iSchool Capstone

2018

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IHME Disease Profiles

The Disease Profiles project is sponsored by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a research center that provides publicly accessible population health data used to evaluate current policies and strategies. Currently, users of the existing tools on the IHME website have difficulty viewing the impact of a specific disease. Our web page provides snapshots of the impact of over 300 diseases in 195 different countries. This tool will assist health policy makers, advocates, non-governmental organizations, and members of the general public in making informed decisions about public health in regards to funding, policy, and education.
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ImagineIF Libraries Device Circulation

The community of Columbia Falls, Montana is economically disadvantaged, and does not have widespread access to reliable wireless internet. The project ImagineIF Device Circulation has assessed this need by conducting a feasibility study to determine the viability of a wifi hotspot lending program based out of the ImagineIF Columbia Falls location. The market, technical, financial, and organizational feasibility were all studied. Additionally, a SWOT analysis and success metrics were devised, so that the groundwork is already laid in case ImagineIF Libraries decides to move ahead with this program in the future.
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Information Behavior and Library Awareness of King County's Returning Citizens

Thousands of people in Washington State are released from correctional custody every year to face the challenge of reentering the community. This research provides simple data that enables public libraries to better understand the challenges and needs of the formerly incarcerated people they serve, and design effective services and outreach to engage those who are not already library users. By collecting data directly from formerly incarcerated people, this study was able to form a rough profile of the community and discern patterns of need, information seeking behavior, and library perception and awareness.
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Interdepartmental Collaborations to Improve Access to Visual Resource Collections: The Patricia Young Collection

The Patricia Young Collection (PYC) contains over 10,600 35mm slides that visually document more than one hundred different architectural and archaeological sites from seventeen different countries in East and Southeast Asia. This slide collection will be uploaded to the School of Art + Art History + Design’s in-house MDID digital image database and then entered as compound object records into the University of Washington Library’s Digital Collections repository. The goal of this Capstone project is for the collection to reach a wider audience at the University of Washington and, by extension, researchers worldwide.
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Invest Wisely: BI Optimizes Digital Marketing Ads Spend

Encore Capital Group, a leading global provider of debt management and recovery solutions for consumers in 15 countries, recently forayed into the digital world and launched several digital marketing campaigns across all platforms such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook etc. However, they were reliant on the reporting portal of the individual platforms to make investment decisions. Team Insight Squad performed extensive data research and analysis and built an end-to-end BI tool that integrated these data sources, transformed it and built a customized dashboard that provides key insights to track campaign performance, optimize the ad dollar spend, and enable budget pacing.
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Investigating the Orbis Cascade Alliance's user interface and information architecture

The Orbis Cascade Alliance is a nonprofit consortium of 39 universities throughout the Pacific Northwest. They advance learning and research by combining the physical and digital library resources of their member universities to serve over 275,000 students. For my capstone, I constructed and conducted a series of tests designed to evaluate the Alliance’s catalog user interface and the information architecture through which they organize digital and physical materials. The results of these usability tests, card sorting activities, and interviews will help the Alliance to continue to promote academic success and better research.
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iSee: SightLife’s data through new lenses

Many organizations utilize Excel to track valuable data. Often times, these spreadsheets grow out of hand with information stored inconsistently and in random areas. This results in a loss of data integrity and the inability to extract information holistically. We teamed up with SightLife, a global health organization to build a dynamic database with powerful data analytics by incorporating existing Microsoft technologies. With a standardized and streamlined data management process, Sightlife now has the ability to ask their data questions and discover the answers. Utilizing their information’s full potential brings them one step closer to eliminating corneal blindness
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Knock! Knock! "Who's there?"

Industrial control systems, a type of cyber-physical system, control critical infrastructures such as national power distribution (nuclear, electrical, etc), manufacturing, and communication infrastructures. The increased internet-connectivity of devices within these networks create apertures for malicious actors to access and control these critical infrastructures. Teaming with FireEye, we retrieved publicly available information about IP addresses that were recorded port-scanning an ICS system. We extracted a list of features that indicate the IP address may be malicious, and created a confidence level to help clients determine potential maliciousness. Using improved capabilities, companies can have increased visibility into their ICS environment.
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Lawn Vision

Currently the only way to estimate your lawn size is by physically measuring it. Lawn Vision breaks the norm to be the first service that uses computer vision on satellite images to calculate your lawn area. Homeowners can use Lawn Vision to communicate more effectively with lawn care professionals and receive accurate quotes. Whereas lawn care professionals can access the right information to prepare for the job and sign onto projects faster, now with greater transparency. This service provides Porch with new data that will be utilized to restructure their current pricing model.
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Life and Times in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District: A Collection of Oral Histories

The Wing Luke Museum's collection of Asian and Pacific Islander oral histories encompasses over 900 interviews. Users can request digital transcripts, but audio recordings can only be accessed in-person at the Wing. For this Oral History Project, we have curated nearly 200 interviews highlighting Seattle’s Chinatown-International District and its various communities; Relevant PDF transcripts and MP3 audio files are now available online through an Oral History website. Not only is this website beneficial for local users, but it is also a tangible tool for the Wing to reach users worldwide who are interested in the Wing’s Oral History Program.