Students and parents had to make challenging decisions regarding education during the COVID-19 pandemic. School districts across the US implemented varied school operation plans and the federal government did not create a centralized source for operational statuses at the national level. Data at the state level differs greatly in availability, verbiage, and format. This project aggregates and tracks district-level school operational statuses state-by-state, as well as school-related COVID-19 cases. It accounts for 6,800 out of 10,000 US school districts across 33 states. With this data, K-12 parents and children have a tool to make informed decisions regarding education and health.

Financial institutions have long been looking for quantitative methods to analyze tens of thousands of jargon-filled documents generated in the highly dynamic market. Thus, MarketOwl is the solution that can collect and assimilate these text data into measurable indicators. Through analyzing SEC filings and earnings call transcripts with its NLP engine, MarketOwl provides insights such as sentiment and credibility trends and transforms them into curated dashboards. MarketOwl empowers portfolio managers to make faster and better decisions with integrated and trustworthy company information and make more profits for their company and clients.

Our team worked with the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning product team to improve the retention of deeply engaged customers on the AML platform. The project involved both qualitative and quantitative analysis of customer usage patterns, including customer interviews, telemetry data analysis, hypothesis building and testing. The result of our analysis serves as a good foundation to understand the needs and pain points of the customers and to come up with strategic ways of moving forward. It has the potential to help improve the user experience of the AML platform and allow AML to gain more competitive advantages in the market.

Have you ever had the experience that you unlock your phone, scroll through a few pages of the home screen and don’t know what to do or which app you are going to use? This is the gap we are trying to fill in with MIRRO. Thanks to its recommendation algorithm, MIRRO will help you locate your preferred content, music, news, games, shows and faster. What you need to do is telling MIRRO how much time you have, and it will take care of the rest. With MIRRO, great content has never been easier to find!

Some tribal leaders and communities may not have access to the information they need. There are many factors at work, including unreliable internet access, paywalls and academic jargon, limited resources, etc. At the same time, the pressure is on tribal communities to respond to pressing issues like climate change, water security, global pandemics, data sovereignty, and more. By developing and sharing these modules, with tribal citizens as our core audience, we hope to place information in the hands of communities so they can share and disseminate this knowledge as they wish.

Poor diet is the most common preventable cause of death in people 65 or older. Recently, there has been a hike in apps that promote healthy diets, but most are not designed for the elderly population. Also, since the elderly are disproportionately affected by the pandemic's remote solutions, supporting their needs is more urgent than ever. Olitor is a scalable solution to help change the diets of elderly patients. The online solution would focus on behavioral change, providing patients with timely attention and care in sensitive times such as the pandemic without waiting months for a consultation appointment.

My project was sponsored by the Bellingham Public Library and built on directed fieldwork that I conducted in the summer of 2020 to support BPL’s project "Peoples’ Perspectives", a community initiative hoping to capture life in Whatcom County during COVID-19. The resulting archive, consisting of submissions from the community, will be preserved and displayed online through Omeka S. I provided recommendations for BPL on best practices, vocabulary, metadata, and digital preservation going forward.

The Zines on Zoom events served to promote the Washington Center for the Book’s project, Sheltered in Place: COVID-19 Zine Diaries Project. We organized a focus group and a workshop to teach adults about zine culture and zine-making with the goal of inspiring them to create a zine to submit to the Sheltered in Place project. In these two virtual events, we celebrated zines and highlighted their ability to both exemplify and preserve human expression. We hoped to help participants process their feelings during the pandemic in a flexible and creative format.

Our project centered around creation of student training and documenting progress for the Peer Education Program (PEP), a new model of student employment at Odegaard Library based around peer mentorship. Our deliverables included a You Should Know About learning experience for Libraries' staff, training modules for the first PEP cohort, and a Toolkit to act as an introductory resource for those interested in the project. This project helped to promote the PEP initiative, train new student employees, and create a guide for project duplication.