Capstone Projects | Information School | University of Washington

reflect: a full-length smart mirror for pregnant and postpartum individuals

Experiences of dissatisfaction are a pervasive issue in today's society, however, there are few information solutions available that specifically address this within pregnant or postpartum individuals. Recognizing that negative body perception can cause significant distress to both the parent and their child, Team U has developed a solution that fundamentally prioritizes mental health and well-being: reflect. reflect is a full-body smart mirror that integrates daily check-ins, intention setting, breathing exercises, reflection time, and mirror exposure therapy. Our goal is to encourage users to slow down, cultivate healthier relationships with themselves, and ultimately, help improve their quality of life.

ResumAI: An AI career counselor chat bot that gives personalized resume feedback

ResumAI is a web based chat bot that helps job applicants overcome their resume challenges by giving them personalized feedback on their resumes and careers. Using the latest iteration of Chat GPT, ResumAI serves as a platform that facilitates and collaborates with the user resulting in improved resumes for all. We have addressed the bias, limitation, and accountability of ResumAI with an additional academic paper working with our sponsor Professor Chirag Shah. Team ResumAI has presented to the iSchool Founding Board representing the UW undergraduate capstone program, leveraging the capabilities of AI and providing personalized career guidance for job seekers.

Robert Garfias Film Collection @ the UW Ethnomusicology Archives

This project took digitized films of Robert Garfias (founder of the UW Ethnomusicology Archives) and made them accessible via the UW Ethnomusicology Archives and Internet Archive. This largely included cleaning up and working with the metadata, and creating standard filenames, all the while considering copyright and ethics of the films. While uploading films there was a deeper work with metadata, particularly with subject headings and material descriptions, and continuously learning about the processes of preserving and/or digitizing film.

Scarecrow Metadata Project

Scarecrow Video is a nonprofit video store and archive that houses over 145,000 titles. Scarecrow has been growing its collection for over 30 years, across various catalog system conversions, resulting in many inconsistencies and gaps in the catalog’s metadata. For our capstone project, we were responsible for checking and correcting metadata within the Sci-Fi and Japanese Horror genres. Ultimately, we verified metadata for over 600 titles. This updated metadata will increase the usability and searchability of Scarecrow’s catalog, and assist the transition into Scarecrow’s new web-based system that will be launched in the next few months.

School Library Database User Guides

This project sought to support the work of the librarians at Lakeside School Upper School, a private high school in Seattle, WA. The librarians needed to find a solution to a decrease in time available to devote to direct instruction pertaining the use of the many databases that the library purchases for access by its students. The Capstone team, in order to help solve this problem, created 31 video-based user guides on how to use 11 different databases, as well as videos devoted to general database use instruction (i.e. search strategies, keywords, etc.).

See-weed: Detecting Storefront Advertising of Age-restricted Retailers

The youth across King County are rampantly being exposed to age-restricted products like Marijuana, Tobacco, Vapes etc. To address the issue, we partnered with King County and built a computer vision model that analyzes the storefront images of age-restricted retailers and categorizes them into different groups based on advertisement aggressiveness or intensity. The advertisement intensity groups are classified as ‘High’, ‘Medium’, and ‘Low’. The results will help recommend suitable actions to create a safer advertising space. This will also enable various regulatory bodies to create awareness among the youth and bring necessary policy reforms to prevent unhealthy advertising.

Serenify, Giving Voice to Mental Health

We have created an intuitive and user-centric community platform that is centered on anonymity and story sharing. Serenify provides a safe space for users to discuss mental health concerns and ways to support each other. Most importantly, the platform is designed with simple user interfaces and fun interactions. The project goal is to build an online space for users to feel a sense of community around mental health issues with regard to daily prompts. Users can post text, pictures, and videos as responses to the daily prompts.

SGS Student Librarianship Program

Last year, SGS, a private, nonprofit middle school, moved into its permanent home, along with a collection of 2,000 books and no library staff. The library presented many challenges, namely an uncataloged fiction collection, a nonexistent circulation system, and an overwhelming lack of student engagement. Together with my sponsor and four students, I developed the Student Librarianship Program, cataloged 775 fiction books, established a check out process, and celebrated our progress with the entire school. SGS’s community of 170 students and staff now have a library they can use and a renewed sense of excitement about its continued evolution.

Sharing the Bounty: Rehoming Surplus Materials in the Whitman County Historical Society Archives

Working with the Whitman County Historical Society to help them discover what specific surplus materials they have in storage, I inventoried over five hundred individual items while creating a directory of potential new homes for those materials that fell out of the Society’s scope and flagging those that might be considered for integration into their collection. In conjunction with an interactive PowerPoint presentation, this project allows the Society to easily find and access these materials, with the end-goal of opening up storage space and moving on surplus materials to organizations that will recognize and utilize their full informational potential.

Simplifying Lab Creation and Management for Educators

Traditionally, creating and publishing labs in Azure Lab Services has required technical expertise, creating a barrier for non-technical educators to easily utilize the platform's powerful capabilities for their classroom needs. Our project simplifies the lab creation process for educators, making it easy to create and manage labs with minimal technical expertise. Our solution has achieved a 60% reduction in lab setup time and an estimated 30% increase in Azure lab adoption and usage. Our solution empowers educators to provide equal opportunities for all students to learn and succeed, promoting equity and accessibility regardless of their technical background.

iSchool Capstone

2023