Xplore Research Program
ICME Master’s and PhD students work with Stanford and industry mentors to solve real-world problems.
Launched in 2018, the ICME Xplore program immerses ICME graduate students in a quarter long, real-world project-based data science learning experience while offering course credit through CME291.

“The biggest takeaway for me in the project was the realization how messy real-world data can be.
Moreover, there were no fixed set of questions that we were looking answers for. The project provided me an opportunity to tackle open ended questions in a structured manner. This set of skills will be extremely useful as I take on challenges in my career and life after Stanford.” - Neel Rakholia (ICME Graduate)

Students - ICME Graduate students gain valuable experience and mentorship they would not otherwise find in the classroom while working toward course credit.
Mentors - High quality, committed mentors are key to a project's success as they provide direction, quality data, expertise, and encouragement through weekly meetings.
Faculty - Each project is sponsored by an ICME Faculty to provide oversight and direction, which offers students and mentors a unique opportunity to work closely with ICME Faculty on valuable research.
Recent Projects

Project Scope: Mapping vaccine coverage in Nigeria.
- Ruohan Zhan & Yuan Gao, ICME Students
- Guillaume Chabot-Couture, Institute for Disease Modeling
- Gianluca Iaccarino, Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Project Scope: Develop virtual reality visualization and simulation methods for cardiovascular surgery applications.
- Jun Li, ICME Student
- Dr. David Axelrod, Stanford Medicine
- David Sarno, Lighthaus
- Alison Marsden, Associate Professor, Pediatrics - Cardiology

Project Scope: Improve furniture style understanding for product images by using deep neural network.
- Jen Weng, Yiwen Guo, ICME Students
- Alessandro Magnani, Walmart Labs
- Gianluca Iaccarino, Professor, Mechanical Engineering

Project Scope: Mining quality phrases for topic modeling.
- Alexandre Matton & Yuan Chen, ICME Students
- Dr. David Axelrod, Stanford Medicine
- Pavel Mizenin, Borjana Dodova, Twilio
- Ashish Goel, Professor, Management Science and Engineering

Project Scope: Understanding, optimizing, and predicting the behavior and performance workflows of super facilities.
- Mengtian Jin, Youkow Homma, ICME Students
- Alex Sim, John Wu, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
- Mary Wootters, Assistant Professor, Computer Science

Project Scope: Interrogate publicly available human genome data using lab generated datasets
- Pranav Bhardwaj, Data Science, Austin Wang, ICME Student
- Dr. Tony Oro, Sam Piekos, Stanford Medicine
- Wing Wong, Professor, Statistics
- Andreas Santucci, Lecturer

Project Scope: Build a Python suite for reduced-order modeling applied to systems of partial differential equations.
- Kexin Yu, Remmelt Ammerlaan, Anran Lu, Yiwen Guo, ICME Students
- Kevin Carlberg, Sandia National Laboratories
- Matthew Zahr, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- Lexing Ying, Professor of Mathematics

Project Scope: Analysis of campus-wide utility consumption volatility.
- Neel Rakholia, Sean Clement, ICME Students
- Kristin Parineh, Stanford Sustainability Operations
- Ram Rajagopal, Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering