Libraries are a great repository of information and data that encapsulate community literacy, engagement, and health. However, this data is scattered across disparate sources. Our dashboard will help Anchorage Public Library collate this data and transform it into readable and usable information that can be used to drive insightful business decisions and highlight their achievements. The images and visualizations of our project will explain where and how the library’s resources are being used and how to effectively alter them if required. Our results will also recommend areas of improvement for APL along with the suggested formats to collect future information.

Behance is an Adobe product where designers share their creative work. Behance’s help desk is set up on Zendesk, due to which the user interface of the FAQ page lacked homogeneity with the Behance website. The current page lacked intuitiveness, making it difficult for customers to find answers, leading to a bad user experience. In this project, we redesigned the FAQ module by rearranging information into concise categories using Behance’s theme, providing guided navigation, and kickstart with featured articles. This project will ensure customer satisfaction with a better User experience at this self-service portal and is expected to reduce customer support tickets.

To help the Xbox team determine which technology performs better at detecting unsafe images, our project builds a comparison system that evaluates the performance of two image detection algorithms. The key results include: 1) a system that takes user images and generates similarity scores automatically; 2) an analysis pipeline that analyzes the data in Python and is live-connected with Power BI to show the key metrics. With our pipelines, the Xbox team can easily plug in images and see the comparison results on the dashboards. It eventually improves user experience by helping moderators remove the bad content effectively.

While the COVID-19 pandemic spared no region in the world and left in its wake an unprecedented public health and economic crisis, it has exposed and exacerbated pre-existing socioeconomic inequalities both globally and domestically. Using publicly available datasets, we have built a model that identifies neighborhoods in Miami that are most vulnerable to post-pandemic recession. This will enable government officials and policymakers to make data-informed decisions to spur the revival of the city’s economy.

Unlike most major tech companies and public institutions, DOL does not have a standard privacy or data maturity assessment form for program-level use. DOL has studied models from cities like Seattle and commercial enterprises but found that none of the existing models fit their needs. The final deliverable of our project is the survey tool designed for review and adoption by Washington DOL. The survey tool will act as a preliminary check for current data governance practices at DOL, help DOL reinvent data privacy and stewardship standards, and serve as a foundation for WA DOL's future Privacy Impact Assessments.

Data-Driven Waste Management Solutions with trashcan pick-up frequencies are determined primarily by empirical observation. Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) sought a data-driven solution to better estimate waste levels and thus optimize waste bin placement and service scheduling. Our team detailed shortcomings of organization data collection and infrastructure, collaborated with stakeholders to create an appropriate data collection system, and created an optimization model to minimize costs associated with each collection route. Our efforts intend to reduce SPU’s expenses, support a cleaner city, and bolster SPU’s future information management practices to allow further opportunity. 

The Microsoft Mixed Reality team currently lacks a centralized tool to manage policy documents. Our team focuses on recommending the best document management system to our sponsor that has functionalities including automated tagging, access control, version control, and notification. We have taken into consideration factors such as financial cost, usability, scalability, and user experience. Our project provides our sponsor with essential research findings on different DMS tools and valuable insights into improving their document management process, indirectly contributing to improving the efficiency of the overall policy document management workflow.

Anecdata is a citizen science platform that allows users to upload, download, and browse content pertaining to their surroundings and environment. We worked on improving the user experience and information architecture of the platform. We achieved this by working on requirement gathering (surveys),  conducting usability analysis, creating user personas, and creating a system map. We further recommended a few features to improve the taxonomy and user flow of the platform. We believe that our work has positively impacted the lives of people who take a deep interest in the environment and use a platform like Anecdata to connect with like-minded people.

Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning platform is currently experiencing a growth in its number of users, creating an area of opportunity to sustain these incoming users month over month. We explored this opportunity by using a hypothesis validation framework to examine what efforts can be made to improve customer retention, focusing on customers who are still in the early stages of their development. Through this framework, we were able to identify key user behaviors and pain points that led to churn. These findings have been used to suggest changes to the platform to improve product experiences and usability for customers.

A 2019 CDC report states that 35% of Americans living with a disability suffer from a condition that directly affects their ability to navigate webpages and platforms. And there aren’t nearly enough websites that address that accessibility problem. Smartsheet was invested in changing that and wanted to kickstart research on improving the accessibility and usability experience of its resource management platform - 10,000ft. As part of our solution, we studied impacted user groups, the issues they encountered, and created a framework to address accessibility problems in the future.