The teams provided a ranked list of the 8 projects and 
the assignment was done with the Hungarian algorithm, 
so the matching is optimal. 

The result is surprisingly good: 
11 teams received their first choice, 
3 teams their second choice, 
1 team their third choice, 
1 team their fourth choice. 
None of my test runs achieved such a good rating. 

The details of the program output are: 
Cost is 8
Team  0 is assigned to project 4 [rank 1]
Team  1 is assigned to project 7 [rank 1]
Team  2 is assigned to project 8 [rank 0]
Team  3 is assigned to project 3 [rank 0]
Team  4 is assigned to project 1 [rank 0]
Team  5 is assigned to project 5 [rank 3]
Team  6 is assigned to project 2 [rank 0]
Team  7 is assigned to project 3 [rank 0]
Team  8 is assigned to project 2 [rank 0]
Team  9 is assigned to project 4 [rank 0]
Team 10 is assigned to project 5 [rank 2]
Team 11 is assigned to project 6 [rank 1]
Team 12 is assigned to project 1 [rank 0]
Team 13 is assigned to project 7 [rank 0]
Team 14 is assigned to project 6 [rank 0]
Team 15 is assigned to project 8 [rank 0]
[rank 0 = first preference, rank 1 = second preference,...]

Team  0: Mustafa Ciftei 
Team  1: Daniel Calder, Gopalakrishnan Easwaran
Team  2: James Esslinger, Victor Romero
Team  3: Ning Zhu
Team  4: Michael Maedo, Kanupriya Gulati
Team  5: Peter Rega, Jacob Smith
Team  6: Vijay Sundar Rajaram, Vijay Idimadikala
Team  7: Josh Rossmeisl, Sylvia N'guessan
Team  8: John Maffei, Akhil Patel
Team  9: John Price, Jason Lee 
Team 10: Leo Sakhvoruk, Sameh Sharkawi
Team 11: Navendu Misra, Andrew Webb
Team 12: Jaehan Koh, Jaenho Lee
Team 13: Yao-Chung Yee, Vijay Subramanian
Team 14: Subhajit Dasgupta, Saurin Shah
Team 15: Aravind Srinivasa Raghavan, Vijay Balasubramanian
Team 16: David Brown 
Please excuse typos in the names - I did not check against 
the roster.

Have fun!