The company Test Innovators helps students prepare for standardized tests like ISEE/SSAT. Students sign up to their platform and take practice exams. They have more than 20,000 students signed up till date and pocess more than 5,000,000 questions on their system. The company wanted to build a system which automatically analyzes the student's progress in their practice tests and recommend ways to improve their scores. We have built a system, PrepSmart, that automatically learns from past experiences of students who are similar to the current test taker and suggest their features to the current test taker to improve his scores. Recommendations can be anything like strong/weak subject areas, time to answer questions,additional question banks and tutoring services. PrepSmart helps students in improving their overall scores and it also helps the sponsor in generating additional revenue by selling recommended question banks and tutoring services.

We set out to create a food spoilage tracking system that would allow a user to plan meals, coordinate shopping trips, save money, and keep a more clear mental image of the items the user currently has at home. Our hope is to foster an improved sense of what food items are available to a person and when those food items will pass their usable dates, so as to save our users time and money. The goals of this project are not only limited to personal food storage and tracking, as the world is facing a mounting issue with food sustainability. As our numbers increase our demand for food increases and so does our overall cumulative waste. We seek to help not only those who would use our application, as much as the the world at large, by maximizing food consumption and reducing avoidable expiration based waste.

Students are not being exposed to user-centered design and other Informatics topics in high school. We have found that many currently in the field did not discover such topics until their second year in college. With the demand for user focused critical thinking on the rise, Project Spark hopes to bridge the gap by introducing these topics earlier in the education system in order to spark interest. We bring college students to the high school classroom in order to give high school students a taste of what they can do with user-centered design. Our goal is to simply get more students interested in design thinking within the context of technology in the information age.

In 2012, the Bainbridge Public Library, the Kitsap Regional Library, and the people of Bainbridge Island began working on a digital archive of the Bainbridge Island Review between the years 1941 to 1946. The only newspaper in the country to oppose the incarceration of Japanese American citizens for the duration of the war, the Bainbridge Island Review published pictures and letters from incarcerees, as well as reflected the values of their community, that largely believed incarceration of Japanese Americans was unjust and immoral. Still today, the people of Bainbridge Island are dedicated to “Nidoto Nai Yoni”, which means "Let It Not Happen Again". My task was to locate & contact individuals and organizations that might use their influence to raise awareness of the archive and its unique story. Conducting this outreach has resulted in multiple organizations recognizing the archive’s value, and a promise that they will spread the knowledge contained within.

Before RCMD:ME, media recommendation services solely recommended media based on user’s preferences within the same media type. For example, GoodReads recommends books to users based upon other books they like. However, there are no recommendation platforms which bridge multiple media forms--such as someone who likes The Road might want to find musical artists, movies, and books that other users who like this book also like (e.g. 67% of people who like The Road also like Apocalypse Now). We have developed a recommendation service which has created a new way to find relationships between different forms of media that are otherwise unknown. Our service allows artists to gain exposure in a way that respects independent artists and strengthens ties between print and digital media. With RCMD:ME, users are able to find new media more easily, decreasing wasted time and frustration, and ultimately improves the media discovery process holistically.

Re-Imagining the Spectrum of Library Experience Diane Clark, Online MLIS, Aryn Orwig, Online MLIS, Kat Redniss, Online MLIS, Susen Shi, Online MLIS Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), is an enigmatic condition that can make accessing community resources challenging. In the United States, 1 in 68 American children are on the spectrum, a significant increase within the last half-century. Many public libraries offer programs for children with autism, however there is a lack of services dedicated to young and emerging adults with ASD, a community that often gets overlooked. We have created an adaptable toolkit housed in a user-friendly website that supports public libraries in creating more inclusive spaces, services, programs, and customer service approaches that better serve individuals on the autism spectrum. This digital toolkit supports libraries in breaking down barriers of access for individuals on the spectrum, in turn, encourages more meaningful engagement in programs and library services. The toolkit serves to reduce reticence among staff, empowering librarians to engage administration in a dialogue about best practices for serving the underserved.

The OLAC Movie & Video Credit Annotation Experiment seeks to draw connections between names and their associated roles within moving image MARC records using Named Entity Recognition in natural language processing in order to drive more effective discovery interfaces, formulated for sharing as linked data in a manner similar to the Internet Movie Database. This research-based capstone project sought to better understand moving image roles as they relate to relationship designators in the RDA Toolkit, linking them as appropriate, proposing new designators to accommodate the diverse range of roles in the moving image industry, and identifying areas where designator mapping was problematic or not possible. The results found 64 percent of roles could be mapped, 19 percent could be assigned to proposed designators, and 16 percent remained undefined. This research has contributed toward a better understanding of issues related to formulation, inclusion, location, and consistency within moving image MARC records.

During this project I worked with the Ozarks Literacy Council to establish the statistics on their user groups. Due to the OLC being a non-profit, their funding is based on the support of organization such as United Way. However, with a recent change in administration, there is a lack of evidence as to which demographics are utilizing the services offered by the OLC and where gaps lie in services offered. I compiled statistics gathered by the OLC and used Excel to created a spreadsheet utilizing macros that will make keeping stats in the future more user friendly so they are able to maintain this information on their own in the years to come. Additionally, I created an infographic highlighting user satisfaction and accomplishments by the learners that will be used to increase grants and fundraising.

The Puyallup Public Library serves the citizens of the city of Puyallup in Washington state. They enjoy a youth services department comprised of two children’s librarians and a teen librarian. My project focused on analyzing the current services of the children’s librarians, researching things they could do to improve their services, and offer recommendations based off that research. My analysis indicated potential improvements in marketing and programming evaluation strategies, my research indicated specific marketing strategies and evaluation rubrics that would be applicable, and my recommendations were tailored specifically to the Puyallup Public Library. My research project offers two things primarily to the children’s librarians. Not does it offer recommendations with objectivity realistic marketing strategies, but those recommendations take the personality and unique customer base of the Puyallup library into account. Put another way, my recommendations seek to supplement the children’s services, not replace them.