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YCC Innovation Prize Spring 2026 Results

Meet the builders making Yale better.

Eight projects were recognized at the CEID on May 1, 2026, for turning real problems into useful, working software.

2026 Winners

The top three projects

First place $400

YalieMCP

Evan Boyle

YalieMCP unifies CourseTable, Canvas, Degree Audit, Yale’s course catalog, and major roadmaps behind one conversational interface that connects to any MCP-compatible AI client. Students can compare courses, inspect syllabi, check requirements, and plan schedules in natural language—turning a fragmented set of systems into one direct path from question to answer.

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YalieMCP generating an updated Yale computer science course roadmap
YalieMCP turns a natural-language request into an up-to-date course roadmap.
Evan Boyle, creator of YalieMCP
Evan Boyle
Second place Recognition

Yideshare

Yideshare helps verified Yale community members post upcoming trips, find others traveling along similar routes, and coordinate a shared ride. By making trusted carpools easier to arrange, it lowers travel costs while reducing duplicate trips and their emissions.

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Yideshare received second-place recognition. No cash prize was awarded because the project did not meet the competition’s open-source requirement.

Third place $100

Tabula

Victor Park

Tabula helps small store owners make sharper inventory decisions without a full operations team. It brings together stock levels, supplier prices, demand trends, and sales history to recommend what to restock, when to order, and why—helping owners avoid overstock, missed demand, and costly supplier choices.

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Tabula inventory dashboard showing sales trends, inventory alerts, and agent activity
Tabula’s store-health dashboard brings inventory signals and recommended actions together.
Victor Park, creator of Tabula
Victor Park
Distinguished Finalists

Five more projects worth knowing

Sofia Grimm

Yale Research Match

A matching layer for undergraduate research that replaces scattered cold emails with a clearer way for students and faculty to find mutually strong fits across departments—making access to research more efficient and more equitable.

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Joey Tan

ReViser

A spatial creative-writing environment for Apple Vision Pro. ReViser gives writers a virtual way to arrange, compare, and structurally revise passages—the kind of visual editing process that usually requires printing pages and spreading them across a room.

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Noah Safar

Aiden

A local-first AI email assistant built for the volume and complexity of student life. Aiden triages inboxes, drafts replies in the user’s voice, coordinates meetings, and surfaces the deadlines, billing alerts, and opportunities that matter.

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Aiden email interface summarizing a message and proposing meeting times
Aya Kasim

Frame

A system for generating personalized, time-bounded tours of the Yale University Art Gallery. Frame combines collection metadata with language models to help visitors navigate thousands of works while preserving the gallery’s curatorial voice.

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Esha Garg

CourseMap

An AI-powered academic planner that combines Yale’s course catalog, degree requirements, and student preferences to generate a personalized four-year plan using deterministic rules, retrieval, and generative planning.

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