Master of Information and Data Science (MIDS) alums Kevin Ngoc Hoang, Xinyun (Roxy) Rong, Maggie Corry, and Roshni Suresh Tajnekar are the winners of the Sarukkai Social Impact Award, for their project, Carbon AIQ.
The Sarukkai Social Impact Award was established by Sekhar and Rajashree Sarukkai in 2021. It recognizes capstone and final projects with the greatest potential to solve important social problems.
The MIDS team focuses on carbon offsetting, a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by investing in projects that lower or remove CO2 and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Carbon offset markets, or trading systems where organizations buy and sell carbon credits to compensate for greenhouse gas emissions, are divided into government-run compliance and open-access voluntary markets. They addressed voluntary markets’ credibility and accessibility issues by compiling and tracking data bases of current carbon projects and the lifecycle of carbon credits, making it easier for environmentalists to access the information they need to fight against climate change.
We spoke to the team to learn more —
What inspired your project? How did you decide on the concept?
Roxy: The project was inspired by my work with the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project through Berkeley’s Data Science Discovery program. Their efforts to bring transparency to voluntary carbon markets revealed a clear gap: data from different registries is fragmented, inconsistent, and time-consuming to analyze. We saw an opportunity to apply our skills in data engineering, ETL, and data modeling to automate this lengthy process in Python—saving time for Berkeley researchers and enabling deeper, faster analysis.
Maggie: We knew data science concepts could accelerate and support scaling of the Carbon Trading Product, bringing higher accuracy and more frequent updates to a larger population that found this type of information essential to their research.
What was the timeline or process like from concept to final project?
“This project is a testament to the profoundness of the partnership between a great ambition for social impact and the power of information and data science technology.”
Roxy: We began by interviewing stakeholders and assessing existing data sources to understand the landscape. Early on, we divided tasks based on each team member’s strengths and interests, aligning our work with our Capstone instructors Joyce Shen and Korin Reid’s class milestones to stay on track. We held weekly meetings with Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, to share progress and gather feedback. For class updates, we rotated responsibilities to ensure everyone had equal ownership. With strong collaboration and a shared sense of purpose, we ended up delivering far more than we initially imagined—we truly functioned like a rockstar team.
How did you work as a team? How did you work together as members of an online degree program?
Roxy: We leveraged the async-first nature of the MIDS program to divide tasks based on our individual strengths. I focused on building the end-to-end data pipeline and backend infrastructure. Roshni led the development of the project type classification model, Kevin worked on harmonizing methodologies and engineering features for prediction, and Maggie designed the Streamlit-based user interface. We coordinated through weekly Zoom meetings and shared detailed documentation to stay aligned despite being in different time zones.
How did your I School curriculum help prepare you for this project?
Kevin: My I School curriculum gave me a holistic toolkit, soft and hard skills alike, for executing in the ideation, development, and deployment of Carbon AIQ. I took the advanced courses in natural language processing, ML Systems Engineering, and ML at Scale; those, plus the intro courses, gave me a great grasp of modeling, dev ops, and project design capabilities to support my team. I also owe much credit to the group projects I completed throughout the classes leading up to Capstone; they were game-changers in facilitating team coordination, communication, and project management skills needed for Carbon AIQ’s success. Thank you to the I School teaching faculty for attentively designing course materials to foster my development!
Maggie: I believe the I School curriculum allowed us to have foundational engineering, cloud platform, data science, and coding experience. Many of us were able to explore new skills, such as front end development and advanced large language model pipelining in our capstone work. While we all took different courses, we were able to learn from each other in our final semester.
Do you have any future plans for the project?
Maggie: Carbon AIQ is still growing! The Carbon Trading Project at Berkeley has used much of our work, including enhanced dashboards and visualizations to grow their efforts. We still communicate with the team as other volunteers have jumped in to grow the effort.
How could this project make an impact, or, who will it serve?
Kevin: There is a worldwide user base that has a deep interest in a comprehensive, harmonized, and open-source carbon offset market database that Carbon AIQ serves, with an incredible variety: representatives of decarbonization projects, researchers, policymakers, businesses, and even the general public. At a high level, this project enables automated analytics toward the voluntary carbon market so that users can better understand the lifecycle and distribution of carbon credits without burdensome manual data wrangling. Why is this environmentally important? Research has shown that most carbon credits traded in markets do not truly align with the decarbonization they represent, so the analytics supported by Carbon AIQ helps drive research, market, and policy-based action to ensure that credits align with decarbonization amounts. Millions, and potentially billions, of tons of CO2 emissions are at stake in ensuring the legitimacy of carbon credits, so there are astounding impacts that a robust, accessible database on the voluntary market can provide.
Roshni: We’re proud that Carbon AIQ is already supporting the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project in bringing much-needed transparency to the voluntary carbon market. The project’s success highlights the power of interdisciplinary collaboration and how data science can help address some of the world’s most pressing environmental challenges.
Today’s voluntary carbon market faces serious issues—from inconsistent methodologies to unclear credit impact—which can destroy trust and effectiveness. By applying data science, machine learning, and AI, we worked on closing those gaps and bringing greater transparency and accountability to the space.
It’s been incredibly rewarding to see organizations across the U.S. and around the world reach out to learn more about our work. Knowing that our efforts are making a real impact and helping move us toward a more sustainable future is deeply fulfilling.
You were recognized with the Sarukkai Social Impact Award. How does that feel?
Roxy: It’s incredibly meaningful. This award validates the team’s hard work and reminds us that technical skills can—and should—be used to solve real-world problems with lasting social and environmental impact.
Kevin: This project is a testament to the profoundness of the partnership between a great ambition for social impact and the power of information and data science technology. We’re grateful to the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project for partnering with us toward their great work and goals, and to my capstone team for the stellar collaboration, all of which got us this recognition!
Maggie: I am so thrilled that our team was able to use our learned technical skills to fill in the gaps in a research team to further their environmental data efforts and provide greater transparency and information to the public. It’s always great to know we can use data science for good!
Roshni: It’s deeply humbling and energizing to receive the Sarukkai Social Impact Award. For me, it's a tribute to the incredible team behind Carbon AIQ and the shared belief that technology can be a powerful force for good. What makes it especially meaningful is knowing that our work is resonating beyond the capstone project and actually helping shape real-world change.
