Homelessness is a multifaceted crisis that includes many common information and community challenges, such as social instability, systemic inequity, and discrimination. We combine social network analysis, Natural Language Processing, and stochastic topic modeling to measure online information sharing among U.S. homeless care organizations. Analyzing four years of social media data from major federal homeless care communities reveals evidence of a robust-growing homeless service community interacting with the marginalized Hispanic/Latinx population shortly after the announcement of COVID-19. This study offers valuable practical policy implications for U.S. homeless services organizational learning.

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.

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.

Misinformation has always been present, but social media has significantly increased its scope, spread, and reach in our world today. Working with the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public (CIP), this project places the SIFT fact-checking strategy in the hands of Android mobile device users. The ReSIFT mobile application assists users in fact-checking articles and expedites the fact-checking process. ReSIFT reduces the amount of time needed to fact-check and educates users on information verification best practices to create a community of information skeptics and critical thinkers.

Every year thousands of students leave college looking for a job but don't have a sufficient resume to make them stand out. Additionally, tailoring their resumes to specific industries is a long, tedious process that gets boring and we found that students are more interested in improving their resumes if made into a faster and more fun process. ResumeQuest aims to address this issue by being a fun professional platform that accurately recommends top terms in job applications and industries which helps improve the quality of resumes so the user can be more confident when applying to their first jobs.

Twips is a short-form media platform intended to support streaming media from Twitch in the condensed format of user curated Twitch clips intending to combat the over-consumption of media that Twitch users experience. The platform features sorting and sharing functionality, as well as personalized content feeds to allow users to filter clips relevant to their interests. Users receive a customized stream of content that condenses hours-long streams into 60 second-or-less highlights from the relevant categories and content creators that users can enjoy without committing hours of their time.

Social media companies are notoriously known for storing immense amounts of users’ personal data. While many social media sites do provide an option to view and download your data, the data is often given in raw formats, which can be overwhelming or hard to understand for the average user. Our project aims to analyze users’ downloaded data, and output it as data visualizations that are much more informative and intuitive. We hope that Aware will help people become more aware about what data is being stored about them and become incentivized to be more cautious about their online behavior.

Seasonal Affective Disorder affects more than 15 million people in the U.S., with women four times more likely to be diagnosed than men. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic makes more people live with limited social interaction and reduced sun exposure, which are leading factors that could cause/exacerbate SAD. Better Weather is a web app which helps SAD sufferers combat their symptoms with proven interventions. Through its different feature pages, users have the chance to foster connectedness & peer support, relieve stress, increase exposure to sunlight, and ultimately improve their mood.

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.