Today’s “One Click” culture hides supply chain complexity from consumers. While logistics companies must confront supply chain risk as an everyday part of conducting business, quantifying and mitigating risk isn’t easy. Expeditors International, a global Fortune 500 freight forwarding company, wants to change the way their enterprise-level customers engage with the shipment of their goods by bringing greater visibility to supply chain risk. Route Assess, a risk assessment tool for U.S. transcontinental freight forwarding, allows Expeditors’ professional logistics analysts to measure and communicate the risk associated with a particular shipment to a customer, empowering analysts and customers to jointly tailor mitigation offerings on an individual shipment level. Aggregating crime, weather, commodity, and mitigation offering data, logistics analysts can easily input a shipment details, quantify risk along the route, visualize route data on a map, and then present this comprehensive assessment in a digestible format.

U.S. Congress has been reducing appropriated funds and personnel from the DOD since 2001 and cut 25% in inflation dollars since 2011.  Reducing the availability funds creates a need to evaluate how useable facility space and how it’s utilized to support the readiness to defend and support the citizens of the U.S. This project actually addresses the above need for adequate facility space to support state emergencies, identify which facilities need added soldier strength to support the local communities and support EXORD 164-15. As of 7 April 2015 EXORD 164-15: Reduce the Installation Facility Footprint, requires the disposal of all excess and poorly maintain facilities from the inventory to conserve funding.  To the citizens of Washington this project ensures during emergencies theirs a facility nearby to provide shelter, base to destitute food, supplies, personnel and equipment to the community.

Since 2007, Capital Stage has produced the Playwrights’ Revolution: a theater series of staged readings for six unproduced plays, inviting artist and audience feedback for playwrights. The series now receives up to 300 script submissions each year. To address the high volume of submissions, I developed a structured process for shepherding submissions from script to stage that is responsive to the company’s needs. The process includes a script catalog, a scoring rubric for script reviews, and coordinating volunteer readers to ensure all submissions receive equal consideration. This project creates a tested script management process that is scalable to growth of the Playwrights’ Revolution series and transferable to other script management projects. There are not currently industry standards for managing submissions, although there is a recognized need for better organizational strategies. This process uses tools that are already familiar to users, and could be easily implemented by other small theater companies.

Commercial music streaming services represent the fastest growing sector of the music recording industry, accounting for 32% of all digital revenue in 2014. User studies emerging from the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) research are currently being used to guide the strategic development of recommendation systems and new methodologies for the navigation of large music collections. This project serves to test the generalizability of seven user personas, constructed in prior research, and seeks to identify the significance of design implications for various user types. Approximately 1,000 users of music services were surveyed in order to determine behaviors and preferences when interacting with such services. Using a stratified sampling framework, key characteristics were extracted to classify users into specific persona subgroups. Such findings can inform designers of MIR systems and music streaming services in the development of targeted approaches, rather than a universal service model.

The financial aid process is full of esoteric rules and regulations. Students on financial aid, who are considering dropping a class, must navigate a complex process. Without realizing it, students can inadvertently set off a chain of events that can jeopardize their ability to continue to attend college. Our tool guides students through this complexity by tailoring a series of questions to fit their situation. Easy to navigate and available to explore, our tool empowers students to investigate the consequences of their decisions. We want students to understand how they might be impacted by financial aid details and what they can do about it. In addition, to improve the overall findability of the financial aid website, we designed an improved navigational framework that allows students to quickly find answers to questions without having to contact the financial aid office. We're excited to show you how our work has brought a touch of simplicity to a complex situation.

The current user experience (UX) landscape has seen a shift from the classic days of Garrett and Norman. UX designers invariably experiment with approaches resulting in a slew of methodologies. In an effort to unify the best practices among these, we devised a model that encompasses strategic alignment of organizational resources, market trend analysis and stakeholder buy-in. To pilot test our hypothesis we worked with University of Washington Information Technology (UW-IT) on redesigning the online course registration system. By performing a heuristic evaluation and connecting with users to understand the as-is system, we envisioned what the to-be system needs to accomplish. A proposal was prepared to seek management approval. Thus through the application of the model we were able to provide UW-IT with a feasible design proposal that met user and organizational needs. The pilot test indicates that this methodology provides an effective UX strategy that can help reduce development cost.

Forensic examiners and legal professionals must stay abreast of new technologies while adhering to sound practices required to satisfy evidentiary requirements in court. The widespread adoption of a new operating system and browser bears enormous importance for the digital forensic community. Specifically, the impact of Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 is especially dramatic with their range of new features. Our research encompasses the technical forensic considerations and the legal concerns that arise when dealing with anti-forensic activity and contemporary systems. It serves as an overarching, practical resource for forensic practitioners and legal professionals. We provide an overview of the forensically relevant changes with Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10, and then investigate the potential for recovery of valuable evidence under forensically challenging circumstances. Finally, we offer insight into the evidentiary treatment and legal ramifications of live acquisition of evidence and antiforensic activity.

After Oct. 30th, 2013, Alaska Airlines began to charge passengers $25 each for the first and second checked bags, so a lot more passengers started to carry their bags on the flight. Since then passengers constantly experienced flight delay due to the fact that too many carry-on bags cannot be stowed in the limited overhead bins. If the approximate number of “problematic” carry-on bags of each flight can be known in advance, Alaska Airline can prepare much earlier to avoid flight delay. Based on the flight and baggage data from August 2013 to February 2014, our project right there to help solve this problem. We identify several interesting patterns from the data, like the flights to Canada have more “problematic” carry-on bags than others, and furthermore we design a statistic model for predicting the approximate number of bags which should be claimed at the gate to avoid the delay problem.

This project attempts to assess the virtual reference services of the University of Washington. The service offers students, staff, and faculty 24/7 access to librarians and advanced graduate students from the UW as well as librarians from across the country, in order to have their information needs answered as fast as possible. With access to OCLC’s Question Point, I looked at a sample of chats that occurred during weeks one, five, and ten of Winter Quarter 2014. Chats were coded according to the category of questions, READ Level, time of day, and session time, and an analysis of the data showed that the majority of questions were labelled as either General Information or Known Item Searches. This could be due to a number of factors, including website design, gaps in information literacy instruction, as well as the recent migration of the UW Library’s catalog to Ex Libris’ Primo and ALMA. In addition to the transcript coding and analysis, I conducted a literature review to gauge what has been written in regards to the evolution of virtual reference services, from overviews of its effect on libraries to best practices of assessment and implementation. 

ADP Cobalt group, a leading provider of digital marketing solutions for the automotive industry, has spent years collecting customer survey feedback on their dealer websites. The company now wants to leverage this valuable data in order to gain meaningful insights that will help guide decisions to optimize content and website functionalities for the end user. Our team will execute a quantitative research project using advanced natural language processing tools to help systematically categorize the unique open text responses and statistical learning methods to cluster customer segmentations, these findings will potentially be used by business stakeholders and the research team to aid in product optimization decisions.