What does library access look like for incarcerated youth? There have been few studies on this subject. What we do know is that there is no legal entitlement to library resources for detained youth. This means incarcerated youth have no right to independent legal information, independent sexual health information and even recreational materials. Because Juvenile Justice Systems differ from state to state, the best way to access this information gap is to look at each state individually. The State of Utah served as a pilot study to find the best way to research this area of library science.

Disparities in Internet access among residents of the whole nation have been a serious problem in the States for decades. Unfortunately, even though there is public broadband data available, it’s hard to make sense of it. This project focuses on utilizing millions of records of broadband and census data to better serve communities across the United State. We created two new measurements for broadband deployment performance and built interactive dashboards and infographics to visualize the huge volume of data. Want to explore the broadband data in your area? Find out at https://fayechu.github.io/NTIA_Data_Visualization/frontend/index.html

This project developed a new capital planning strategy for Hennepin County Library. HCL previously planned building projects for its 41 libraries based on a time-schedule, which proved to be too prescriptive and did not account for varying building use and impact. This new capital framework uses a data-driven approach to determine capital improvement projects. Weighing three sets of data—community disparities, library usage, and asset condition—this holistic approach allows HCL to plan building projects in a more proactive, equitable, and sustainable way.

Students studying lighting design have limited opportunities to publish their work in an academic setting. Very few institutions publish theatrical design documentation as they are not considered student research in the traditional sense. This project sought to showcase how Institutional Repositories are a perfect solution for this publishing gap. The results included the publication of the design process work of an undergraduate student for three separate productions. Furthermore, Boise State University's Institutional Repository is now better equipped to support student research in the Arts & Humanities, allowing them to diversify their collections.

The hardworking board members and volunteers of the Washington National Guard Museum have dedicated themselves to collecting, preserving, and displaying the rich history of Washington State’s brave military personnel. By continuing initial cataloging efforts of the Museum’s vast photographic collection, and beginning to make the entire collection available through an online database, our team helped further the Museum’s mission to instruct, inspire and educate all citizens. This project ensures the Museum’s goal of becoming an essential research library will soon become a reality.

Children’s collection development and programming is implemented by adults based on librarians’ knowledge of what children might need. Libraries are missing direct input from elementary-aged children regarding books and programming. Our Capstone team created a research-based framework to implement Children’s Advisory Boards (CABs) in libraries. In a CAB, a group of children advises the library on collection development and programming. Using best practices that emerged during our eight test CABs, we created a toolkit for our sponsor, the Collaborative Summer Library Program. Librarians nationwide can use this toolkit to invite children’s voices into their libraries.

Our capstone project aims at applying advanced machine learning techniques to identify advertisement traffic from the cellular network traffic. The idea behind classifying advertising traffic is relevant in today’s business era where digital marketing has become the predominant medium to increase outreach and connect directly with customers. Our team developed a novel approach to label & predict this advertisement traffic (accuracy ~97%), thereby paving the way for further research into identifying and blocking malicious/spam advertisements. The relevant activities we performed included getting data from network captures, data pre-processing, feature extraction, ad-labeling, applying ML algorithms and evaluating model performance.

The digitization of art images has created new opportunities for artists, researchers, and students to explore visual arts. However, many digital art libraries are difficult to navigate. This is because they lack metadata to describe their images, which makes finding images based on their content hard. We applied computer vision techniques to a dataset of art images to create an art recommendation system.

UW's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) publishes papers about disease research to improve population health. They gather feedback from a network of collaborators around the world, and each paper receives up to 5000 comments. We've built a streamlined system for managing comments. Our platform consolidates multiple applications into a central location that utilizes automation and intelligent triaging to process large sets of comment data quickly. IHME staff no longer need to look through thousands of comments and categorize every cell. We have built a magic button that, with just a click, reduces weeks of work into 30 seconds!