iSchool Capstone

2017

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Tempo

9 out of 10 college students report trouble with procrastination, and 7 out of 10 procrastinate because they have difficulty getting started. Tempo provides an easy solution for tracking and getting started on tasks. Simply input your task names, sizes, and due dates and Tempo will automatically prioritize what you should focus on first. You will receive occasional notifications to encourage you to start thinking about your task. When you sit down to work, you will already have an idea of what you need to do and can quickly start working using the pomodoro timer provided by Tempo.
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The Effects of Visual Presentation on the Perceived Veracity of News Sources

In online news, as in many forms of media, the appearance of content influences the reader, possibly even more than the content itself. Our experiment investigates this possibility further by researching how certain content-supporting attributes, such as links and pictures, affect how judgments are made about unfamiliar news sources, independent of any informative content. Studying how people evaluate the credibility of news sources is important because our society is increasingly turning to online news sources, while simultaneously becoming more adept at creating them. We hope our research will provide new insights into what factors influence what consumers of news believe.
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The Judge George Bagley Collection

The Judge George Bagley Collection consists of approximately 40 boxes from Bagley’s career as a lawyer and a Circuit Court Judge starting in 1895, when he passed the Oregon bar, and ending with his death in 1935. World events he would have witnessed include the World War I, Prohibition and the stock market crash, as well as significant events in Oregon history. This project started the process of digitizing the collection and uploading the images into PastPerfect5 and then transcribing the documents. Doing this makes the collection searchable for historians and other researchers.
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The Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School and Camp Archives

The Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School and Camp Archive represents over a century of Northwest Colorado and Modern Dance history. The collection consists of various formats, including photographs, correspondence, and ephemera, and measures roughly 50 linear feet. Series 11: “Scrapbooks”, includes 32 collections of photographs, camp programs, and journal entries that include the school’s founding in 1914. These objects were the focus of the preservation and access effort. The physical preservation, arrangement, and description of these materials was the first phase of this long-term project.. Development of an Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aid is ongoing. Next steps include focused digitization, acquisition efforts, and community outreach. Future work will allow this previously inaccessible and deteriorating collection to endure over time and supplement related collections in the region.
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Ticket Genie - Predictive Analytics Framework for Service Ticket resolution

In the telecom industry, the process of resolving service tickets is cumbersome and time-consuming. The support staff has to manually categorize these tickets and quickly find resolutions. We present “Ticket Genie,” a predictive analytics framework that expedites this process of finding resolutions. The framework automatically predicts resolution categories of new tickets and clusters similar tickets together using predictive machine learning techniques with up to 90% accuracies. Being deployed as a web service, Ticket Genie can be integrated into various ticket management systems with minimal efforts. With this expedited processing, we hope to achieve faster resolution leading to greater customer satisfaction.
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Total Resource Observation Utility Team (TROUT)

The Total Resource Observation Utility Team (TROUT), created a data visualization using Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife’s (WDFW) high-resolution land change data. The interactive visualization makes this important data understandable to the public, policymakers, and environmental scientists. TROUT has unlocked this public data and improved access by disseminating in a clear, concise, user-centered dashboard presenting actionable information. This visualization allows the user to see actual changes in the Puget Sound over time with data-rich GIS information describing the changes. TROUT’s use of open-source technologies and code documentation mean the dashboard can be replicated for displaying future public spatial datasets.
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Understanding and Designing a Holistic User Experience for AWS Kinesis

A new addition to AWS, not much user research has been conducted on Kinesis, the company’s data streaming service, to understand its users’ needs and challenges. Presently, one major design question that exists is how can Kinesis’ entry points and onboarding experience be redesigned to help drive more engagements across different user personas who may interact with Kinesis. Through this project, in which our team has taken this design question through a user-centered and lean design process, we strive to help make Kinesis a better product for its users, thereby increasing its impact and prominence within the AWS family.
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USC Events App

USC Events is the leading music festival and events company in Washington state, with over 200,000 annual show attendees. Despite this volume of success, USC Events does not have an app where people can find their events or a system that rewards consistent attendees. Thus, we covered both of these key business needs by developing iOS and Android mobile applications for USC Events. Our apps will significantly enhance the music show experience for a substantial amount of the 200,000 annual attendees. We fully completed the app’s design and are nearly finished refining the app development’s MVP for launch.
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VisualEyes

Every day, most of us take our ability to see the world around us for granted. According to World Health Organization, approximately 246 million people have some form of visual impairment and do not see the world as you and I would. We are working on a smartphone application that simulates various visual impairments such as macular edema, age-related macular degeneration, color blindness, cataracts, and glaucoma. The goal of our application is to establish empathy and understanding while educating the user on the challenges a person with a specific visual impairment may encounter.
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VizioMetrics: Evaluating the Importance of Visual Content in Scientific Literature

VizioMetrics is an image search engine and classifier created by researchers at the University of Washington. In order to improve it, we would like to automatically identify a “central figure” in a scientific article in cases when multiple figures are present. We defined “central figure” as a single visualization that encapsulates key aspects of a paper, a graphical summary that captures the content of the article for readers at a single glance. We surveyed 488,590 researchers in biomedical field and found out that for an overwhelming majority of papers their authors were able to identify a single “central figure.”