Books to Prisoners (BTP), a Seattle-based nonprofit organization, provides free books on request to incarcerated individuals throughout the United States in an effort to foster the love of reading, encourage self-improvement, and break the cycle of recidivism. BTP’s largest budgetary expenditure is postage on book shipments. Of these, up to 10% are refused and returned by institutions, at BTP’s expense, because they were found to violate restrictions on inmate access to reading material that can vary by state, county, and institution. Due to limited resources, BTP has been unable to effectively organize these restrictions, resulting in thousands of dollars in wasted postage. Our team analyzed BTP’s existing documentation, established a standardized vocabulary and structure for the information, and designed a comprehensive information system for institutional restrictions. Use of this system is expected to reduce returned shipments and to also furnish data that will assist in securing grant-based funding.

PainlessVR is a research tool that allows researchers from medical, psychological and any other fields to test hypotheses about Virtual Reality without any development at all. The goal of the product is to improve future virtual reality pain management applications by removing the barriers to researching virtual reality. PainlessVR allows researchers to modify, and by extension study, variables regarding color, sound, context and cognitive load. Improving VR pain management would mean improving care for those who are unable to take traditional pain medication such as burn victims or recovering opioid addicts.

The healthcare industry is undergoing rapid change whereby it is expected to perform better with fewer resources. Regional health systems struggle to perform at the level of national or larger teaching institutions with respect to infrastructure and knowledge. We have performed analysis on behalf of Lakeland Regional Health (LRH), a large regional healthcare system. LRH hopes to enhance the quality of its service and business performance through a key partnership with a nationally-recognized healthcare system. We have provided consulting services to LRH in outlining strategic initiatives and business intelligence implementations to help them verify the benefits are worth the cost of this partnership. These include market share analysis to assess outmigration trends and evaluation of quality of care to identify key areas for improvement. Findings were delivered through a report and dashboard that will help them predict the areas of focus and systematically track their performance against their goals.

Patents are arguably one of the most important means of rewarding innovation and creativity. According to the U.S. Commerce Department, in 2010, IP-intensive industries accounted for 34.8 percent ($5.06 trillion) of U.S. gross domestic product. Despite this significant contribution, the process of acquiring and maintaining a patent remains fraught with complexities. Through our research project we intend to shed light on some of these complexities and provide data driven insights into this process. By scraping, cleaning, and analyzing 10 years worth of publicly available utility patent data, we have attempted to examine and visualize some interesting and pressing topics like prevalence of any gender bias, trends around industries/organizations that produce patents, and countries that spearhead innovation across the world, among others. We believe the data and insights produced by this project can guide future research and improvement efforts in this field thereby benefiting the patent industry, in a broader sense.

Each year, roughly 30% of first-year students at baccalaureate institutions do not return for their second year and over $9 billion is spent educating these students. Yet, little quantitative research has analyzed the causes and possible remedies for student attrition. Here, we describe initial efforts to model student dropout using the largest known dataset on higher education attrition, which tracks over 32,500 students' demographics and transcript records at one of the nation's largest public universities. Using a balanced dataset, an accuracy of 16% over baseline (66%) can be achieved. Logistic regression, random forest, and k-nearest neighbors models were used. Accuracy was boosted through a feature engineering approach. This project will inspire universities to use machine learning to identify at risk students. They can then target retention efforts towards these students; hopefully putting loan money to better use and ensuring that the most students possible earn degrees.

The company Test Innovators helps students prepare for standardized tests like ISEE/SSAT. Students sign up to their platform and take practice exams. They have more than 20,000 students signed up till date and pocess more than 5,000,000 questions on their system. The company wanted to build a system which automatically analyzes the student's progress in their practice tests and recommend ways to improve their scores. We have built a system, PrepSmart, that automatically learns from past experiences of students who are similar to the current test taker and suggest their features to the current test taker to improve his scores. Recommendations can be anything like strong/weak subject areas, time to answer questions,additional question banks and tutoring services. PrepSmart helps students in improving their overall scores and it also helps the sponsor in generating additional revenue by selling recommended question banks and tutoring services.

We set out to create a food spoilage tracking system that would allow a user to plan meals, coordinate shopping trips, save money, and keep a more clear mental image of the items the user currently has at home. Our hope is to foster an improved sense of what food items are available to a person and when those food items will pass their usable dates, so as to save our users time and money. The goals of this project are not only limited to personal food storage and tracking, as the world is facing a mounting issue with food sustainability. As our numbers increase our demand for food increases and so does our overall cumulative waste. We seek to help not only those who would use our application, as much as the the world at large, by maximizing food consumption and reducing avoidable expiration based waste.

Students are not being exposed to user-centered design and other Informatics topics in high school. We have found that many currently in the field did not discover such topics until their second year in college. With the demand for user focused critical thinking on the rise, Project Spark hopes to bridge the gap by introducing these topics earlier in the education system in order to spark interest. We bring college students to the high school classroom in order to give high school students a taste of what they can do with user-centered design. Our goal is to simply get more students interested in design thinking within the context of technology in the information age.

In 2012, the Bainbridge Public Library, the Kitsap Regional Library, and the people of Bainbridge Island began working on a digital archive of the Bainbridge Island Review between the years 1941 to 1946. The only newspaper in the country to oppose the incarceration of Japanese American citizens for the duration of the war, the Bainbridge Island Review published pictures and letters from incarcerees, as well as reflected the values of their community, that largely believed incarceration of Japanese Americans was unjust and immoral. Still today, the people of Bainbridge Island are dedicated to “Nidoto Nai Yoni”, which means "Let It Not Happen Again". My task was to locate & contact individuals and organizations that might use their influence to raise awareness of the archive and its unique story. Conducting this outreach has resulted in multiple organizations recognizing the archive’s value, and a promise that they will spread the knowledge contained within.