We worked with Reach Out and Read Colorado, a nonprofit that incorporates reading into pediatric care, to help improve literacy-rich waiting rooms in an urban and a rural clinic. First, we interviewed rockstar clinics about what makes a successful space. We then established community partnerships to provide books, art, and furniture. And we connected clinics with local librarians to promote library resources. Finally, we compiled our learnings into a best practices guide to be distributed nationally to ROR partner clinics. Although Covid-19 prevented us from delivering all materials, we managed to support the clinics and their efforts for early literacy.

Many companies communicate with their users in much more casual and conversational language than the formal English taught in schools. This casual writing style may help companies seem more approachable, but they may also seem to lack professionality and trustworthiness. In this study we are interested in how language formality affects people’s reactions in security-related interfaces. Through an online quantitative study we will explore these effects as well as how people perceive the formality of some major companies. Our findings could be used by companies to decide what tone they want to address users with to accomplish their security goals.

The Cost-Effectiveness Meta-Regression team at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) informs health policy by conducting analyses exploring the cost-effectiveness of health service provisions. This project aims to simplify the maintenance of IHME’s Health Interventions Taxonomy (HIT), while exploring the potential for resource enrichment through annotations. This project resulted in an evaluation of HIT and workplan for improvements, alongside a prototype system demonstrating the benefits of using an ontology for representing and processing the datasets. The evaluation and workplan provides a guide for IHME researchers to transition their taxonomy into a formal knowledge organization system.

The Washington Talking Book Library is committed to serving the needs of Washington residents that are unable to read standard print material due to blindness, visual impairment, deaf-blindness, physical disabilities, or reading disability. In addition to librarians and staff, patrons at the library are served by an auto-select function in the catalog that sorts through and matches individual preferences with appropriate books--for patrons new to the library, this function may not serve their interests. For new and experienced patrons alike, the collection will offer something new to explore. The Crowd-Pleasers Collection aims to give patrons what they want to read.

The Boys and Girls Clubs of Thurston County WA, serve a diverse group of children. For various reasons, some club members do not have access to a public library. Members spend a large amount of their afterschool time at the clubs, Our solution: setting up small libraries at the clubs, to provide an opportunity for club members to checkout books that they would be interested in. Being stakeholders in the library, club members select the books, setup ,and run the library. The library supports literacy as well as the Club's mission of inspiring and enabling youth to realize their greatness.

Climate Change is a clear and present danger to the world we live in today. A community-level collaboration movement is the need of the hour across the world that can bring about a significant change towards the behavior and attitude of people who are still skeptical about our impact on the planet. Our vision is to create sustainable and collaborative technologies for the environment that can help drive our mission for encouraging people to collect data(images) about our environment. To achieve this mission, we have developed an online platform to collaborate with citizen science communities around the world.

GreenDubs is a web platform that aims to enhance data infrastructure for the citizen science community. GreenDubs is targeted at Science Volunteers & Project Managers who will use the platform for data aggregation and analysis. Our solution is an open-source web application designed specifically for citizen science data collection, sharing, and collaboration. Key features include integrated image classification deep learning model which saves time and effort in collecting and tagging images by reducing the manual effort. The platform also includes email integration which should save time and effort in collating data from different volunteers.

Greenergy is a computer-vision based solution for encouraging smarter decisions when it comes to carbon emissions specifically relating to diet. The carbon emission output for producing one kilo of lamb meat is about 39.2 Co2 kilos, the equivalent of driving 91 miles in a car. There are no simple solutions for finding out what kind of impact your food has on the planet. Greenergy aims to provide a simple, informative application where users can simply take pictures of their food and instantly get a basic idea of how their meals may be affecting the environment.

With the evolution of technology and social media, humans as the social creatures we are, have grown in connectivity. The sheer average number of relationships an individual can maintain is at an all-time high! Unfortunately, this sometimes dilutes our special relationships, the relationships that we cannot live without. That is where GroupConnect comes in. GroupConnect is a private, invite-only social media platform where users can share their memories with their families and groups of close friends. GroupConnect allows families and friends to stay connected no matter where the journey of life takes you, from infancy to adulthood.

Math. It’s tough. Especially for first-graders who struggle with staying motivated to learn in their own little world. HabiHero is a conservation-themed, math-based learning game with the goal of making math fun, customizable, and socially impactful. HabiHero uses gamification with a focus on saving endangered animals and their habitats. Each animal represents a topic in the math curricula that is based on the Common Core Standard. As users solve problems, they earn habi-badges and habi-coins that can be redeemed to customize your hero. Parents and teachers can also track progress and create lessons to have their little heroes solve.