iSchool Capstone

2022

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MasterView: A User-Centered Customer Management Platform for Masterworks

Masterworks is a full-service marketing and fundraising agency that helps faith-based non-profits achieve their missions through growth strategies focused on quality of engagement with their audiences. Masterworks clients don’t fully understand the effectiveness of digital marketing, which affects the company’s ability to retain clients in the future. Our MasterView Tool enables Masterworks’ clients to see the value of investing in digital marketing. It achieves this goal by showing them the specific ways that a person’s engagement with ads leads to financial donations. With this, Masterworks can validate that their clients' investments are delivering quantifiable results.
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MatchLab: Democratizing University Research Opportunities

Finding research opportunities at universities is an extremely time-consuming and ineffective process that often leads to frustrated, empty-handed students, students who quickly churn out of roles due to poor fit, and research leads ending up behind schedule. Online research postings are often outdated, and the most common way principal investigators (PIs) find candidates -- through people they already know -- is neither an efficient nor inclusive process. To address this problem, we created MatchLab, an online platform that democratizes research opportunities and saves students and PIs time and frustration.
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Misinformation in the Brony Fandom

Misinformation is a significant continuing problem in online discourse, affecting our trust of others and institutions. While unconventional, studying fandoms such as ARMY and the brony fandom yielded interesting insights into how commonplace misinformation occurs, and how these online fandoms developed strategies to counter them. This study expands on Prof Lee’s work on ARMY and applies it to the brony fandom, discovering that both fandoms share techniques but also have unique yet effective approaches to tackling misinformation. The results have significant implications for mitigating misinformation in online discourse without affecting community cohesion, restoring online trust in information.
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Moment: Elevate Deeper Connections with Teammates

The pandemic and the shift to remote work have made it more difficult for college students to meet new people and make deeper connections with those with common interests. Based on student interviews, we found that the majority of the participants did not stay in touch with their peers after the class quarter ended, and the main reasons behind this were due to the lack of initiative where it was hard to “break the ice” outside of classwork. We designed a simple application that would prompt those working in teams to find common interests and spark conversations to deepen relationships.
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Natural Language Processing to Categorize Misinformation

In recent years there has been an abundance of mis/disinformation around US elections on social media sites like Twitter. Research collectives such as the Election Integrity Partnership investigated this information in real time to analyze and disseminate important details across election stakeholders. However, not all researchers have the quantitative skill sets necessary to access this data at scale. Our project improves the research process of qualitative researchers by creating a Python Jupyter Notebook that allows researchers to gain insight from datasets relevant to the US election.
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Pawdy: free pet sitting for UW community

Pawdy is a free, secure, and accessible pet sitting website designed for UW students. As our furry friends have become a crucial part of our life, the need for pet sitting has grown exponentially. Many students have to sacrifice personal life for their pets due to the high cost of pet sitting. With Pawdy, students can find other UW students to sit their pets for free. Students can request pet sitting and interested student pet owners can contact them to make arrangements. Pawdy provides convenience for pet sitting, forms a close-knit community around the campus, and develops relationships around their interests in pets.
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Phenomenality: Helping Gender Minorities Mitigate Imposter Phenomenon in the Workplace

Gender minorities entering the technology field experience imposter phenomenon (IP) at a disproportionate rate as compared to their male counterparts. Phenomenality aims to mitigate the effects of perceived inadequacy by encouraging users to reflect on and celebrate their daily accomplishments in a journal-like manner. Through consistent, affirmative self-talk, a Likert scale quiz, and personalized IP alleviation strategies, Phenomenality provides gender minorities with the resources to optimize their potential, boost their confidence, and ultimately flourish in their professional environments.
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Plurality

Plurality is a safe and welcoming platform providing a space for political dialogue to bridge partisan divides. Based in research demonstrating the power of storytelling to elicit empathy, Plurality allows users to share and learn about diverse perspectives through first hand accounts. Plurality encourages users to see people as more than their political party and seeks to ameliorate the current environment of hyper-partisanship.
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Project Jasmine: Celebrate variation in beauty

Eurocentric beauty standards are highly pervasive throughout social media, and non-white features are often not represented or seen as beautiful. This can lead to feelings of low-self esteem, non-inclusiveness, and toxicity around physical appearance. Empowering users through variation, not standardization, Jasmine is a mobile-browser app that aims to showcase beauty through diversity. Jasmine pushes users’ ideas of beauty beyond just a Eurocentric scope by allowing women in our communities to upload photos of their unedited and untouched features.
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QuickTrip: the hassle-free way to rent a car from your friends

Both transportation and car production generate a large share of greenhouse gas emissions, leading to negative environmental impacts. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a shortage of vehicles for rentals, reducing college students’ access to vehicles when they need them. QuickTrip aims to solve this problem through a marketplace model. QuickTrip is a mobile car-sharing platform that allows students at the University of Washington in need of a car to rent a car from their friends, making the benefits of point-to-point transportation accessible to a larger audience.