Communication is an essential tool to express our needs. Unfortunately, not everyone has the skills or foundations necessary to communicate. Children who fit this description require additional support to build their verbal skills and may need training to interpret what others are trying to say. Point is a free tablet application aimed at giving children who have yet to build the foundations of communication an alternative voice. It does this by providing prepackaged line drawn icons that cover words commonly used among young communicators, but also gives you the ability to create your own words. Point focuses on the first words of communication rather than complex sentences like other applications do. Whether your child is at school, the park, or at the dinner table, Point provides your child with a large vocabulary in a quick and easy to access format.

Students nowadays are facing tremendous competition and pressure while applying for higher education. One of the most difficult parts is preparing for the tests. Test Innovators focus on promising the students with a brighter future by providing preparation online tests for different exams. Although the company has thrived in the business, it could maximize the profit by executing different pricing strategies. Combining lore in machine learning and business, our team conducts several experiments on the websites to observe the behavior of users, including free trial demo, subscription pricing and website A-B testing. We collect both user behavior and transaction data to perform analysis helping the business to grow its customer base and maximize revenue per capita simultaneously. Our work not only benefits the business, but also helps the students to have a prosperous future by increasing their chance to be admitted to an ivy-league college.

To help online retailers understand how customers are interacting with their products, we created Prizmiq Analytics. Prizmiq, a startup based in Seattle, is paving the way for 3D product experiences on the web by providing scanning and hosting solutions for 3D product models. Prizmiq Analytics records online-user interactions with 3D models and provides a visual dashboard that helps deliver and display the most important information to retailers. The analytics dashboard will help provide information like how long users are interacting with a product or what color of a product users like the most. Also, for the first time, we are allowing retailers to see how their users are moving in 3D space with interactive 3D visualizations. This will enable retailers to understand their customers’ behavior, the successes and failures of a certain product’s design, and how to make the product better.

Howard Clifford, a photographer for the Tacoma News Tribune and Pacific Northern Airlines, donated to the University of Washington Libraries Special Collections Division a large collection of his life's work spanning the 1930s to the 1960s. In the 1970s when a portion of the collection was donated, items were commonly dispersed into general subject files, robbing researchers of the important context only a complete collection provides. My efforts to re-establish the collection’s original integrity through archival processing are resulting in new physical and intellectual arrangement and description as well as digitization of items for access on the UW Libraries’ Digital Collections website. Not only will a comprehensive finding aid provide detailed narrative descriptions, but for the first time, researchers will be able to see Clifford's photographs from anywhere in the world.

The Chateau Ste. Michelle Winery has an archive room where they store a collection of historical photographs, brand material, maps, and anything that relates to the history of the winery or property. One of the pain points for this archive is the usability of the room; people do not know what is available in the room. To assist in this problem I centered my project on creating catalog and index records for the archive. The company will be able to access these records through a SharePoint Team site that lists the contents of the archive in smaller collections, sorted by relevant categories. I also used Value Sensitive Design to figure out stakeholder needs, specifically how they could be integrated into making the archive room an asset for the winery. Marketing and Guest Services will now be able to find answers to historical and brand questions about the winery.

The photographs of John E. Thwaites, a mail clerk sailing throughout Alaska in the early 20th century, offer researchers a valuable glimpse into the maritime, Native American, and industrial history of the region. However, access to this collection is limited due to unprofessional processing that took place decades ago, arbitrarily sorting the photographs into subjects and subsequently losing the gestalt. My project remedies this by intellectually arranging the collection to express the course of Thwaites’ life and work in Alaska. In addition, the creation of a descriptive finding aid and the digitization of the images will enable searchable access to the collection from anywhere in the world. After languishing for decades, this highly compelling collection will gain new appreciation and access and utilization will be more possible than ever before.

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.

Nearly a million jobs are posted to Craigslist each week that range from landscaping to construction. Craigslist, and similar online platforms, offer little protection or assurance to both job seekers and job posters. Other services that do, such as Labor Ready, require strict guidelines and a long hiring process. Our team has addressed these issues with the creation of Scaffold. Scaffold is an online communication platform that connects people seeking to work with people looking to hire through a quick, direct, and dependable process. Unlike our competitors, we are not an employer, but simply connect our users. With two-way anonymous reviews and a managed messaging system, Scaffold minimizes potential abuse and provides a space for local micro-economies to flourish.

As part of their transition from a paper based circulation system to the online request system Aeon, the Newberry Library recognized the need for a stronger online presence for their unprocessed manuscript collections. Many of these collections were only described in paper inventories. My project addressed this information problem through the creation of collection level encoded archival description (EAD) records. Approximately 300 unprocessed collections now have an online presence in the library’s list of manuscript abstracts, a collection level finding aid, and are available for request in Aeon. Through the creation of these records, enhanced access is available to researchers around the world who may not be able to visit the library. Previously unknown collections now have a new visibility and can provide valuable research opportunities. The library’s archivists can use new interest in these collections to help determine the priority for processing.

Students who want to improve their skills, learn new skills, or build social network may feel frustrated when they cannot find someone to help. On the other hand, a large amount of on-campus activities or resources are sometimes underutilized due to poor-information conditions. To fill the gap between resources and demands, we developed ‘Skill Swap’, an iOS mobile application that allows UW students to build their own profiles, find a partner from whom they can learn or to whom they can offer help, and stay informed of on-campus events that are of their interests. In addition, our app encourages students to share skills, minimize training costs, and build social network. Willing to share skills and learn something new with no expense? Come and try our Skill Swap App!