Doctors and parents in clinical trials face significant difficulties in tracking babies’ cries. The current method, handwritten crying logs, is inaccurate and offers little insight for clinical personnel. This project aims to use machine learning algorithms to more accurately identify and track cries. Hours of crying data were gathered and transformed into t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding, Support Vector Machine, and k-Nearest Neighbor algorithms, visually grouping audio clips by sound similarity. An audio debugger determines the accuracy of the groupings. With continued training and testing, the algorithms will be able to engage binary classification of cries.

Washington State legislative assistants are overwhelmed by constituent inquiries and face challenges responding in a timely and thorough manner. Through extensive user research and competitive analysis, Civic QA has built an efficient and comprehensive third-party communication tool to manage constituent relations. We leverage machine learning to effectively categorize correspondence and help legislative assistants quickly respond to pressing issues, while enabling staff to track constituent engagement over time. By supplying engagement reports, daily trends, and filtered topics, staff have greater insight into the needs of constituents to drive better policy responses.

The job hunt can be stressful enough by itself; uncertainty surrounding hearing back and the next steps to interviews can make it difficult to find ways to gain control of the process. Sending materials en masse can easily lead to losing track of key information regarding positions, such as due dates and requirements. Many use spreadsheets to track online postings, which adds more work to the tedious process. Clarity simplifies the management of online job postings to return that time and energy to job seekers so that they can focus on what actually matters: bringing their best foot forward.

Our team set out to understand barriers to COVID-19 data publishing across the United States. Working with our sponsor, Sarah Schacht, we investigated how governments process and normalize a high volume of data as well as publish information to a variety of stakeholders. We conducted an ecosystem scan of all 50 states and key informant interviews to understand public health department needs. Using our findings, we produced reports highlighting shortcomings and obstacles in COVID-19 data reporting and provided recommendations. The report will hopefully be used to remedy existing problems and prepare government bodies to manage data in the future.

With our nation’s declared quarantines and the drive to develop and administer COVID-19 vaccines, it is no surprise that young adults are prematurely socializing without heeding safety regulations. While tools have been released to help, they are unnecessarily complicated, time-consuming, and invasive. CovidAware, a COVID-19 risk assessment calculator, is our solution to young adults' needs for in-person social interaction, to mediate their less cautious behavior, and decrease stigmatization they face from their peers. With CovidAware we can reduce the number of new COVID-19 cases and provide the information needed to make informed decisions without requiring users to provide unnecessary information.

CryAw, an AFK cryptocurrency tutorial game, was created to provide comprehensive, structured cryptocurrency knowledge for those skeptical of investing in it or have an interest in understanding it better. Through proven gamification concepts and real-time data from active digital currency exchanges, we provide a novel and concise education method on the future standards of global currency. With CryAw you can enjoy yourself and compete with other users to create the highest value cryptocurrency investment portfolio. CryAw provides increased access to structured cryptocurrency knowledge - thereby cutting through the noise in the cryptocurrency space.

CuriosityBased fosters curiosity within the workplace to help teams and companies build trust, collaboration, and communication. One of their tools is an assessment based on their 7 Forms of Respect™ framework. This framework helps individuals identify how individuals and teams demonstrate respect in the workplace. Their previous system for calculating and visualizing assessment answers was manual and extremely tedious. Our team was asked to automate this process and redesign the results delivery. The resulting product will save time for the CuriosityBased team and allow them to put more effort into services and consulting.

Social media has changed today’s information and communication world. Rampant mis/disinformation has eroded users’ trust in social media platforms. Through research, we look at how design considerations can influence what makes an information system “trustworthy.” For this project, we are sponsored by the Center for an Informed Public (CIP) and conducted an extensive literature review of 23 papers. We used our research insights to make a design toolkit to help designers building platforms build trust through the design process.