Outreach is a web-application that bridges the communication gap between immigrant parents and middle school teachers to aid in student learning. We realize that when parents are engaged in their children’s academic lives, students are more often to excel. Teachers will be able to communicate with parents through a web application enabling them to send out weekly messages to encourage conversation within the home. Our goal as a collective is to create a family inclusive environment for immigrant parents that struggle to get their children to college.

Patent applications are currently an expensive process, requiring many work hours and high economic costs for creating, editing, and submitting applications to the United States Patent and Trademark Office. This project utilized machine learning methods to analyze method claim text and ultimately determine whether a method claims application would be rejected. This project aims to help stakeholders leverage the results from these models to streamline their patent application process and to implement the models in the future for better determining which words may contribute to their application being rejected.

How might we plan user-friendly entrances for the library? For this project, we learned about and applied service design tools at UC Berkeley’s new Center for Connected Learning to provide library leadership with input on a redesigned entry experience. After learning about service design, we created six fictional personas and walked them through different entry scenarios to examine each step. Then we created easy-to-understand graphics to provide the UC Berkeley leadership team with planning materials. Any library can use service design tools to improve the experience of its users.

Providing digital access to government documents requires a collaborative effort from both Federal Depository Libraries and digital repositories. This project prepares for the digitization of government publications held within the University of Washington Libraries while promoting access to documents already held within certified digital repositories. First, I created an index of World War II and post-war items held by the UW Libraries that have not yet been digitized and subsequently compiled a workflow process to aid in future digitization projects. Additionally, I developed research guides to facilitate access to previously-digitized collections on repository sites such as HathiTrust and govinfo.

Age Friendly Seattle's Civic Coffee Hour has been an essential informational event for Seattle's older adult population, especially among immigrants and refugees, for the past decade. Now Civic Coffee Hour must expand to Seattle community centers, but participants still need to be able to participate in a live, online Q&A event. We created Postcomet, a solution that integrates SMS into YouTube Live broadcasts, allowing users to participate in the event regardless of their viewing location. This allows people to connect to live events & live speakers though technologies they already understand: YouTube and text messaging.

It is no doubt that employees are the powerhouse of our companies. However, employee negligence and human error are some of the main causes of data breaches. This costs nearly $4 million on average for a business in the U.S., posing great security and financial risks. PrivaSee is a platform where security professionals can easily identify the exploitable employee public data and take action to mitigate the risks right away. This allows our clients to fully focus on their business objectives while they continue providing necessary resources for the employees.

Among gamers playing the top 15 games, roughly 70% have experienced online abuse. Project Detox is empowering the Gaming Safety team at Microsoft so that they can provide a safe environment to their customers worldwide. We are implementing an automated testing framework for their toxicity classifiers. After measuring model performances against each other and on different kinds of data, we have generated beautiful and intuitive reports which would enable the stakeholders to make data-driven decisions. All of this has been packaged into pipelines which would automate the process and eliminate manual work.

This project involved cataloging a 10,000-document collection of newly digitized, multilingual Law Library of Congress treaties and international agreements. The collection was classified by metadata elements in a master spreadsheet. To ensure users’ ability to fulfill collocating and finding bibliographic objectives, LCSH and indexer-derived keywords were appended to each record. Inconsistencies between records were resolved using OpenRefine and blog posts containing trend graphs and search tips were constructed to promote the collection. When published online, this content will encourage information literacy by helping the organization’s increasingly networked stakeholders navigate and interact with this content for the first time.

To address the information needs of the UW Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Leadership Team, we developed materials that analyze, assess, and provide training on Scalar, an open-source authoring and publishing platform. Through research and examination, we wrote a literature review that compared Scalar to similar publishing platforms, evaluated its accessibility, and examined its potential as an open digital scholarship platform. Additionally, we crafted learning resources and facilitated an interactive online workshop to assist librarians in identifying and promoting Scalar’s features and use cases for future students, faculty, and the broader research community.

With the rapid transformation to the digital age, one sector that has changed the least is the banking and financial sector. After the creating of the first cryptocurrency, there has been an eager push to use this technology to benefit humanity by creating new technologies that harness the power of a decentralized system. Every new technology is a double-edged sword. It can be used to benefit people as well as suppress them if used incorrectly. There have been efforts by organizations as well as countries to use cryptocurrency to collect personal data and evade sanctions.