The City of Seattle Office of Economic Development (OED) works with local businesses to promote innovation, equity, and economic mobility. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted existing disparities between business ownership, and the greater need to distribute resources to People of Color (POC)/non-white business owners. Restaurants represent the culture of a society, and support a range of industries. They have also been one of the hardest industries impacted during the pandemic. To assist the City during this challenging time, we produced a data dashboard to analyze survey data collected, and mitigation recommendations for POC/non-white restaurant owners impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Based on users’ large-scale app installation data, we established an automated process for T-mobile to segment their users and create persona labels with machine learning. This process will improve mobile advertising services. We conducted social network analysis to cluster users, did topic modeling (LDA) for apps, extracted distinctive keywords in each community with linear sum assignment to build user personas The persona is able to show multi-dimension characteristics of mobile audiences such as popular apps, genres, topics within each community.

The Microsoft Azure End to End platform team is invested in identifying an efficient way to steer revenue growth prospects and to further improve user experience as well as increase the customer retention rate. Our project involved the data validation, data quality check, metric definitions and automated pipeline building. Our analysis serves as a foundation towards data-driven decision making for customer retention. The result can be utilized to monitor the user behavior and performance in real time to provide the better service and garner customer loyalty.

Bayou Playhouse, a small theater located in Lockport, Louisiana, holds a collection of costumes and props. However, there was no system in place to keep track of the current collection or any newly obtained items. This is an issue when putting together productions, as the organization often either wastes time looking for an item that may not be there or wastes money repurchasing an item that was already in the collection. To solve this problem, I designed a Microsoft Access database to create an inventory system. In the coming months, I will finish cataloging every item to complete the database.

Behance is a social media platform owned by Adobe that allows artists to develop and share their artwork with other users. With more than 10 million users searching for inspiration, personalized recommendations play a pivotal role in the overall UX. The current recommendation algorithm at Behance requires substantial user activity to generate recommendations and surfaces artwork with higher likes more often. To make these recommendations more fine-tuned, we developed an algorithm using Cypher, that analyzes the activity of all related users & provides weight to project themes instead of likes. Our algorithm also reduced the recommendation generation time by 50%.

Our project is helping the Idaho Commission for Libraries (ICFL) modernize their existing free training resource: Alternative Basic Library Education (ABLE). While a successful program, it needs significant revision, consolidation, and updating to continue being a relevant LIS resource. We are supplying ICFL with the following documents to aid them: comprehensive content audit, user personas, and taxonomy terms/concepts to guide future content creation. The goal is to help ICFL continue providing free quality, versatile LIS resources while increasing the reach of the program to the underserved and the underrepresented in the field of library and information sciences.

Adequate and equitable library spaces and services are not available to every student attending Seattle Public Schools. Stakeholders with different priorities have resulted in SPS libraries that are chronically understaffed and underfunded. Seattle’s citizens signaled strong library support through the recent allocation of $219 million to Seattle Public Library (SPL), the city’s primary library system. This Capstone advocates for a comprehensive public-public partnership between SPL and SPS libraries to scaffold the tremendous work of Seattle's school librarians while bringing all of the assets of SPL’s world-class library system into every one of the city’s public school communities.

Bird the Gap is an outreach-oriented web mapping project to direct birdwatchers to locations currently underrepresented in crowdsourced data compiled by eBird and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. My multi-layered interactive web map uses two sets of raster data from eBird’s statistical models to identify geographic gaps in worldwide data from 2018. Using open-source software programs RStudio and QGIS, I prepared data for all 52 weeks. The scalable prototype uses Mapbox and its JavaScript library to visualize data from one week in July. Bird the Gap will assist in eBird’s ongoing mapping projects, which support scientific research and conservation efforts.

Currently entrepreneurs in the maritime industry are facing the problem of finding funding opportunities efficiently with disparate messy online resources with high charges. Our Blue Funder Portal provides one central location for maritime innovators to find and search for a wide range of funding opportunities sponsored by the Washington State Department of Commerce. These entrepreneurial projects flourish and further help to grow the “blue” business in the pacific northwest maritime industry.

Blyp is a digital curation tool intended for those at end-of-life. People death plan in various ways--from cleaning social media profiles, to leaving predated emails for loved ones. Existing social media platforms focus on what is happening now, but not much on what happens after we pass. With Blyp, users can preserve memories through photo and text media, specify a location, and decide when loved ones can access their blyps. Blyp gives those close-to-death a platform to leave stories behind, while at the same time creating conversation around and de-stigmatizing death. Blyp is available as an iOS mobile application.