Ever thought about exploring Seattle on a bike without getting lost? Ever wish to be more active while meeting with friends? Find a great group ride and go! Cascade Bicycle Club offers more than 2,500 group rides annually, ranging from leisurely jaunts to longer endurance rides. Some are urban and some are in the greater Puget Sound region. Free for everybody. This great resource has been living on the website of Cascade Bicycle Club, but with mobile becoming the first screen for more of us, it got less convenient to access everyday. Now with the “Ride Finder” app, you can have these awesome group rides right on your fingertips, whether you’re chilling out in the backyard, or trying to get some quick planning done on the go. It will find you the perfect group ride to join based on your personal needs in just a few easy clicks.

Following the path of Moore’s Law, teleoperated robots are becoming more accessible and ubiquitous in the everyday consumers life -- forever changing the way we work and interact with the world around us. In order to maintain public safety in a society cohabited by humans and machines, the Robot Operator License ensures that users have completed training and received a license to operate their robot. This educational course provides critical information and interactive simulations in an effort to smoothly transition this technology into the modern world. Developed in partnership with the University of Washington Human-Centered Robotics Lab, the Robot Operator License is designed for the Beam+ telepresence robot, which serves as a proof-of­-concept and demonstrates a need for this type of operational education. Our course aims to tackle the policy challenges and threats to public safety due to the use of teleoperated robots by the everyday individual.

In 2014, the EMP Museum launched Indie Game Revolution, the first large-scale museum exhibit dedicated to the history, art and culture of independent video games. The EMP desired to add the games displayed to their permanent collection, but had never before archived digital-native video games. Building off a pre-capstone project to determine what could be preserved for each game while working within the EMP’s scope and budget, our capstone team prepared 30 games for the collection. For each game, we archived DRM-free versions of the game files; recorded hours of gameplay footage; created a catalog record in a custom metadata schema built for the project; and, when possible, conducted oral history interviews with the game’s developers. These packages will not only preserve the games but help future researchers understand the era’s independent game development.

In 1492, Spain issued the Alhambra Decree, mandating that all Spanish (Sephardic) Jews –about 200,000– leave the country. They continued to speak a language known as Judeo-Spanish or Ladino in their new lives. The language has survived the intervening centuries, and present-day Seattle counts several native Ladino speakers among its population. Devin Naar, PhD, and the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington are collecting and digitizing Ladino documents to preserve and share this unique aspect of Sephardic Jewish culture. We developed a prototype for the Sephardic Studies Digital Library and Museum. We then conducted user testing for a web portal to lead interested researchers and community members from the Stroum Center’s website into the digital collection, which is hosted by UW Libraries. We have used our expertise in digital preservation and metadata best practices to provide project leaders with a list of recommendations.

To provide its members with award-winning care, Group Health employees need access to data. This includes electronic Personal Health Information (ePHI) which is distributed throughout the company-wide scheme of network folders. To safeguard ePHI, Group Health administrators have to determine who needs access to this data and at what level. For our Capstone, we joined the Identity and Access Management Department at Group Health, where we led the File Folder Access Review process. During our 5-month engagement, we helped 60 Group Health leaders identify appropriate access among employees to ePHI data. To accomplish this, we conducted gap analysis research, refined existing review structures, and deployed access reviews of 1000+ network folders. Through our project, we ensured effective access to data in compliance with Healthcare Information Portability and Privacy Act (HIPPA) regulations, ultimately decreasing security risks for the entire Cooperative, patients and employees alike.

Sharks are enormously important to our ecosystem, yet poorly understood. Researchers seek to understand and study them but are hampered by siloing, wasted research opportunities, and underdeveloped collaborative networks. Shark Share Global is a website and database that facilitates sample sharing and collaboration between researchers around the world. It is custom-built to encompass the needs of researchers- bringing the technology solution as close to their existing processes of sample cataloguing as possible- to ensure a low barrier to adoption. Open only to accredited shark and ray researchers, it is a simple, elegant solution to a sprawling problem, introducing a formal research collaborative tool where none have existed before.

From hardware setup to data acquisition and analysis, depression researchers go through a long, convoluted process to understand electroencephalogram (EEG) data (popularly called brain waves) collected from patients. Acquired data is often messy and difficult to process, and analysis can take from hours to days to return results. Our project, Slate, aims to change that by providing a platform that streamlines this process, and provides a fully interactive 3D model to visually digest the data. Slate is a cross-platform desktop application that consists of two parts: an EEG data processing tool, and a data visualization tool that allows depression researchers to view and analyze brain signals obtained through a non-invasive, commercial EEG headset. Slate utilizes real-time modeling and neuroimaging techniques to allow more meaningful understanding of EEG data in the process of interpreting and identifying depressive patterns in research, with the goal of ultimately serving patients.

Once one of our team members, Jason, travelled to the west coast of the US and stayed in a small and cozy hotel. He was surprised to see the front desk making notes with her pen and paper and her pc monitor being surrounded by sticky notes. Apparently those notes weren’t helping much as she was still busy browsing through pages and sticky notes for a piece of information. Jason couldn’t help but wondering: is there a information management tool that he can build, without too much investment, to help those small hotels to do their business in a snap? This is what our project aims to tackle: to usher small hotels, who are still managing their information manually, to a technology based information system built with an open source relational database and an intuitive user interface. Our goal is simple. We want to offer hoteliers a solution to run their core business functions more efficiently, and to make their life much easier.

The Tseltal Maya are an Indigenous people living in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico who are inheritors of a rich Mayan culture but experience extreme poverty. One of the many challenges they face is the loss of language and culture in the face of encroaching globalization and assimilation into the Mestizo culture. The Tseltal House of Wisdom will hold what will be the world's largest collection of Tseltal language materials. However, the current conditions in which the materials are stored, as well as a jungle environment, present the difficult task of organization and preservation. Through a partnership with the One Equal Heart Foundation, we traveled to Chiapas to assess their newly constructed building and collection to offer recommendations for Collection Development, Classification, Environmental Controls, and Technology. We hope the Tseltal House of Wisdom grows into a vital resource for the community as they continue to strengthen their language and culture.

Imagine working with a community that has no word in their language for library. The Tseltal Mayan people in Chiapas, Mexico have recognized the benefits and necessity of a community knowledge house. Currently, potential materials are stored across 600-square-miles and need to be collected in a central location and organized. More than an archive, this location is meant to be a community center where Tseltal cultural materials can be accessed and shared. In conjunction with the One Equal Heart Foundation, our team designed recommendations for increasing access and collection development in order to support the community’s cultural and linguistic preservation. The delivered manual of recommendations includes examples of indigenous and Latin American libraries to inspire community leaders as they envision the future of their knowledge house.