2023 UMSI Student Project Exposition award recipients announced
Thursday, 05/18/2023
On April 17, more than 300 students and 200 guests gathered in person and online for the University of Michigan School of Information’s student project exposition. The event celebrated work completed by UMSI students for courses, clients, student organizations and independent initiatives.
Presenting teams were eligible for awards and judged by a panel of UMSI-affiliated advisory board members, alumni and partners. Fourteen projects received awards in final project and thematic categories.
Final project awards ($5,000 for first prize; $1,500 for second prize)
Bachelor of Science in Information (BSI) Capstone
All BSI students are required to complete a final project with an external client. Projects in this category are in the areas of user experience and design and information analysis. Students demonstrate theories and methods taught at UMSI, execute a clear plan, and provide feasible and valuable recommendations to the client organization. This award category includes eligible students from the BSI capstone courses, which includes SI 485 and SI 487.
First prize: CourseKit
Chuxuan (Claudius) Ma
SI 491: BSI Capstone Independent Study
Project description: “CourseKit is a webapp that helps students get into their desirable courses. The project has made a real impact to the University of Michigan community. I received $50,000+ credits and deals from Contrary Capital (no equity sacrificed) and have launched two minimum viable products (MVPs). The successful launch of the second MVP, attracting 341 initial users and receiving 3,651 queries in just two weeks, demonstrates a clear product-market fit. In W23 registration, we had over 500 active users, with each of them searching over 10 courses. This was achieved solely through poster promotion and word-of-mouth, without any marketing spend.”
Second prize: 1st Gen Engin
Sein Kim, Xiyu Hu, Kashaf Usman, Hiram Rodriguez
SI 487: User Experience Final Project
Project description: “We worked with the University of Michigan 1st Gen Engin program team to redesign their website. Current website is not being used by the program due to the outdated designs and lack of information. New designs allowed for a central hub for all program information and emphasized first generation student needs.”
Residential Master’s Programs Final Projects
Projects in this category cover a broad range of focus areas, including digital preservation, user experience research and design, big data analytics, communities and collections, user-centered agile development, and more. Students demonstrate theories and methods taught at UMSI, execute a clear plan, and provide feasible and valuable recommendations to the client organization. This award category includes projects from the SI 699 mastery courses and the SI 698 Master’s Thesis Option Program for Master of Science in Information and Master of Health Informatics students.
First prize: Power to the Players: Video Games and Low Vision [Video summary]
Emmy Thompson, Stephanie Tong, Elizabeth Riddle, Edith Zhang
SI 699: UX Research and Design Mastery Course
Project description: “This project aimed to make an accessible and inclusive gaming concept for the low-vision gaming community. To do this, we created a customizable heads-up display (HUD) system that allows players to change the size, location, color and other visual aspects of game information. This respects each players’ individual needs and empowers players by giving them more agency over their own gaming experience.”
Second prize: Developing a Project Management Tool for Digital Archives
Claire Danna
SI 699: Digital Curation Mastery Course
Project description: “The Buddhist Digital Resource Center, a digital archive of Buddhist texts from contributors around the world, wanted to create a sustainable and automated way to track records entering their archive to assess and improve project workflows. This project resulted in a custom metadata schema and a prototype that demonstrates how records can be tracked, manipulated, visualized and grouped throughout their lifecycle. This mock-platform is designed to address the needs of BDRC’s unique internal roles and to improve their ability to communicate with and serve their global network of contributors and users.”
Master of Applied Data Science (MADS) Capstone
All MADS students are required to complete a final project in SIADS 699, the MADS capstone course. Projects in this awards category are a result of a project-based course in which students propose and build end-to-end data science projects in their domains of interest. Projects should demonstrate mastery of data science concepts and methods from the MADS curriculum, resulting in a creative, original and technically rigorous portfolio piece.
First prize: Evaluating US School District Achievement Scores Based on Community Resources [Video summary]
Kathryn Andrews
SIADS 699: Master of Applied Data Science Capstone
Project description: “How can we compare U.S. public grade school districts fairly? If we can compare districts like-to-like based on resources available to the local communities that support them, we can identify and learn from schools that are making the most of what they have. We used measures of socioeconomic, health and environmental factors to group school districts, to predict standardized test scores and to identify high-achieving districts.”
Second prize: Developing Online Course Recommendations [Video summary]
Thomas J. James, Chauncey Raggie, Asia Paige
SIADS 699: Master of Applied Data Science Capstone
Project description: “Online course title, course description and job title text data were web scraped, filtered and combined into a single data frame. Data preprocessing was conducted to ensure prevention of messy and noisy data. Embeddings were applied to develop multiple distributional representations of similarities existing amongst the text data. The embeddings selected for this project were gloVe, VERT and RoBERTa. The text embeddings were concatenated and calculated for cosine similarity. Text similarity rankings were sorted, and the top five online courses were output. Input of a job title produces the five online courses ranking highest in similarity.”
Thematic awards ($1,500 for first prize; $500 for second prize)
Entrepreneurship/Innovation
This award category is for projects that develop, organize and/or run a new business or creative initiative or approach. Students or teams that embrace the opportunity to create value through new innovative solutions that have a positive impact, are collaborative, and demonstrate success in uncertainty were highly considered.
First prize: Enhancing Scientific Computing Experience for Non-technical Users [Video summary]
Le (Grant) Yang
Independent project
Project description: “Scientific computing is an essential part of modern research. However, outdated tools, poor usability and technical barriers can create a steep learning curve for scientists. The lack of experience using cloud infrastructure further complicates the issue. Our goal was to create a tool that helps scientists run computing jobs on cloud platforms with ease. We settled on using React + Express.js + MySQL to create a full-stack web application.”
Second prize: Optimizing Laparoscopic Surgery Training Skill with An AI-powered Software [Video summary]
Maria Bronson, Saumya Sharma, Xiaokun Qian, Yicheng Hong, Yujia Ke
SI 582: Introduction to Interaction Design
Project description: “Laparoscopic surgery is a procedure performed using small incisions with the aid of a camera. Before the surgical resident can operate on a real patient, they need to be trained to pass an exam called Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery (FLS). After the initial walkthrough, residents are left to practice the FLS skills without feedback as attendings and trainers are busy. Residents sometimes feel frustrated as they do not know where things go wrong. Our client, Michigan Medicine Clinical Simulation Center, asked us to design a solution to improve the learning experience of FLS for surgical residents. Our solution was MyFLS, a system that provides real-time AI feedback and post-performance statistics that allow residents to track their own progress. Residents can also record their performance and send it to their attendings if need be. Attendings and trainers can provide feedback to residents on their practice session anytime and anywhere as they wish through the software.”
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion
This award recognizes students or teams that focus on fair treatment and full participation of all people, including populations who have been historically underrepresented or subjected to discrimination. This supports UMSI’s goal to “make our commitment to diversity part of the fabric of everything we do, visible in our community life, instruction, research and administration of programs and services.” Projects in this category can focus on UMSI, the University of Michigan, other communities or society at large.
First prize: Sustainable Food Solutions on Campus [Video summary]
Chiao Cheng, Chia-Ying Hsieh, Grace Lee, Sarah Lin
SI 699: UX Research and Design Mastery Course
Project description: “Maize and Blue Cupboard (MBC) is a food pantry on campus that aims to provide equitable access to healthy food, but our research has identified user problems. Our team aims to redesign the MBC shopper and volunteer experience and will provide a model of how on-campus food banks work, which can be applied to other schools as well.”
Second prize: RefugeeOne: Design And Build A Job Search Portal For Refugees
Neha Kumari, Mike Wu, Tianchi Fu, Kenneth DeBacker, Yipeng Lin, Mingyu Li
SI 699: User-Centered Agile Development Mastery Course
Project description: “RefugeeOne is a non-profit resettlement agency in Chicago that provides services to refugees. Its mission is to create opportunities for refugees fleeing war, terror and persecution to build new lives of safety, dignity and self-reliance. Currently, the employment team at RefugeeOne receives many job listings, and it is a challenge for them to synthesize all information in a way that is accessible to refugees seeking new job opportunities. To overcome this challenge and others, a streamlined process is needed that helps in articulating crucial information about available jobs like location, pay and others in an interactive, accessible way.”
Community/Civic Engagement
This award is for projects that focus on the participation, rights and obligations of people in society, including local initiatives. Projects should demonstrate engagement with government, community and/or local nonprofits and serve the public good and/or be citizen-centered.
First prize: Do1Thing: Developing an App for Disaster Preparedness Education [Video summary]
Grace Brindle, Jessica Browning, Steven Dobrovich, Caleb Schumake, Qingyi Wang, Zongyao Wang
SI 699: User-Centered Agile Development Mastery Course
Project description: “Build a new mobile application for Do1Thing that is interactive, accessible and contains elements of gamification to keep users engaged with disaster preparedness.”
Second prize: Preserving the Lillian Schwartz Hybrid Art Collection at The Henry Ford Museum [Video summary]
Angelina Viana, Claire Danna, Gabi Acuña, Bella Barrie
SI 581: Preserving Information Resources in a Digital Age
Project description: “Our team worked with the Archives and Library branch of the Henry Ford Museum to create an inventory for digital media items in the hybrid art collection created by prolific digital artist Lillian Schwartz. We successfully inventoried 220 items and created archival preservation recommendations that Henry Ford can use to further preserve the Lillian Schwartz collection, allowing for increased access for the community.”
Collaboration/Teamwork
This award category is for projects that focus on the development or enhancement of people collaborating, working toward the same goal, and deepening their understanding of one another. Most projects at the UMSI student project exposition are completed by teams, but to be eligible for this category, collaboration and teamwork need to be a central theme of the project itself.
First prize: Battling the Opioid and Mental Health Crisis with Research & Design [Video summary]
Alexandra Lepore, Anders Lundin, Chloe Park, Grant Ho
SI 487: User Experience Final Project
Project description: “Workit Health is a telehealth provider offering addiction treatment available from the privacy and comfort of home. Workit Health has tasked us with redesigning the notes feature within their proprietary Electronic Health Record to solve issues regarding collaboration, organization, automation and standardization. Through our redesign, our team intends to streamline and optimize the note-taking process for providers so they can give more attention to their patients and reinforce Workit Health’s mission of providing efficient and affordable patient-centered care.”
Second prize: Neighbors Helping Neighbors [Video summary]
Phil Mendez, Rena Shen, Ushio Wang, Whitney Speck, Xi Zhang, Ying Wang
SI 538: Citizen Interaction Design
Project description: “The City of Dearborn is launching a volunteer program to help neighbors in need. Currently, city staff handle volunteer recruitment and task assignments manually, resulting in an overwhelming workload and inefficiencies. Through prototyping with the city and potential users, we designed an interactive dashboard for volunteers to browse and sign up for tasks and connect with fellow volunteers. Our goal is to create a seamless and engaging volunteering experience that empowers more citizens to make a meaningful contribution to their community.”
The estate of Gerald P. Miller (AMLS ’86, PhD ’95) and the UMSI Miller Scholars Fund provided funding for this year’s awards.
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