Though the rules of chess can be learned in a day, people spend years learning the nuances of the game that can make them masters. Important strategic details often go unnoticed or are not fully understood by novice players. Tactical play refers to maneuvers that limit an opponent’s options, or present multiple problems simultaneously resulting in a tangible gain. Moves like pins, forks, and skewers all fall into tactical play. Positional play refers to maneuvers that strengthen a player’s position on the board or weaken an opponent’s. Space, or how many squares a player controls, is an aspect of positional play. We speculate that by just seeing these strategic details, novice players could play stronger games of chess. We will be designing and implementing a set of visualizations that can be overlaid onto a digital chessboard that may help novice players more quickly and meaningfully see potential patterns, threats, and opportunities in hopes of helping them play more successful games. Our application could serve as a tool for further research on the relationship between visualization and chess learning, but our focus for the remaining quarter is only to design the application through research of chess and collection of feedback from chess players of all levels, and to implement a working application that may run in a web browser. Assuming the project is a success, future work may include a within-subjects study that compared how well novice chess players fared against a consistent chess AI both with the visualizations enabled, and without based on victories, losses, total moves until the end of game, and total value of pieces lost versus pieces captured.

While professionals in the Information Technology (IT) industry are able to read and understand new terms by associating them with previous knowledge and current context, professionals outside of the industry struggle with unfamiliar words and acronyms in dense technical documents. In these circumstances, many people turn to online resources such as Wikipedia to define or explain terms they don’t understand. Yet, switching attention between reading an article and searching for information using various resources can increase cognitive load, thereby increasing perceived stress level and potentially reducing the effectiveness of both tasks. To address this problem, we propose the D-Jargonizer: a web-based tool that assists non-technical professionals as they read complex technical documents by allowing users to select and define technical terms with minimal distraction. We hypothesize that this tool will reduce cognitive load, perceived stress and make it more enjoyable for professionals outside of the IT field to read and comprehend technical documents. First, using a diagramming application, we will create a static prototype that imitates the proposed functionality of the D-Jargonizer. Students at the University of Washington who are unfamiliar with technical documents will be recruited to test perceived stress and enjoyment while using the prototype, as well as provide feedback about the overall user experience. Based on our initial user testing, we will develop a Google Chrome extension that allows users to select a term on a web page, searches for the term in an ontology based on Wikipedia entries and displays the definition in a text box on the page itself. Our tool will be tested again to confirm our hypothesis and verify usability. While the D-Jargonizer currently focuses on helping people understand technical documents, the basic concept could be applicable to medical or legal documents in the future.

Hot flashes affect 75% of menopausal women, leaving them with recurring flushing, sweating, skin blotching, and occasional anxiety, palpitations, and sleep disturbances. 20% of those affected describe the symptoms as “intolerable,” and current treatment methods carry too many side effects or are insufficiently effective. We propose the drug nalfurafine to prevent these symptoms. Nalfurafine has the distinct clinical advantage of being taken orally and targeting κ-opiod receptors outside of the blood-brain barrier, leading to minimal side effects. κ-opiod receptors decrease the activity of Kiss1 neurons, and we believe kappa agonists such as nalfurafine inhibit the Kiss1 neuron activity we hold responsible for hot flashes. To test this hypothesis, we injected nalfurafine in mice and collected blood and brain samples, expecting reduced levels of specific hormones and proteins associated with Kiss1 neuronal activity. Analysis of data collected in this study is ongoing. If our hypothesis is incorrect, we will have a new understanding of how κ-opiod receptors regulate Kiss1 neuronal activity. However, if we find evidence that nalfurafine inhibits Kiss1 neuronal activity, it may alleviate hot flashes in women, thereby providing rationale for clinical studies and potentially leading to a therapy that would improve quality of life for millions of women.

 Our capstone project discusses a redefinition of a social bar experience. Opening and closing tabs at bars is stressful, time consuming and frustrating. Today, the process to order a drink at a bar is tedious: wait in line, order a drink, then hand a bartender a credit card to open a tab. Stand in the same line for each subsequent drink as well as to close the tab. This process is time-consuming and detracting from a customer’s bar experience. With the imminent rollout of mobile payments as a ubiquitous brick-and-mortar payment method, we identified an opportunity to utilize mobile payments technology to develop an elegant solution to order drinks at a bar. One of our goals is to eliminate as much friction from the experience as possible, which will allow users to better enjoy their drinks with their friends. The service will handle ordering, paying and tipping for menu items, as well as offer additional value-added features that are only possible when customers order and pay for drinks from a mobile device. While we will focus on the bar scenario, our technology platform will be applicable to several other verticals including restaurants and stadium venues. By employing the user-centered design process supplemented with usability research, we seek to create a solution that redefines the bar experience.

Perineuronal nets (PNNs) are a matrix of proteins that surround nerve cells and reinforce the most often used synaptic connections between neurons, essentially hard-wiring neural connections made as a child into permanent pathways that respond to specific stimuli. By dissolving these PNNs, we recreate the plasticity characteristic of a young developing brain, granting us the ability to rewire the brain with respect to any stimulus. In this study, we are looking at PNNs within the vestibular system – the sensory system that, under natural conditions, is primarily responsible for maintaining images on the fovea during movement. Hair cells within the semicircular canals of the vestibular system register head accelerations and then send reflex signals through vestibular afferent nerve endings to extra-ocular eye muscles that drive eye movements. This vestibular ocular reflex aids the maintenance of stability of images on the retina. As a therapy for vestibular loss, our lab has developed a vestibular prosthesis that electrically stimulates the afferent nerve endings of the vestibular system, thereby simulating natural vestibular response to movement. This electrical stimulation, however, spreads to untargeted as well as targeted vestibular afferents and cause inaccurate eye movements as a result. By dissolving the PNNs in the vestibular nuclei and then allowing them to regrow during a period of adaptation, we hope to suppress inappropriate eye movements in response to our prosthesis’ electrical stimulation. If our lab can prove that electrically elicited eye-movements become more accurate after the dissolving and guided re-growing of PNNs, we can show that it is possible to restore plasticity to the brain and shape its neural connections through controlled electrical stimulation to the target system. By extension, such results will ascertain if it is possible to use this method to re-wire a physiological system to accept prosthetic stimulation in place of a non-functioning system.

The vestibular system is responsible for maintaining stable vision and posture by interpreting accelerations of the head in various planes. Impaired function of this system can cause debilitating vertigo, as seen in Meniere ’s disease. Our lab has developed a prosthesis that aims to counteract these deleterious pathologies through electrical stimulation, and our research is directed towards improving the effectiveness of this device. In order to stabilize gaze, the vestibular system must incorporate demands from several neural inputs, many of which are dependent on direction of the line of sight. Additionally, the effectiveness of electrical stimulation may be altered by the background activity of the activated neural pathways, which vary with orbital eye positions. Therefore, in this study, I am focusing on the dependency of stimulation-evoked eye velocities on initial position of the eye. I have collected data from two Rhesus Macaques by stimulating the right lateral, posterior, and superior semicircular canals at different eye positions. My data shows linearly graded velocities depending on stimulus amplitude, so it is clear that eye position must be taken into account when evaluating eye velocities. Speculation into the cause of this phenomenon will help to better customize our implant’s effectiveness according to the physiology of the patient in consideration.

Research over the years has shown that effective oral hygiene with brushing and flossing can help reduce bleeding, gingivitis and plaque buildup. When bacterial plaque is left alone or removed improperly, it can lead to further dental disease such as caries. During orthodontic treatment, fixed appliances such as brackets are bonded to the teeth and archwires connect the brackets. These appliances make it especially hard for orthodontic patients to brush and floss effectively on their own, and failure to do so leads to an increase in plaque and gingivitis seen in the orthodontic population. A pilot study at the University of Washington’s Center for Pediatric Dentistry (CPD) will assess development of white spot lesions during orthodontic treatments. White spot lesions are the first sign of a caries lesion on enamel that can be detected with the naked eye. Pediatric orthodontic patients from CPD will be enrolled in this pilot study. Study participants will be randomly assigned to one of two oral hygiene regimens. Group A will use the WaterPik Water Flosser with orthodontic tip (dental water jet irrigation system) in conjunction with daily oral hygiene and Group B will use floss with a threader in conjunction with daily oral hygiene. Both groups will manually brush their teeth with fluoridated toothpaste twice daily as part of daily oral hygiene maintenance. The White Spot Lesion Index will be used to evaluate white spots. The primary objective of this study is to evaluate prevalence of white spots in fixed orthodontic cases following these assigned oral hygiene regimens. Secondary objectives include assessment of safety and of plaque and gingival status for both groups. Intraoral examinations will be performed; and visible plaque index and bleeding on Marginal Probing scored at each follow-up evaluation. Study participants will be evaluated at every orthodontic appointment for a minimum of 18 months.

Protein kinases are enzymes that take phosphate groups from adenosine triphosphate (ATP) molecules, the energy in your body, and add them to other specific molecules inside the cell. This transfer of the phosphate group can activate or deactivate the target molecule, thus regulating cellular activities such as growth, replication, and respiration. The kinases studied here are hemopoietic cell kinases (Hck kinases) under the class of Scr kinases. Hck kinases are present in bone marrow and are often associated with myeloid leukemias and myeloproliferative disorders. Studies have shown that in the active conformation, the Hck kinase detaches two of its domains, SH2 and SH3, resulting in a more extended conformation. Using a Waters Synapt G2 HDMS, ion mobility mass spectrometry (IM-MS) techniques were used to probe the size of inactive and active Hck kinases by measuring drift times of their gas-phase ions traveling through a neutral background gas under the presence of a weak electric field. Drift times were then converted into collision cross section (CCS) values, which depend on the size and shape of the ion of interest. Eight different small molecules (< 500 Da) were used to inhibit Hck kinases, and changes in conformation were investigated using IM-MS. Preliminary data shows no significant changes in global conformation or size, conflicting with the previous studies. To investigate more subtle changes in conformation, collision induced unfolding (CIU) methods are used. By selecting an ion of interest using a quadrupole mass filter, protein unfolding is monitored using ion mobility as a function of ion activation prior to ion mobility analysis. This process allows an investigation of the subtle conformational changes in the Hck kinase upon the binding of small inhibitor molecules.

One of the functions of the vestibular system is to engage neural reflexes, which ensures the stabilization of a visual image during head movements. This is accomplished through the stimulation of vestibular hair cells, which respond to accelerations, and then produce compensatory eye movements opposing head motion. This called the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR). Hair cell loss results in vestibular deficits, and for these individuals, this loss of function is debilitating and results in vertigo and decreased visual acuity. To address these deficits, the Phillips lab has developed a vestibular prosthesis, which aims to use electrical stimulation to restore function by artificially activating individual branches of the vestibular nerve. However, it is not known precisely how the system changes after hair cell loss; this may have implications for the effectiveness of the prosthesis in treating vestibular loss. To explore this, we examined the interaction between the electrical activity and residual vestibular activity after vestibular loss. We first introduced a vestibular deficit in a rhesus macaque through successive gentamicin injections into the middle ear to destroy vestibular hair cells, and measured VOR responses to verify the progressive vestibular loss. Next, we recorded eye velocities in response to electrical stimulation to characterize changes in the efficacy of stimulation, thus providing insight into the prosthetic mechanism. Finally, modulated electrical stimulation was provided during rotation of the rhesus macaque to test the efficacy of the prosthesis in restoring VOR in conjunction with residual vestibular activity. Characterizing prosthetic function during increasing vestibular deficit is important in determining the mechanism of stimulation, the physiological responses succeeding hair cell loss, and ultimately a model for the prosthetic efficacy for human patients.