Data science is changing the face of the financial industry. Visible in the rise of quantitative funds, AI managers, and high frequency trading, 21st century technologies have produced unprecedented volumes of financial data. Without context or a way to capture the big picture, even the most engaged investors are getting left behind. Pariity takes technical, quantitative, and sentiment analysis and makes it accessible and digestible for everyone. We provide a holistic view of markets so that all investors can educate themselves, validate their thinking, and increase their confidence in trading.

Thousands of travelers and homeowners use peer-to-peer homestay services like Airbnb every day. However, there is a major problem existing. The home management systems are not efficient, secure, and user-friendly. Most houses manage traveler’s entry-exit through conventional locks. When people book accommodations, they have to go through the hassle of collecting, using, and returning the key. Often, travelers reach the house during odd hours which becomes inconvenient for both parties. Also, traditional lock and key systems can lead to fraud. Our project solves this real-world problem by implementing a secure and user-friendly cloud-based IoT lock and key system.

TellToo focuses on the journey we take as individuals to find meaning, purpose, and fulfillment in life. For many of us, technology has changed the way we socialize. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have pushed social interactions to shorter, less personal, and more trivial exchanges. This has left certain core elements of socialization in the dust. Our project focuses on modernizing those elements and building a platform that delivers a more human centric method of sharing and connecting. Our mobile application allows users to tell stories through audio recording and visually navigate chains of naturally related stories.

The City of Seattle's Demographic Disaggregation Task Force (DDTF) is a cross-departmental group charged by City Council to change the way the City collects race/ethnicity data. With this more accurate information, City services can be targeted more equitably. Our project is a pilot of demographic disaggregation at the Utilities Discount Program (UDP), which provides discounted electric utility rates for low-income households. Through organizational research, observations of staff, and interviews with key UDP players, we came to understand the current practices around race/ethnicity data. From here, we made recommendations on how to integrate the disaggregated race/ethnicity data practices into UDP's framework.

Many of us have been hooked to playing video games for over 10 years now, secretly wishing to make money of our talent to understand the game play. Our sponsor Unikrn provides a platform for eSports enthusiasts to gather insights, play and bet on popular games like League of Legends, Counter-Strike and more. Our market research suggests that users have difficulty comprehending how eSports betting works and tend to bounce off their website. To address this problem, we made it our mission to redesign Unikrn’s web experience. Through extensive user interviews, competitive analysis and user stories, we designed new interactive UI and workflow that delight users and help make informed gaming decisions. Our tests have shown higher engagement rates with the new UX. Once implemented, the new experience will be more user-friendly and trustworthy; targeting an audience of 600,000 users who will together wager around $85 Million in 2016.

The future of the country lies in the hands of the children. If the child doesn’t get the right start, he is 60% more likely to never go to college and 70% more likely to be arrested for a violent crime. However, good quality of early learning education can change these statistics. The Childcare Quality & Early Learning Center for Research and Professional Development (CQEL) is the University of Washington’s effort to measure and improve the quality of early learning environments for children. CQEL is responsible for conducting, onsite evaluations of child care providers located throughout the state. The process of rating early education sites was being executed using a complex and cumbersome Excel spreadsheet until Data Wanderers pitched in. The team transformed the IRC Database solution from Excel to a robust SQL relational database thereby catering the problem of data security, data losses, multi-user access and facilitates standard and adhoc reports to analyze the performance of various sites.

Seattle JazzED, a music education non-profit, has two substantial and growing collections: sheet music used by instructors and instruments lent to students. Because neither collection was inventoried, it was difficult for JazzED staff to track where instruments were or what song arrangements had already been purchased. We created a database for, and cataloged, JazzED’s non-bibliographic resources using custom metadata built around their needs. We constructed the database on a cloud-based platform, allowing staff and instructors to easily share and edit entries, check out instruments, make notes about repairs, and search for songs by skill level, style, and more. This project provides JazzED with a personalized system that saves their staff precious time and energy, which in turn supports their mission to empower students of all backgrounds. By dramatically expanding JazzED’s ability to manage their resources, we have contributed to their powerful impact on students and music education in our community.

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.

Video games are widely consumed as interactive media by a diverse population. 49% of US adults reportedly play video games and the US industry alone is estimated to be worth over $23 billion. However, who gets represented in video games is poorly understood and public discussions on the topic are divisive and heavily anecdotal. Controversies like Gamergate demonstrate a lack of depth, rigor, and scope in discourse on diversity in gaming across stakeholders including academics, consumers, developers, and publishers. Our team identified and built solutions to address the two largest barriers to the study of representation in gaming: a standard way to describe video game protagonists and a representative sample of video games. Released in a public-friendly format in collaboration with key stakeholders (e.g., the GAMER group, Anita Sarkeesian), these materials enable the systematic study of representation we need to advance crucial dialogues about our fastest growing media.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But when it comes to moving freight, that line becomes complex. In these uncertain times of political upheaval, natural disasters and huge amount of freight theft, Route Assessor aims to empower Expeditors in choosing better delivery routes based on various risk parameters. This robust web based solution helps Expeditors in recommending the best route to the customer, so that risk can be intelligently and appropriately managed. A real time risk score is calculated for a given source and destination, based on FBI crime data, Freightwatch data, weather and commodity type. With Route Assessor, Expeditors can provide a holistic risk assessment of customer’s shipment by helping them to choose better risk mitigation products and provide a superior quality of service compared to its competitors. Route Assessor reduces the probability of an “unwanted surprise” within the supply chain logistic.