PitchBook Data is an online data platform that provides research, financial information, and resources to analyze private companies, investments and funds, private equity and venture capital. PitchBook wants to explore new ways to surface insightful information to their users by allowing them to discover more information beyond what they were searching for, making it a one stop shop for all of their VC research needs.

Successful data communication inspires action. In India, where nearly half of the world’s corneal blind population lives, policy makers must be persuaded to implement policy change to more efficiently treat these citizens. Sponsored by SightLife, SightLife Data is an information visualization tool that dynamically demonstrates the potential impact that policy change can have. SightLife will be able to use this site to create advocates and inspire policy change that will help the organization accomplish their mission of eradicating corneal blindness worldwide by the year 2040.

Ensuring the health of shipments is of paramount importance to a Fortune 500 global logistics services company. Project Superbug assists Expeditors in doing exactly that by creating an automated reporting system that provides a data architecture supporting business intelligence and analytics. Precious man-hours are saved through this system, thereby providing analysts with more time to examine shipments. This brings great value to the health care client sector by enabling diagnosis with rapid turnaround times, which in turn creates faster treatment decisions, leading to better patient experience

In the telecom industry, the process of resolving service tickets is cumbersome and time-consuming. The support staff has to manually categorize these tickets and quickly find resolutions. We present “Ticket Genie,” a predictive analytics framework that expedites this process of finding resolutions. The framework automatically predicts resolution categories of new tickets and clusters similar tickets together using predictive machine learning techniques with up to 90% accuracies. Being deployed as a web service, Ticket Genie can be integrated into various ticket management systems with minimal efforts. With this expedited processing, we hope to achieve faster resolution leading to greater customer satisfaction.

The Total Resource Observation Utility Team (TROUT), created a data visualization using Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife’s (WDFW) high-resolution land change data. The interactive visualization makes this important data understandable to the public, policymakers, and environmental scientists. TROUT has unlocked this public data and improved access by disseminating in a clear, concise, user-centered dashboard presenting actionable information. This visualization allows the user to see actual changes in the Puget Sound over time with data-rich GIS information describing the changes. TROUT’s use of open-source technologies and code documentation mean the dashboard can be replicated for displaying future public spatial datasets.

The Washington State Department of Ecology works to manage and conserve public resources and collects information about the effectiveness of its conservation programs. Our project will help in the Open Data Literacy initiatives of the Department of Ecology by transferring this information to the open data portal of Washington state (data.wa.gov) and designing user-friendly data visualizations. This project will create a positive social impact by presenting the existing waste management information through interactive and powerful visualizations to the public. It will also help the department and government officials in tracking of the progress of their conservation efforts more effectively.

In an effort to address the persistent opportunity gap in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines, Jon Madamba founded STEM Paths. STEM Paths is an organization that empowers disadvantaged, multicultural youth in STEM disciplines through class-based workshops. The organization’s information problem is that it does not have a centralized repository for the data they gather from the students and families they work with. The staff at STEM Paths conceive this central repository as a user-friendly, multi-user database with a mobile counterpart to collect, store, and safeguard such data. This can result in two important outcomes for the organization. The first outcome is that be able to continue its mission by processing data and tracking student performance, The other outcome is that it’ll have meaningful information to present to stakeholders expand their operations and improve the database’s reach to enterprise-wide integration.

An ever increasing amount of data collection on social media contributes to additional security implications which are not outlined in the End User License Agreements that we see today. We believe that this data can be used in many ways to violate user anonymity and create digital profiles of users based on various data processing methods. We can then cross-reference these digital profiles to other social media platforms to identify previously anonymous users. To do this, we hope to use numerated social media APIs which contribute to the release of Personally Identifiable Information. From this, We hope to educate users on End User License Agreements while informing them on applications of data usage by performing analysis on Reddit user data and other social media platforms.

The Financial Inclusion Insights (FII) team at the Gates Foundation is responsible for performing data quality checks and analysis on survey data collected from eight countries in Africa and Asia. The survey data is related to usage of mobile money and digital financial services (DFS) in these countries. The current process is manual and tedious and involves multiple people working simultaneously to perform data analysis. Our solution solves this issue by automating the manual process and generates customizable data analysis reports. The result is a robust, modularized and highly customizable framework which will make it easy for FII to explore the “what”, “how” and “why” of demand­ side trends in mobile money and other digital financial services (DFS). This helps FII model, construct, and perform better research to understand the impact of DFS and promotes adoption of these services as they are revised using the research insights.