The Washington Department of Licensing (DOL) is a core agency of our state government, providing a variety of personal and professional licenses and other legal documents. It manages huge amounts of data about Washington’s people and economy, and its data analysis is crucial to our legislature. However, its data governance lags behind its goals. We conducted dozens of interviews with DOL employees on how and what data they work with to craft a taxonomy and recommendations for how DOL should organize/conceptualize its data, improving efficiency and making the agency more responsive and modern, resulting in better services for all Washingtonians!

Lower Lake Michigan – the area ringed by Illinois, Indiana, and parts of southern Michigan and Wisconsin – is full of shipwrecks and other sunken historical treasures. The knowledge of the wrecks’ histories, survey records for preservation purposes, what actions can be taken to recover artifacts and create new documentation, etc., is spread widely across the Lake Michigan dive community. The Wrecker’s Report is a new reference document that compiles federal, state, county, and city laws to assist divers in planning shipwreck diving expeditions.

When responding to emergencies, police and firefighting organizations often miss critical pieces of information which adversely affects their response. As part of a pilot program for entrepreneurial capstone projects, Adaptive Resilience, LLC involves equal parts business and product development in an attempt to create a product that meets information needs of emergency responders and a business model to support the product. Through user-centered design practices and rapid generation and iteration of business models, we have come up with a novel solution oriented around a data-aggregation pipeline and UI that could be rapidly realized and scaled beyond a single industry application.

The Gates Foundation partnered with ESPEN to create an open access data portal for the purpose of empowering Ministries of Health and other partners with the information necessary to drive efficient investments for neglected tropical disease treatment. This project aims to address low utilization of the ESPEN portal through the development of new metrics and dashboards that health officials can derive actionable insights from. By leveraging publicly available data from ESPEN and consolidating many relevant data points, we have provided tools for health officials to more effectively identify and act upon points of concern in drug procurement and administration.

Dr. Ann Huppert and Dr. Pamela O. Long are developing a history of the Church of the Gesù, the first Jesuit church built in Rome. I implemented data organization, performed data entry, and created a Table of Contents for the 16th-century account book. The TOC tracks peoples involved, monetary transactions, materials, and other details relevant to construction that occurred between 1568 and 1581, and establishes a relationship between folio photographs and corresponding pages of the transcription. My work complements the researchers’ architectural and historical expertise, giving them a clearer picture of the construction project and facilitating the capture of data.

Students who choose to learn programming through non-traditional routes face more obstacles introduced by predominantly remote learning. The CodeBreakers (coding bootcamp) website promises that coaches will be available 24/7—a large and demanding commitment. By developing a LeetCode Chrome extension and Slackbot for Codebreakers students, the addition of these tools will assist in offloading some of that weight, streamlining teaching processes, and lessening pain points. We can track impact by analyzing differences in CodeBreakers’ graduates' success rates prior to and after implementing our solution, as well as the feedback from surveys completed by students, usage rates, and performance in mock interviews.

From developing news stories to fake news, satirical posts to outright deceitful information, there is a lot of misinformation out there. For students and young adults, it can be difficult to understand how these revolve around your life and how they impact you. Alongside the Center for an Informed Public, we set out to build a supplemental educational platform that teaches high school and college-age students about how misinformation impacts their life in an interactive, reflective, and engaging way.

With the current public health crisis of COVID-19 at hand, some communities in the King County area are at a higher risk and are more vulnerable to the effects of this pandemic. CounterCOVID is a risk assessment tool that assists these communities by reducing misinformation and easing their fears through a targeted and personalized approach. CounterCOVID takes in symptom information from the user and returns personalized information about the next best steps, with a focus on the King County area. The goal is to be a reliable and centralized tool for King County residents, specifically the at-risk communities.

We set out to research how intermediate programming students could achieve a more intuitive understanding of computer science data structures so that they can make better design decisions when creating software and utilize these concepts in future work. Based on feedback from programming instructors and user testing, we determined that our product, destructure.io, is successful in breaking down learning barriers and cultivating strong mental models of common data structures. Our product will allow more students to feel confident in their programming skills and succeed in various technical roles.

The John Wott Slide Collection was originally intended to support academic reference and research, and it is now combined with 35mm slides created by Joy Spurr. Through this project, we intend to set up an organized foundation for the Elisabeth C. Miller Library to digitize these materials on a manageable budget and make them available to support teaching and research in a more modern era of technology. Deliverables include a weeded, organized, and cataloged slide collection, an online exhibit established in Omeka, and a research paper discussing digitization, preservation, funding, and budget options for the collection materials.