Microsoft's Mixed Reality GRC program currently leverages various GRC management solutions such as ticketing tools, dashboards, and automated workflows to meet the GRC obligations. However, as the volume of requests increases, the Mixed Reality GRC team seeks an integrated and centralized platform to reduce operational overhead, increase efficiency, and improve overall usability. This project creates a virtual chatbot to provide main features like submitting a request, updating a request, and troubleshooting questions. This new functionality will allow all Microsoft employees to communicate and resolve issues seamlessly with the Mixed Reality GRC program.

Women of color students are a marginalized identity within the field of STEM spaces. In understanding how we can better support WOC students in educational settings, we can turn to teaching assistants. Teaching assistants play a direct, vital role in providing encouragement and empowerment to help students strive in pursuing the tech field. CONNECTA’s mission is to educate and engage students and teaching assistants to better equip them with tools to work with students with diverse backgrounds in creating comfortable and engaging learning spaces.

Drawing upon several philosophical theories and experiential pedagogies, I've designed a gamified learning device to assist learners in developing their research skills so that they will be better equipped with the literacies to navigate our complicated mediasphere in their personal, academic and professional lives. This device’s collection echoes the random assortments found in the historical variations of curiosity cabinets. Learners will manually inspect and speculate about the cabinet’s mysterious and unusual objects and then will utilize library resources to investigate their actual origins or functions. This learning program is repeatable and adaptable for many types of learners.

Fiction subject tagging in libraries is largely ineffectual for a variety of reasons—e.g. a lack of robust, open-access vocabularies, the difficulty and time commitment of assessing the contents of fiction, and unsuitable software. In partnership with Fiction Filters: Taxonomy for Adult Fiction, who created our core vocabulary of tags, we created a website in which users tag previously read books in subject areas such as character traits and tropes, using their own or pre-existing tags. This gives power to readers to highlight what they find most important and appealing about books, browse by personal interests, and filter out unwanted content.

The Flipgrid team at Microsoft believes that a healthy online learning platform is the combination of the sense of safety and the level of engagement from its users on the site. Using PowerBI as a vessel to track Flipgrid’s platform content and user activity, our mission was to help the Flipgrid team refine how they measure the health of their platform. The insights generated from this report will support Flipgrid’s effort to create platform policies and feature enhancements that make the online platform a safe environment for all users as well as a source of good connections and healthy experiences.

As part of their degree requirements, Music Performance majors perform solo recitals. Voice majors have often relied on repertoire recommendations from their voice professors, or have drawn from a narrow range of well-known composers. This project seeks to connect singers to more unique song repertoire via techniques inspired by the “read alike” and Nancy Pearl’s “four doorways.” The “read alike” concept was adapted and placed within a repertoire selection framework as a set of search strategies. The framework allows students to find music that speaks to them, is varied and diverse, and promotes a more research-minded approach to performing.

Misinformation has always been present, but social media has significantly increased its scope, spread, and reach in our world today. Working with the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public (CIP), this project places the SIFT fact-checking strategy in the hands of Android mobile device users. The ReSIFT mobile application assists users in fact-checking articles and expedites the fact-checking process. ReSIFT reduces the amount of time needed to fact-check and educates users on information verification best practices to create a community of information skeptics and critical thinkers.

Smartsheet Inc. offers a resource planning solution, Resource Management by Smartsheet, and aims to provide intelligent recommendations for staffing work across their customer organizations. Our team, Avatar, focused on defining the best staffing suggestion tool for our sponsor with features that include criteria-based recommendation, staffing needs prediction, experience tracking, and overallocation notification. Our design leverages resourcing data to optimize the utilization of human capital, better predict resource demand for future projects, and reduce dependency on human intervention.

Gun violence and youth suicides in the U.S. are on the rise. In 2019 alone, a minor was killed by a gun every 2 hours and 36 minutes. In working with the Grandmothers Against Gun Violence Foundation (GAGVF), the “Translating Gun Violence Research Into Action” project takes statistics and research to convey the importance of gun safety through educational data visualizations, gun storage guides, and connections to more resources to gun-owning families. These educational materials will be distributed by the GAGVF to reduce unintentional gun deaths among minors, primarily in Washington State, and promote safe gun storage within gun-owning households.

In March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Washington State Library collected data on service disruptions across the state’s public libraries. We have built on this effort by curating, enriching, and tidying the information in this dataset — adding variables to transform it into a time series, filling in missing values, and archiving the digital sources we referenced for each observation. Our curated dataset and supporting materials, published on the Washington State open data portal, will serve as a comprehensive record to shed light on this historical moment and inform future research and emergency response planning.