The objective of this research is to improve our understanding of how people perceive and describe the mood of video games and interactive media. The mood element and its respective controlled vocabulary was developed by the Game Metadata Research Group at the iSchool, in collaboration with the Seattle Interactive Media Museum (SIMM), as a part of the Video Game Metadata Schema.In order to evaluate the applicability of the mood element, I have conducted user interviews in which gamers were asked to evaluate the current mood CV and apply mood terms to familiar game titles. Next, I have compiled a list of over 1500 games, with applied mood terms, and sourced genres and release years. This project rectifies the scarcity of past research, enabling cataloguers and users of the SIMM to search and organize video game metadata by mood.

With networks being as complex and many-layered as they are, problems can exist in staggering varieties and walking through them blind provides no solution for future occurrences. NetJeeves is the beginnings of a network manager that brings disparate elements of network management together and provide users with a simple, but clear overview of their network state. NetJeeves reduces clutter while highlighting the most relevant issues in a highly visual interface, providing information that can be used to diagnose issues that may not be solved by automated fixes. With NetJeeves, informa-tion about the network and connected devices are given at a high-level without becoming a black box for users, as may occur in other existing technologies, ensuring transparency of the network without overwhelming users.

With a growing number of courses offered online there isconsiderable interest in distance education. As universities negotiate standards in online instruction we ask: How will effective communication, interaction, and motivation be established in the absence of face-to-face instruction? What will be the role for instructors in online education? How will students’ learning outcomes be assured and improved? To address these concerns, City University created a new set of standards for their online classes: the Exemplary Course Standards (ECS). But CityU was unsure how to start applying these. Our team modeled ways to use the ECS by redesigning a core course on critical thinking. We created an online experience that is interactive, uses story-structure, formative assessment, and caters to a variety of student types and needs. Education is an old art form but as the medium we teach through changes, we must adapt to harness the power of online instruction.

The Trumbull Library System in the town of Trumbull, Connecticut selected baseball as the theme of their annual One Book, One Town event for 2014. The theme honors the 25th anniversary of the Trumbull Little League winning the Little League World Series over the heavy favorites from Taiwan. In order to extend the conversation with patrons, I developed a program for collecting and preserving the memories of townspeople who remember or participated in the Little League World Series of 1989. This spring, I am recording the stories of townspeople in a series of story sharing sessions. The Trumbull Library System and local historical societies will receive copies of the audio in two formats, CD and on flash drive. The multiple formats and copies at multiple locations will help ensure that there are copies preserved for future researchers interested in this unique piece of local history.

OpenDoors is a readers’ advisory program aimed at middle- and high-school-aged readers. Our goal was to adapt librarian Nancy Pearl’s concept of the “four doorways” of adult readers’ advisory (plot, setting, character, and language) for use with YA works. Working with St. Thomas School, our team created an informational poster, bookmarks, and a Tumblr blog. Students are provided with a number of titles as a starting point and encouraged to explore further and to share their own discoveries via Tumblr. For some readers, these materials may get them thinking about why they enjoy the books they do and encourage them to seek out more diverse reading materials; others may use the categories simply as a field of suggested titles to draw from. In either case, they will be making new finds and actively considering what they liked about the books and why.

As in many libraries across the nation, the Iowa City Public Library (a single-site system) in Iowa City, Iowa, has witnessed a decline in circulation of young adult materials and participation in teen programming. In order to assess young adult (here defined as those from ages 12-18) interests and possible barriers to library access and use, I have observed teen center traffic and program participation, collected focus group responses, and conducted a survey of 200+ local members of the target demographic. I will present the Iowa City Public Library with an executive summary of this data, highlight the teen services’ successes, and offer a multi-pronged approach to both better meet the needs of their existing young adult patrons and attract new ones by a.) reconsidering the structure of programming, b.) incentivizing in-house and off-site library participation, and c.) fostering stronger connections to the teen populace at large via social media.

Any major business shift, be it an acquisition, a new technology or strategy, require an organizational response.This necessitates the need for an organization transformation effort, in which the group, at any specific point of time, should have instant access to information they require relating to projects, tools, internal documents and reports. One of Intel’s leading design groups has undergone a major organization transformation effort. In order to consolidate multiple sites and provide information to the entire organization, the project’s main goal is to have an information rich integrated SharePoint site integrating operations, strategies and processes across multiple groups. This includes an external customer facing site and an internal site restricted to resources within the group. This site helps in effectively aligning to continually evolving changes in the group and increases the presence of this group in the organization roadmap.

Communities Technology Centers (CTCs), such as libraries and nonprofits, teach people vital digital literacy skills. However, many of these organizations have no way to measure the impact of their digital literacy programs. Without a way to quantify impact, CTCs can neither assess the effectiveness of program services nor communicate the impact to funders. Outcomes-based evaluations offer a method to bridge this divide. With that in mind, I created ready to use protocols for surveys, focus groups and class observation that CTCs may use to assess digital literacy outcomes. These ready to use protocols may be used by CTCs to assess outcomes, to better understand program needs and strengths, demonstrate success to funders and potential funders, and ultimately to help ensure that all people have both access and ability to use information and communication technologies.

Finding a place to park in Seattle is difficult. With so many different signs and restrictions in place it can be confusing to determine where it is safe to park. As a result, we have developed a mobile application named SafeSpot that will help Seattleites and visitors find parking and alleviate the stresses of being towed or ticketed. SafeSpot does this by showing the locations and restrictions of real parking signs in the city of Seattle on an easy-to-use map. Users can also press a “park my car” button to verify that they are parking in a valid location, keep track of that location, and remind themselves when their parking has expired. It is essential for users to be able to find information quickly and easily. By reducing clutter and using detailed icons to represent parking signs on the map, our application should be simple to pick up and use.

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, interested in solving education or welfare related problems in developing countries, is looking for the solutions that could better gauge the demography of a country. Lack of any concrete census data from Afghanistan can be substituted by tracking migration patterns of people through Call Detail Records (CDR) from cellular subscribers. We came up with a framework to visualize short-term movement over long distance and long-term migration patterns of people based on CDR, and to correlate these patterns. We track inter-provincial migration and how it is varies in response to Geopolitical events like Bomb-blasts, Flood, and Snowfall. CDR data is also supplemented with complementary data from airtime top up activity to account for socioeconomic factors of the subscriber.