Academics:   Bachelor of Science in Informatics

By Brian Ledbetter, Brian Reyes, Carlton Reiner
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Access to Justice (ATJ) Web is part of an effort to ensure that technology makes the justice system more accessible to everyone in Washington State, including those facing physical, economic, or literacy barriers. On December 3, 2006, in order to help guide the use of technology in the state justice system, the Washington State Supreme Court entered a court order to adopt and uphold a set of guidelines called the Access to Justice Technology Principles. The Principles define how technology should be used to increase the accessibility of the justice system. A website was created to house the ATJ Tech Principles, but it had numerous shortcomings. Our design of ATJ Web (www.atjweb.org) addresses these problems and endeavors to make the ATJ Technology Principles a pervasive and enduring reality in the justice system.

 

By Eric Aker, Martin Nash
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Over a ten-week period our team has observed 30 online poker tournaments from PokerStars.com: 10 low, 10 medium, and 10 high buy-in, nine-player, no-limit, play-money Texas Hold’em tournaments. Our analysis has shown there to be revealing characteristics about game-play between the buy-in levels, such as time to completion, total number of hands, and player rate of attrition. We provide interpretations of the aggregated data, as well as a recommendation for new online users. Even though the analyzed data suggests only a few distinguishing characteristics between each buy-in level, we provide a foundation for future research in this area, and identify some insight for direction.

 

By Helgi Felixson, Jeffrey Stein
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The Department of Anthropology at the University of Washington was using a simple spreadsheet to catalog specimens. They decided that they would like to be able to access the catalog online, and for it to have some sort of search feature. We took on the project of creating the new system, and set out to analyze the data collected in the catalog so far and gather information about user need.We performed contextual inquiries and interviews with students, staff, and faculty members. Using information gathered from these activities, we designed a system that offers several different ways of searching, a flexible access control system, and simple groups to facilitate class use.

 

By Matthew Harris, Robert Lee, Andrew Parisio
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There are over 26,000 public high schools in the country, serving more than 13 million students. As the need for a college education grows, it has become apparent that many of these students are not prepared for higher education because most states’ high school graduation requirements fall below college requirements. Thus, researchers must manually analyze student transcripts by hand. This project seeks to provide a more efficient way of processing this information.Our team built a working prototype of a system for automating the processing of these transcripts. The system compares each transcript to a set of pre-defined rules establishing Washington State college eligibility. Detailed data can then be analyzed and translated into direct action plans for improvement in the school or school district under evaluation.

 

By Omer Burstein, Samuel Hendricks
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User search strategies differ between initially finding and re-finding information. When re-finding information, users are unlikely to use a re-finding tool such as a bookmark and instead are far more likely to directly enter a URL, use a search engine or access pages via another website. Breadcrumbs is an information re-finding tool unlike bookmarks or browser history because it automatically tracks and places a visual cue next to each link a user has visited. This visual cue helps users identify resources they have used in the past so they may disregard irrelevant information. When a user needs to re-find a page they have found useful in the past, Breadcrumbs helps them do so more efficiently by cutting down on fruitless browsing behavior.

 

By Mark Lee
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Carousel is a project that intends to solve some of the problems encountered during the course of a group-based project in an Informatics class, although it can be applied to any similar work environment. It explores bridging the real-time collaboration aspect, which students found effective, with the asynchronous aspect of working together, which is what realistically happens in a diverse college setting. This was accomplished by writing modifications to two open source projects: a patch to the Gobby real-time collaborative editor to allow it to import and export documents via the Atom Publishing Protocol standard, and a plug-in to the Trac project management system that enables its wiki pages to be published via that protocol.

 

By Jared Keller, Morgen Nilsson
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Today anyone with a personal computer and an Internet connection can publish thoughts, opinions, stories and other information on the Web. The lack of restrictions and a peer-review process has given rise to issues surrounding misinformation and disinformation, especially the extent to which users believe and rely on information they encounter on the Internet. The Apollo Project is a system created specifically for the collection and dissemination of time-sensitive information, specifically for suppliers in the travel and tourism industry. This will allow organizations to track and address any information published concerning themselves.

 

By Isaac Yang, Rommel Degracia
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The problem we addressed is the feeling of boredom caused by educational video games and making gamers choose between ‘entertainment games’ and ‘educational games.’ Our project focused on finding a way to bridge this gap between education and fun, by incorporating educational material as an essential part of gameplay. Players learn to play by learning educational material rather than rewarding learning with entertainment. We used some general teaching principles found in popular video games to design an educational game that would be suitable for entertainment, teaching Introductory Computer Programming material, as taught at the University of Washington. The results of our demos and feedback suggest that our demo teaches best to a specific audience.

 

By Carolynn Crews, Michael Chui
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Many students spend weeks searching for apartments, gathering information along the way: scraps of paper drawn from whatever was lying around, cutouts from newspapers all jumbled together. Often, they are never really sure if they asked all the questions they needed. These students often run out of time, bogged down by clutter, and too frequently end up taking what they find first.To maximize efficiency in searching, housebook makes sharing information between roommates faster, standardizes the way listings are stored no matter where they came from, and simplifies their organization into a quickly understandable and printable display. We hope that the overwhelmed student will have one less burden to contend with during their career.

 

By Jonathan Erickson, John Le, Julieanna Leung, Terry Terrell
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Our capstone project goal is to improve upon existing online community marketplaces, specifically Craigslist. We chose to single out Craigslist because it is one of the most popular websites to buy, sell and trade goods online. From our personal experiences using Craigslist, we felt that there are many areas that we could improve upon. For this project we decided to focus upon three main areas of improvement: security, usability and aesthetics. We chose these specific areas because from our experiences, these areas were especially problematic. However, we wanted to design our system using a user-centered design process, so we went through the phases of gathering and data analysis, design and implementation, system evaluation and usability testing to create our system design.

 

Improving Understanding of User Behavior and Needs within a Task/Project Context for Personal Information Management
By Rajdeep Gill
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Personal Information Management (PIM) supports the activities we, as individuals, perform to order our daily lives through acquisition, organization, maintenance, retrieval, and sharing of information (Teevan, Jones, Bederson, 2006). Management of personal information involves cognitive processes. The study objective is to discover what cognitive processes people use when they interact with personal or work-related projects. Cognitive processes include memory, attention, perception, problem solving and mental imagery.The results will offer guidance for future research and design in terms of heuristics, tools and methods. The group populations I am studying are managerial/administrational assistants because they deal with a variety of information on a daily basis.

 

By Katherine Haselton
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“I have AIDS, where am I gonna live?”Bailey Boushay House, Rosehedge, and MultifaithWorks are the three primary organizations that provide care and/or housing for individuals with an HIV/AIDS diagnosis in Seattle. Although these organizations have similar missions and goals, and often provide service for the same clients, they do not share client information. This project addresses obstacles to client information sharing. I have conducted interviews with staff to understand different perspectives on the issue as well as gathering the standard intake and policy documentation. Taking this information, along with background research into the rules and regulations, I will identify the barriers to information sharing that are present and what can be done to overcome these barriers.

 

By Ege Ersoz
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Most college students give up on acquiring skills or services because of two reasons: it takes too much effort to find out how and it costs money.This system addresses their skill-learning and service needs by allowing them to run searches based on what they are willing to learn or the services they need, in exchange for teaching a skill or performing a service of their own. Skills and services themselves replace money as the currency of exchange, and the number of steps to find and contact the other party is minimal. Because the fundamental idea behind this system is powerful yet simple, the system can easily be customized for any user-base, be it academic or professional.

 

By Peter Dotsenko
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In order for a pothole to be fixed, someone needs to report it. Currently, in order to report a problem in King County, a user needs to find the city web site, figure out how to submit information and provide an exact address. There is no way to know if the problem was reported already or the status of the repair.The proposed website would cover all of the forty cities in King County, with easy visual navigation. Users can pinpoint a problem regardless whether the address is known or not, and report it by clicking on the map and clicking "save." If the problem is reported already, no second reporting occurs. All active reports have up-to-date status for easy access.

 

By Frederick Sayre
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This project addresses the need in industry for something better than the current attempts at scheduling by “one size fits all” database management systems.Renton Coil Spring (RCS) is a spring manufacturing company located in Renton, Washington. RCS currently uses an information management system “JobBOSS,” which has proven ineffective at meeting their scheduling needs. The current system is limited in its ability to cope with the unique demands of RCS’s operations. For this project, a custom application was implemented to interface with the current database system. This provided solutions to the existing problems and implemented some new tools to aid manufacturing scheduling.

 

By Daryl Lacanlale, Binh Nguyen, Boris Unigovskiy
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The Merge web application is a social network that communicates with other social networks. Through numerous interviews with potential Merge users in Needs Assessment, Design and Evaluation stages, our design team has developed a functional specification for an improved user interface that encompasses the core features of a social network and improves on usability and privacy, while providing more user control.

 

By Shawn Dodge, David Fong, Szu-Kai Huang, Michael Nguyen
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Our group focused on providing real-time information about restaurants and bars to tech-savvy users engaging in the local nightlife, based on their geographic location. The original problem that inspired this is: "What do you do when you go out to eat and you encounter a large wait time?"We provide information to solve this problem by means of a web-based application accessible at http://nightlore.gotdns.org. The information provided includes address, phone number, directions, food type, average price and most importantly, the wait time at the restaurant. Wait time information is dependent on user data submission. Our system is designed with cell phones in mind but is also available for any online medium.

 

By Phillip Godinez
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The purpose of this project was to design an user interface to automate and preserve payment details for a Pension Trust Fund. Informatics principles were applied while conducting a needs assessment in a real-world setting. The approach for identifying business requirements included “discovery sessions,” interviews, observations and artifact collection with participation from key stakeholders, subject-matter experts and end-users. These ethnographic data collection techniques captured the physical/mental processes employed by users and detailed a list of activities to eliminate/automate steps.The design endeavor attempted to replace methods used in historical system design within this organization. Furthermore, prototyping evaluation techniques explored the acceptance of question-and-answer dialogue between the system and user. This project is the first phase of development by an enterprise software company.

 

By Kyle Egaas, Bennett Hornbostel, Eric Howard
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The likelihood of a university student experiencing a chance encounter with friends in their community is high. Barriers may occur, such as limited visibility, diverted attention or high noise levels which might result in missed encounters. To explore the socio-technical ramifications of technology-augmented chance encounters, we have created rendezBlue, an application for mobile phones that notifies users when friends are nearby.An initial needs assessment has guided design, both by identifying unforeseen user concerns and verifying our initial assumptions regarding habits of the target population. These include privacy concerns and potential patterns of use. We have developed a functional prototype that meets these needs utilizing Bluetooth and Java technology. Finally, a corresponding evaluation has been performed on this prototype to inform future design.

 

By Brian Wishan
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In this Capstone project, I gathered requirements for the creation of a web portal to allow managers in an enterprise to assign applications to their direct reports without needing any technical knowledge of the electronic software distribution tools in place by the company's IT organization. A design specification was created using scenario-based design techniques and personas to tell a story about how each task is accomplished. Low fidelity prototypes were created to experiment with different approaches for accomplishing these tasks. Finally, the design specification was submitted to Microsoft Program Managers for review and feedback. The result is a set of design principles to be used when creating a production version of the portal.

 

By Howard Chan, Khunthary Yos, Monica Yuen
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Tech-Space originated from the problem of technical students not being able to find relevant experience to help them find jobs in the future. At the same time, we found that campus faculty did not have adequate resources or skills to create I.T. solutions to office or class situations, such as designing a website for students. The answer was simple: Students could apply concepts and tools learned in class towards projects for professors.Tech-Space automates and/or facilitates many processes from the current hiring process. The features that distinguish the system from other job-search applications are: social networking, automatic matching and internal rating scheme. Tech-Space simultaneously standardizes and revolutionizes the screening process by using employer evaluations and a project portfolio rather than the conventional resumé.

 

By Brendan Ribera
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How fully can you use your books? How quickly can you identify which of your books reference “King Lear” or find a partially-remembered quote? Computer-based search systems could help find this information inside your library. However, current systems limit what information is shown about a book and don’t allow the scope to be restricted to a meaningful set of books.TomeTracker’s answer is a prototype website with which users can manage a digital copy of their libraries and perform full text searches on those books. Results are displayed with stunning heat maps; focusing on a particular book can also show snippets of text that match search criteria. Users also can recommend books to friends and create book-centered discussions.

 

By Michael Dunlap
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LabTracker is a product design to help manage the many learning spaces (computer labs) on UW campus. It uses maps to show students where to find available computers to use when they enter the lab. I used an iterative design process to produce a set of design heuristics to aid in the future development of LabTracker and its eventual release as an open source product. After three rounds of interviews and two prototypes, I ended up with four heuristics that each focus on a specific concern brought up by the interviews, as well as three heuristics that I recommend as a web developer for all web-based products.

 

By Jessie Shulman
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The Urban Archives Project is a collection of images including graffiti and other forms of public art in the University of Washington Libraries Digital Collections. One of the motivations to create the archive was to develop a repository of research-caliber data that adheres to high metadata standards.The Urban Archives project shares a template with the 80 other project archives made available through the Digital Collections. To accommodate this functionality, the interface and navigational controls present a number of usability hurdles to make full use of the system.By developing a dedicated search tool on the project’s external site, I have created a customized search interface as well as specific Help documentation. Usability testing was conducted throughout this project.

 

By Zoila Sedano, Moushomi Sinha
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This project takes a closer look at usability issues around setting up multiple devices on a universal remote control. Through the needs assessment and design discussions, our team found that users had problems recollecting the device model number while setting up devices to work with their universal remote control. In the design phase, three new enhancements to the remote setup process were developed: auto detecting the devices on a users home network, using images to simplify the model-number based setup of devices and using the power of community to share remote profiles among friends. We conducted a user evaluation of our design proposals and found it to be helpful in improving the user experience while setting devices to work with their universal remote.

 

By Tim Christensen
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With the threat of identity theft growing, the subject of internet fraud prevention has become an important topic. Examining the experiences people have when interacting with a fraudulent page may reveal valuable insights as to how to design a tool or program that will aid users. Using theories from cognitive science, a framework was developed to describe the interaction between people and their browser during their interaction with a phishing site. The framework proposes that people notice, acknowledge and assess website elements to arrive at an overall trust assessment. Data collected through surveys suggest that users’ recognition of relevant elements correlates with a user’s level of experience.

 

By David Chon, Jung Lee
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Key-6 is an innovative text input system for mobile devices that is easy to learn, guess and use, designed for people who are bilingual and non-native English speakers. It emulates the concept of handwriting by using total of 7 stroke-symbols and combining each one to represent upper case alphabet characters. We have created a fully functioning prototype for usability testing during our experiment process. The 9-week cycle experiment was designed to test our algorithm on learnability, guessability, and foreign/abbreviated words in comparison to currently dominant text input systems such as T9 and 9-Key sequential press system. The analysis revealed that Key-6 is able to achieve better performance in the areas that we considered as primary strengths over existing systems.