Fashion: a word that is synonymous with affluence, beauty and confidence. However, a little known fact is that the clothing industry is the second largest polluter in the world, second only to oil. Additionally, a new survey of 2,825 adult women in the U.S. shows that 36.85% of them admit to not wearing most dresses they bought. (Krupnick n.d.)So, what can two women who consider themselves “conscious fashionistas” do to save the world one dress at a time? Empowered with information and driven by technology, the Mélange team educates adult women about their fashion carbon footprint through an activity that they famously enjoy: Shopping! By leveraging the cloud platform to enable women to rent used clothes, we are solving a problem for the women by the women. We believe that this crowd-sourced resell model will drastically reduce the waste generated due to the current absence of an efficient clothing discarding system. Krupnick, Ellie. n.d. "American Women’s Shopping Influenced Heavily By Fashion Trends, Survey Finds." huffingtonpost.com. Accessed May 9th, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/26/american-women-shopping_n_2764634.html.

Each year, Mount Rainier National Park receives over 2,600 requests to camp in the wilderness. Hikers can’t view which campsites are currently available, so they send multiple itineraries for the same trip. These requests must be submitted by fax, requiring over 400 hours of manual data entry by park employees over the summer. Hikers often have to wait up to one month for a response, creating anxiety and uncertainty about whether their request will be approved. To solve these problems, we created an online reservation system where hikers can view available campsites and submit their itinerary online. Every request must be reviewed by a park employee, so we created an employee portal to help streamline their process and improve response time. Our entirely new reservation system will ensure that hikers can enjoy the beautiful wilderness for years to come.

PainlessVR is a research tool that allows researchers from medical, psychological and any other fields to test hypotheses about Virtual Reality without any development at all. The goal of the product is to improve future virtual reality pain management applications by removing the barriers to researching virtual reality. PainlessVR allows researchers to modify, and by extension study, variables regarding color, sound, context and cognitive load. Improving VR pain management would mean improving care for those who are unable to take traditional pain medication such as burn victims or recovering opioid addicts.

We set out to create a food spoilage tracking system that would allow a user to plan meals, coordinate shopping trips, save money, and keep a more clear mental image of the items the user currently has at home. Our hope is to foster an improved sense of what food items are available to a person and when those food items will pass their usable dates, so as to save our users time and money. The goals of this project are not only limited to personal food storage and tracking, as the world is facing a mounting issue with food sustainability. As our numbers increase our demand for food increases and so does our overall cumulative waste. We seek to help not only those who would use our application, as much as the the world at large, by maximizing food consumption and reducing avoidable expiration based waste.

Ever thought about exploring Seattle on a bike without getting lost? Ever wish to be more active while meeting with friends? Find a great group ride and go! Cascade Bicycle Club offers more than 2,500 group rides annually, ranging from leisurely jaunts to longer endurance rides. Some are urban and some are in the greater Puget Sound region. Free for everybody. This great resource has been living on the website of Cascade Bicycle Club, but with mobile becoming the first screen for more of us, it got less convenient to access everyday. Now with the “Ride Finder” app, you can have these awesome group rides right on your fingertips, whether you’re chilling out in the backyard, or trying to get some quick planning done on the go. It will find you the perfect group ride to join based on your personal needs in just a few easy clicks.

In 1492, Spain issued the Alhambra Decree, mandating that all Spanish (Sephardic) Jews –about 200,000– leave the country. They continued to speak a language known as Judeo-Spanish or Ladino in their new lives. The language has survived the intervening centuries, and present-day Seattle counts several native Ladino speakers among its population. Devin Naar, PhD, and the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington are collecting and digitizing Ladino documents to preserve and share this unique aspect of Sephardic Jewish culture. We developed a prototype for the Sephardic Studies Digital Library and Museum. We then conducted user testing for a web portal to lead interested researchers and community members from the Stroum Center’s website into the digital collection, which is hosted by UW Libraries. We have used our expertise in digital preservation and metadata best practices to provide project leaders with a list of recommendations.

From hardware setup to data acquisition and analysis, depression researchers go through a long, convoluted process to understand electroencephalogram (EEG) data (popularly called brain waves) collected from patients. Acquired data is often messy and difficult to process, and analysis can take from hours to days to return results. Our project, Slate, aims to change that by providing a platform that streamlines this process, and provides a fully interactive 3D model to visually digest the data. Slate is a cross-platform desktop application that consists of two parts: an EEG data processing tool, and a data visualization tool that allows depression researchers to view and analyze brain signals obtained through a non-invasive, commercial EEG headset. Slate utilizes real-time modeling and neuroimaging techniques to allow more meaningful understanding of EEG data in the process of interpreting and identifying depressive patterns in research, with the goal of ultimately serving patients.

Spyro: Empowering Familial Genetic Research Through Data Visualizations The field of precision medicine is projected for rapid growth in the next decade and genome analysis is at the forefront of this trend. However, current genome analysis tools have various issues: they have high learning curves, they are visually unappealing, and they have no easy way to compare multiple individuals’ genome data. In response to these issues, we have partnered with Spiral Genetics, a Seattle-based bioinformatics startup, to develop Spyro, a user-focused genome visualization tool. By leveraging Spiral Genetics’ next generation sequencing data, our tool allows researchers to utilize a comprehensive set of features in a simple, intuitive interface. Researchers can analyze an individual’s genetic variants, as well as make comparisons between multiple individuals. Because Spyro is focused on representing variant detection, researchers in this field can quickly adopt our tool and start analyzing.