity.”
While students still valued instructor and peer feedback, they perceived ChatGPT’s feedback more accurate and helpful, especially for text structure and organization.
However, some noted ChatGPT’s feedback could be overly general or excessive.
“Whereas instructors are able to provide very specific, pinpointed feedback while also preserving the student’s own style,” Pendus says.
Shannon DiMuro, a senior health science major, researched public health benefits of public art by examining Boston’s Transformative Public Art Program, which invested $1.8 million from 2019-2021 in murals, performing arts, sculptures and paintings.
“I wanted to see if this was effective in benefiting public health,” DiMuro says.
Through reviewing over 350 articles, she identified such key benefits of public art as improved community well-being, increased outdoor physical activity, destigmatization of illnesses such as HIV and mental health conditions, enhanced community safety, and an economic boost from higher foot traffic.
“During COVID-19, it was really important that a lot of art exhibits displayed masks-wearing, social distancing and vaccines,” DiMuro says.
Due to time constraints, DiMuro couldn’t survey Boston populations that were exposed to art, but she believes, based on her findings, that public art “can be utilized with other forms of preventative care and be something that some people resonate with more.”
Ella Bramwell, a fourth-year English and journalism student, and Lily Gillam, a second-year political science and legal studies student, researched whether virtual reality storytelling generates empathy and influences political opinions more than traditional formats like video or text.
“Is it a good thing that VR increases empathy and that you might be able to use that for political campaigning?” Bramwell asks. “On one hand, yes. On the other, maybe not.
“If you can use it to sway opinions, does it just become another marketing tool?”
In their study, Northeastern students were randomly assigned to experience a story about a man’s time in solitary confinement and its long-lasting psychological effects through text, 360-degree video or VR.
Before exposure to the stimulus, participants completed a survey assessing their attitudes toward solitary confinement and two congressional bills related to solitary confinement.
After engaging with the assigned stimulus, participants completed a post-survey measuring changes in empathy levels and attitudes. They were also given the option to write a letter to a senator in support of the bills as a measure of political advocacy.
Results showed VR effectively increased emotional engagement and empathy, but when it came to inspiring political action — such as writing to a senator — it performed similarly to the 360-degree video.
“Text is definitely the least effective and what we found, it just doesn’t have that much of an impact on people’s empathy towards the incarcerated or solitary confinement,” Bramwell says.