iSchool Capstone

2017

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Safely

In large cities like Seattle, there are many situations where people feel unsafe when travelling on foot, particularly at night. While it’s difficult to provide assistance in time to someone who has the misfortune of falling victim to crime, Safely aims to preemptively inform users of dangerous situations before they enter physical proximity of the danger. In a mobile app using map-based visualizations of Seattle Police Department crime logs, we show where crime has recently occurred and where “trouble areas” are. Through this and user-submitted incidents, Safely keeps users vigilant of threats instead of becoming victims to crime. Justine Edrozo (INFO), Kevin Ke (INFO), Brooks Lobe (INFO), Adrian Pacheco (INFO)
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SearchParty - Making Search Meaningful & Actionable

One of the popular tools on the Pitchbook platform is their search engine, that allows investors to find what they are looking for from nearly a million records of possible investments. Currently their search engine offers an overwhelming number of search results without any meaningful order, and leaves little room for discovery. Our capstone project attempts to fix that by introducing a relevance factor to rank the search results, and by allowing the user to discover possible investments similar to previous successful investments, made either by the investor himself or by others. This makes search more meaningful and actionable for Pitchbook’s clients.
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Serendipitous Discovery

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.
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SightLife Data: Turning Data Points into Human Stories

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.
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Superbug

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
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Ticket Genie - Predictive Analytics Framework for Service Ticket resolution

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.
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Total Resource Observation Utility Team (TROUT)

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.
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VizioMetrics: Evaluating the Importance of Visual Content in Scientific Literature

VizioMetrics is an image search engine and classifier created by researchers at the University of Washington. In order to improve it, we would like to automatically identify a “central figure” in a scientific article in cases when multiple figures are present. We defined “central figure” as a single visualization that encapsulates key aspects of a paper, a graphical summary that captures the content of the article for readers at a single glance. We surveyed 488,590 researchers in biomedical field and found out that for an overwhelming majority of papers their authors were able to identify a single “central figure.”
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Waste 2 Resources - Open Data Literacy Project

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.

2016

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A Path to Data-Driven Solutions

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.