Capstone Projects | Information School | University of Washington

COCINA

Interaction, immersion, and motivation are key to language learning, but finding and maintaining native speaking experiences are difficult. COCINA, a Google Home assistant, seeks to solve this problem by allowing language learners to practice conversations in the comfort of their own kitchen. By providing recipe guidance in Spanish and a translated version in English, our users will be able to cook a cultural dish while practicing their listening, comprehension, and conversational skills in Spanish.

DataBot

Do you love your work, but have this roadblock called “SQL” you don’t have the time to learn? Our product, DataBot, seamlessly bridges the gap between business and technology, so that you can focus on scaling new heights. DataBot leverages Machine Learning to transform natural language into SQL and presents actionable information. This empowers consultants to retrieve data on the fly, and eliminates ad hoc requests to analysts. DataBot harnesses the power of the cloud to ensure zero downtime. Slack integration ensures it can be easily deployed in an office environment. Embrace yourselves for the next disruptive technology revolution!

HALP

Seeking online help shouldn’t be a chore. Websites like Yahoo Answers are antiquated, and even the modern apps that people turn to don’t provide adequate resources for seeking or providing help. Text alone isn’t sufficient to communicate problems. HALP solves this by allowing users to visually communicate the problem. Users can snap a photo from their phones, edit it in-app, and directly upload it to the topic board. Other users can share their expertise by providing photos of their own.

HERE to THERE

At large events, trying to describe a booth location to someone is frustrating and tiring. THERE is our solution - an indoor wayfinding mobile and desktop application for event attendees and planners respectively. THERE easily gets attendees from point A to point B so they can fully enjoy their experience without worrying about getting lost at large events. Creating booth locations online makes event planning simple. Building on HERE Technologies, we navigate complicated indoor spaces for you - to help you get from HERE to THERE.

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.

Making Sense of Misinformation At Scale

Fact-checking organizations have limited resources to keep up with misinformation in this viral age. Prioritization of information allows for more efficient and accurate topic selection. We discuss an implementation of an automated NLP topic-modeling system at Snopes.com, a data pipeline to crowdsource misinformation. Users submit reports through a website and HTML is scraped and parsed into clusters for the Snopes.com reporting staff to act on. Topic modeling provides metrics for prioritization and effective allocation of resources. Our data pipeline reduces the amount of manual curation required by editors at Snopes, which enables them to reallocate their resources to debunking rumors.

MediSend

Transferring medical records today is slow and cumbersome. Medisend allows patients to own their medical records, provide frictionless transfers between clinics and secure storage using Sent.io’s blockchain solution.

NextBite

Farmers markets often have produce at the end of the day that cannot be sold, either due to visual imperfections or overproduction, which contributes to food waste. Volunteers from non-profit organizations rescue food from farmers markets, but this process is inconsistent due to ineffective communication between volunteers and vendors. NextBite is a mobile application that streamlines the donation process by allowing vendors to create donation listings to inform volunteers about the availability of surplus food. Volunteers can then rescue and redistribute these donations to non-profit organizations in the Seattle area.

PlaceR

Imagine the inability to compete in the modern retail market place. It can be prohibitively expensive for small businesses to keep up with large companies like Amazon. Placer levels the playing field. We provide the augmented reality technology to independent furniture manufacturers, so they can give their customers an immersive shopping experience similar to that found in store. By providing a universal accessible platform, we will help a diverse segment of the industry thrive, that would otherwise get left behind. We plan to compliment the independent manufacturers’ business model and allow their creativity to lead to new innovations.

SentIO

There are many applications that use file transfer and storage internally. In some cases, like that of medical file transfer, we are constrained by security requirements and regulations such that there is zero tolerance for security vulnerabilities both from a technological point of view and social point of view. Our solution is to enable people to leverage the blockchain for secure file transfer. SentIO is an API that abstracts the blockchain details away such that the implementation of our secure file storage and transfer system is simple and accessible to any client-side application.

iSchool Capstone

2018