iSchool Capstone

2016

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Gymfluence, habit centered design for a fitter world

The fitness industry is currently worth $27 billion, and has grown less than 2% over the last 5 years. Gyms have abysmal retention rates ranging from 40-70%, and spend nearly 9 times as much in acquisition costs. At the same time, more than 200 million Americans today are considered overweight. How is a growing problem not matched by an industry specifically designed to solve it? Because people fall into the TRIBE – Time, Results, Interest, Body Image and Energy, the top five excuses for not working out. Gymfluence uses habit-centered design techniques to help people mitigate the TRIBE. We analyze user behavior, anticipate excuses, inform gym staff and enable the staff to influence users through data and a positive reward cycle. Additionally, we help users document their commitment to their personal wellbeing. And the kicker? Half our app can only be opened inside the gym!
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Heirloom Seed Catalog

The Kearsarge Seed Savers Group is a small group of farmers and gardeners in rural New Hampshire with an interest in preserving open pollinated seeds that are either rare or of local interest. Due to competition with hybrid varieties more suitable to long distance transport and disease resistance, more than 90% of the United States fruit and vegetable varieties have vanished. This group’s mission is to preserve heirloom varieties whilst also creating a Darwinian effect that increases production by saving seeds from the best plant and utilizing each generation. Although dedicated to the conservation of often long forgotten varieties, the group has struggled with organization and communication. The solution presented was the development of an Access database to serve as a dynamic catalog for the seed collection that monitors inventory levels for storage and distribution. This is connected to a website for means of communication via xml.
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Hippo

The Interventional Radiology department at Seattle Children's Hospital currently deals with an inefficient, error prone system to manually transcribe patient appointments from the billing system to a calendar accessible to nurses, Radiology technologists, and doctors in the operating room. We set out to determine how we can improve the scheduling process for interventional radiology procedures at Seattle Children’s Hospital so that staff are able to easily view upcoming procedures within the context of the patient’s protected health information. We designed a scheduling system to fit the needs of clinicians and staff at Seattle Children's Hospital. The application, called Hippo, is built to contain information accessible with a glance, while maintaining customizability to adapt to the hospital's changing needs. Hippo also connects with existing medical applications, such as Epic and Cerner, to automatically import new appointments and reduce transcription errors. Hippo is a browser based application designed to be accessible on desktop, mobile, and large screen devices.
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Hunt + Gather: A Digital Repository + Ingest Plan for Caldera

Caldera is an Oregon-based nonprofit that provides mentoring to students through arts and environmental programming. Its staff works with youth year-round for seven years, starting in middle school and continuing through high school graduation. The White House recently recognized Caldera as one of only twelve nonprofits to receive the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program (NAHYP) Award. As the organization celebrates its 20-year anniversary, its stakeholders have become critically aware of the need for an organized, centralized digital image repository to serve as an archive of organizational history and enable discovery to promote future work. Currently, its digital images exist across upwards of ten poorly organized hard drives. For my Capstone project, I have assessed Caldera’s collection and available technology and developed a long-term project plan for establishing a repository. This plan includes recommendations on ingest, preservation, and discovery.
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In-field Rating Checklist Database Conversion

The future of the country lies in the hands of the children. If the child doesn’t get the right start, he is 60% more likely to never go to college and 70% more likely to be arrested for a violent crime. However, good quality of early learning education can change these statistics. The Childcare Quality & Early Learning Center for Research and Professional Development (CQEL) is the University of Washington’s effort to measure and improve the quality of early learning environments for children. CQEL is responsible for conducting, onsite evaluations of child care providers located throughout the state. The process of rating early education sites was being executed using a complex and cumbersome Excel spreadsheet until Data Wanderers pitched in. The team transformed the IRC Database solution from Excel to a robust SQL relational database thereby catering the problem of data security, data losses, multi-user access and facilitates standard and adhoc reports to analyze the performance of various sites.
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Indigenous Peoples of California: A Digital Guide to Related Resources at The Bancroft Library

The Bancroft Library on the University of California, Berkeley campus is one of the most heavily used repositories of Western Americana in the United States. Our project makes thousands of manuscript items and printed materials relating to Indigenous communities of present-day California more approachable, searchable, and accessible. With assistance and feedback from members of Indigenous communities in California and subject specialists, we have created a cohesive, detailed guide listing individual titles of items with links to their related collections, catalog records, and finding aids. Our records are organized by language family, and again by four categories we created: Lifeways (physical culture), Worldview (relationships, geographic location, and activism), Mythology & Storytelling (narrative representations), Language (linguistic materials), and General (all material not appropriate for other groupings). We hope our project assists in the preservation and revitalization of traditional culture and language through increased knowledge, respect and understanding of our California communities.
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Information Management Solution for The Museum of Flight

The Museum of Flight receives a huge amount of research requests from its patrons/customers. The requests are collected through paper forms, stored in editable PDF’s and processed in Excel for reference and tracking purposes. Due to inefficient processing and primitive technology, the resource usage is high and redundant. They strive for a robust information management system which is intuitive to use, can be accessed from multiple locations and stores data centrally. The Data Flight capstone team assessed the requirements and designed a database management system for the museum of flight. The new system is built on cutting edge technology, incorporating important features like central storage, multiple session access to update data in real time, and multivariable reporting. As a prospective patron/customer of the museum, your requests will be processed much faster. The solutions takes paper forms out of the equation and contributes towards a clean and greener environment.
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intelligentIR

Starbucks’ information security team is continually seeking to understand which of its security events to prioritize for response. Although the organization utilizes a security information and event management tool for detecting anomalous activity, the number of alerts being generated by the tool are overwhelming and difficult to manage. This is an issue that security teams at many large organizations face; how do you sift through the noise and find the events that are most likely indicative of a security threat or breach? IntelligentIR helps answer this question through the use of machine learning techniques. Using unsupervised learning to label raw security data along with supervised learning to build decision models, intellingentIR identifies and prioritizes new security alerts in order to make incident response more manageable.
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International and Multicultural Resource Collection Development at Willows Preparatory School

Willows Preparatory School (WPS) is a private institution affiliated with Bellevue Children’s Academy in Redmond, Washington. While the elementary school was established in 2000, WPS is only in its second year, therefore, the library is relatively small and consists largely of donated resources. Despite the small size, the new librarian has created an excellent base of resources in nonfiction and a good selection of new and popular books. As an International Baccalaureate (IB) candidate school, with a diverse student population, WPS is looking to add more international and multicultural resources that will both interest the students in their personal reading, support the school’s curriculum, and meet IB standards. With this in mind, my goal was to cultivate high quality international and multicultural resources that the librarian can immediately add to her emerging library.
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Internet censorship in Thailand: User reactions, potential vulnerabilities, and necessary responses

Thailand’s Internet censorship regime poses dire threats not only to users’ access to information, but also to their ability to safely create and disseminate content. In addition to high-risk users like journalists and dissidents, regular users are increasingly victims of the military government’s capricious enforcement of Internet regulations. Through bilingual data from 229 online surveys and 12 in-depth interviews, I find that users face unresolved information problems related to incorrect assessment of the actors and mechanisms behind blocked content, risky censorship circumvention tools from unreliable sources, and peer informants and government monitoring on social media. These results highlight users’ main points of vulnerability, and point to technical responses needed to protect them. Beyond recommendations to the academic computer security community and easy-to-understand guidelines for Thai Internet users, this project informs the development of safer, more secure strategies to resist Internet censorship and surveillance in any setting.