Completed DIF Projects

Empowering Communities Through AI-Driven Meal Sharing

Potluck is a pioneering AI-powered meal-sharing platform founded by Shannon Amspacher, designed to address pressing challenges such as food affordability, social isolation, and the fatigue associated with meal planning. By connecting individuals and communities through shared meals, Potluck fosters both economic relief and social bonds.

DIF Role

Thoroughly review the existing development plan for Potluck and collaborate in building a functional, user-friendly MVP app.

Project Founders

DIF Consultant

DIF Awards

Yuval Shimoni, Recipient of the Fall 2024 Niraj & Cara Patel Endowed Scholarship
and Recipient of the Spring 2026 Fadem Endowed Scholarship

Manoj Chacko managed this project for DIF

Fostering Ethical and Scalable AI Use in Education

The AI Aware Writing Environment (AAWE), founded by Dr. Megan Kane and Stephen Malkowicz, is designed to help students responsibly use AI tools under instructor-set guidelines. AAWE provides instructors with flexible assignment controls and insights into student engagement and AI use, both authorized and unauthorized.

DIF Role

Build a scalable AWS cloud infrastructure for 1,500+ users and improving AI detection and feedback algorithms to ensure high-quality results and academic integrity.

Project Founders

DIF Consultant

DIF Awards

Moa Al Balushi, Recipient of the Fall 2025 Persson-Barbour Endowed Scholarship

Manoj Chacko managed this project for DIF

Bringing Smart Automation to Source-to-Pay Operations

DeepFlow is an advanced procurement intelligence platform that uses natural language AI agents to automate and optimize Source-to-Pay (S2P) processes. With its conversational interface, procurement teams can streamline complex tasks, access real-time insights, and enhance supply chain management with ease. Keze Lin, a Temple Alumni is the founder of DeepFlow.

DIF Role

The Digital Innovation Foundry (DIF) has partnered with DeepFlow to help design user-friendly interfaces that improve accessibility and usability for end users.

Project Founders

DIF Consultant

Impact

“This project gave me real exposure to designing for enterprise users, navigating ambiguity, and refining large-scale workflows into something simple and intuitive” Abby Dorotov

“..strengthened my confidence as a UX designer by allowing me to take ownership of the design direction” Abby Dorotov

Manoj Chacko managed this project for DIF

Fulton Bank, worked with the Digital Innovation Foundry (DIF) to develop a data-driven strategy for identifying prospective mass affluent customers. The DIF team, comprising Wei Wang (Associate Professor of Accounting), Sudipta Basu (Professor of Accounting), and Manoj Chacko, brings academic expertise to inform and guide the project.

This project analyzes how client age relates to deposit and loan balances at Fulton Bank using the bank’s proprietary, anonymized client data, combined with publicly available ZIP-code-level measures of neighborhood wealth and demographics. Using various statistical techniques including scatterplot. locally estimated scatterplot smoothing (LOESS), and regression analyses, we identify distinct life-cycle patterns in client behavior. Specifically, deposit balances increase steadily with age and rise disproportionately once clients enter their 50s, and this effect is more pronounced in ZIP codes with higher home values. Meanwhile, loan balances follow a hump-shaped pattern, peaking among clients in their 30s and declining thereafter. The patterns remain robust after controlling for neighborhood characteristics and state-level differences, indicating they reflect true life-cycle behavior rather than confounding geographical differences. Overall, the findings highlight distinct opportunities for the bank to expand lending relationships with existing and prospective clients.