The iSchool was well represented at the Eighteenth Annual UW Undergraduate Research Symposium that took place on May 15, 2015. The event is organized by the Undergraduate Research Program, which facilitates research experiences for undergraduates in all academic disciplines. The Symposium is a chance for undergraduates to present what they have learned through their research experiences to a larger audience. It also provides a forum for students, faculty, and the community to discuss cutting edge research topics and to examine the connection between research and education. The event includes poster and presentation sessions by students from all academic disciplines and all three UW campuses, plus invited guests.

Informatics projects included: 

Robots of the Future: Design Considerations for the Health Care Domain
Timothy Lau, Junior, Informatics, Mary Gates Scholar
Minjung (Jenny) Sung, Freshman, Physics: Applied Physics

Robots are increasingly becoming an integral part of our society. We interact with robots everyday without realizing it. Robots are beginning to emerge for use in health care, home, and retail settings around the world. However, human-robot interactions remain largely superficial. Robotics engineers are assessing how humans will perceive emotive robots that appear to possess emotions. Robots vary widely in appearance from less human-like to more human-like. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine preferences for the design of emotive robots and attitudes towards robots in the U.S. to report on aesthetic preferences. A cross-sectional survey was conducted from a purposive sample (N = 502) of adults (age range 18-98 years). Using data from this cross-sectional survey study we will analyze information collected on variables related to the appearance of health care robots and measures of positive versus negative attitudes towards robots to better understand the readiness of U.S. adults to accept emotive and human-like robots in our society.

Emma B. Andrews Diaries Project
Christopher (Chris) Sumption, Junior, Informatics

The goal of the Emma B. Andrews Diaries Project is to preserve and make accessible a story of the past. Emma B. Andrews is best remembered for her association with the millionaire lawyer turned archaeologist, art and antiquities collector, Theodore M. Davis. Traveling to Egypt with him between 1889 and 1912, Andrews kept detailed journals of these voyages along the Nile, including Davis’s important yet under-reported excavations of 20 significant tombs in the Valley of the Kings. The challenge facing modern historians is that the original hand-written travel journals are now lost; all that remains are two typewritten copies created around 1918. Emma’s valuable perspective has therefore been, for the most part, inaccessible to both scholars and enthusiasts for almost a century. The Emma B. Andrews Diaries Project intends to change that. Our research team is in the process of creating digital editions of her 19 diary volumes and other related contemporary writings. Students associated with the project work with the diaries in varying capacities. Some research, others transcribe, edit, tag and write code. Currently we have transcribed all 19 volumes of the journal and have converted them into an XML (Extensible Markup Language) format. Additionally, diary content has been ‘tagged’ to draw out further information relating to the people and places mentioned in the diaries. Research relating to these people and places has been aggregated and put into an online database which we are calling the ‘Emmapedia’. An online reader has been developed for not only viewing the diaries, but also to connect the rich textual information found in the diaries to the Emmapedia resource. Future iterations of this project will continue to transcribe, research, and even digitally publish these materials, while exploring alternate visualizations of the data, possibly integrating Emma’s perspective into other mapping or timeline applications.

Track'd: A Responsive Website That Helps Students Find Important Events and Services around Campus
Yizhe (Louisa) Fan, Senior, Bus Admin (Oper & Supply Chain Mgmt), Informatics (Human-Computer Interaction)
Jenny Chen, Junior, Informatics (Human-Computer Interaction)
Michelle Le, Senior, Informatics
Gabriela Nikolova, Senior, Informatics
Shengyao Qian, Senior, Informatics

As students from the University of Washington, we want the best for our campus. However, we’ve noticed that a lot of the information about campus events, organizations and other services are all over the place and difficult to find in one centralized location. Also, it’s incredibly difficult to find things that match up to your interests if you don’t already have friends or connections within existing organizations. That led us to wonder, "how can we aggregate and visualize information about events and services on campus so that students can make friends with common interests and learn more about the resources the UW has to offer?" We conducted many interviews and user surveys and ultimately decided to create a responsive web application that targets three main audiences: first, incoming and prospective students; secondly, students with access needs; and lastly, registered student organizations and campus services that want to advertise and become more well-known. So far, we've conducted several user interviews to access the viability of our project, and we're currently finishing up user testing on our wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes. Results from our testing as well as a beta-stage application will be shared.

VROOM: Designing a Head-Up Display for Automobiles
Stephen Ramirez, Senior, Informatics
David Phillips, Senior, Informatics (Human-Computer Interaction)
Marissa Ho, Senior, Informatics
Jose (Danny) Gonzalez, Senior, Informatics: Info Assurance & Cybersecurity)
Philip Rudio, Senior, Informatics

Head-up display (HUD) technology is slowly emerging in the commercial automobile industry. HUD systems utilize projection technology or custom hardware to display information (an automobile's speed, fuel levels, temperature, etc.) visually on a glass pane. This technology allows for rapid information recognition so drivers can keep their focus on the road and the display itself has the added benefit of being semi-transparent, so it won’t fully obstruct the view through the glass pane. Today, over 30 different automobile manufacturers are researching and implementing HUD technology in their automobiles. VROOM is partnering with UW EcoCar to create a head-up display user interface for their competition car, which will increase the visibility of energy consumption and car diagnostics to drivers while enabling a safer driving experience. We believe VROOM can answer questions consumers have about the safety and usability of existing HUD technology. For this project, various methods of research such as user interviews, user surveys, and meetings with individuals involved in head-up display research and development were conducted to gather data and feedback that enabled our design process. Our project, much like the existing HUD product market, is constantly changing and evolving as we learn more about how drivers expect to interact with this kind of technology.

Achilles: Modernizing the Physical Therapy Experience
Amber Amin, Senior, Informatics (Human-Computer Interaction)
Caleb Thorsteinson, Senior, Informatics
Staffan Hellman, Senior, Informatics
Xavier Beaumonte-Byrd, Senior, Informatics (Human-Computer Interaction)
Robert (Robby) Brosman, Senior, Informatics

Around 2 million people receive physical therapy (PT) every day and this number continues to increase. Yet current PT practices often leverage low-tech guidance, involve minimal patient-therapist communication and do not provide means for accountability. Thus the problem we seek to solve is how to modernize the PT experience to enhance the relationship between therapists & patients and equip patients to better manage their therapy routines. In response, Achilles is a physical therapy prescription system leveraging professional expertise to provide on-demand guidance throughout the rehabilitation process. This is accomplished via software that crowd-sources physical therapy demonstrations to provide a library of guided exercises for physicians to ‘prescribe’ to their patients. As a result, physicians can see when patients are doing their exercises, creating accountability. Additionally, the final design gamifies the physician and patient experiences, encouraging a regular PT routine and increased communication on both ends. Achilles modernizes the physical therapy experience and in turn, patients are able to better manage their therapy, recover faster and avoid recurrence in the future.

CherryTime: Non-Profit Charity Connector
Mariam Davis, Senior, Informatics
Vivian Teng, Senior, Informatics
Cameron (Can) Scotland, Senior, Informatics
Brandon Thai, Junior, Informatics

Volunteering in America has been declining in recent years. Due to minimal community support, some non-profit organizations are struggling to obtain necessary items. To address this problem, our capstone project will create a platform to effectively communicate requests from Seattle non-profit organizations to local altruists. Our application, CherryTime, will enable organizations to make specific requests for items or volunteers. We will be developing a mobile-friendly website where locals will be able to fulfill these requests. Individuals will have the ability to look for opportunities based on location, time, causes they support or skills they have. Their donations and time volunteering will be rewarded through our badge system. Our project will help create a two-way relationship between organizations and individuals. The goals of this project are to increase the number of donors and volunteers in Seattle, make it easier for non-profit organizations to communicate their needs and to raise awareness for charity groups and their needs.

Did You Hear about the Computer that Can Detect Rumors?: An Algorithmic Approach to Rumor Detection
Logan Walls, Junior, Informatics, Psychology

When crises, including natural hazards, school shootings, and political unrest, occur people attempt to make sense of the events occurring around them. This sense-making process often results in ‘rumors’ (information of unknown validity). With the growing adoption and use of social media these rumors travel faster and reach farther than ever before.The massive amount of information circulating at any given moment makes it is difficult to distinguish rumor from fact, and it is often impractical for a human (e.g. emergency responders, citizens, etc.) to systematically differentiate the two. In response, our research aims to design an algorithm which can identify potential rumors without human supervision. We hypothesize that rumors have unique patterns in both their linguistic and temporal structure, which (when correctly identified) will allow for automated detection. Our current work uses data from Twitter collected during multiple crisis events; data also include multiple rumors (stories) which have been identified by human coders. By combining quantitative methods from the fields of social network analysis, computational linguistics, and machine learning we design and test rumor detection algorithms (using the human-identified rumors as a benchmark). Our current algorithms have succeeded in identifying many of the rumors in our test data, but a high rate of false-positives remains a prime issue. Moving forward we would like to further explore temporal patterns of rumors, meta-data patterns, and noise reduction techniques for our current methods.