Crowdsourcing platforms provide a common market place for job seekers and requesters to work collaboratively. The existing platforms fail to address the needs of the workers and the requesters due to unjust distribution of power and insufficient information about the parties involved in a task. In platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk new workers struggle to find tasks, workers face rejection without adequate feedback, whereas requesters do not get high quality results in time. In this research we contribute to Daemo a collaborative project from Stanford crowd research collective. Daemo is a self-governed crowdsourcing platform that aims to improve work quality and provide equitable representation. We studied the surrounding literature about existing solutions to learn about the flaws in the current platforms. Then, we interviewed professional workers and requesters to find their needs. We envisioned ways to improve the requester experience by suggesting tagging for tasks to make the tags easier to be searched and tailored for their skills. We also proposed adding ratings to requesters profile and adding rejection rate to requester profiles. Then, we illustrated our design choices by creating prototypes to communicate and evaluate our work.

The Joseph Mathia Diaries Project, part of the Newbook Digital Text Project, is a research initiative started in 2012 and dedicated to the application of innovative digital technologies towards the multi-media publication of 16 original diaries and 30 transcriptions of Joseph Mathia Svoboda's original diaries. The transformation of these primary sources into physical or digital media consists of five phases: transcribing, editing, analyzing, encoding and formatting each text; with each and every one of them characterized as needing of extensive human resources. These resources come in form of undergraduate and graduate student interns; the undergraduate community being the most represented. The project almost entirely depends on this segment of the student body due to reduced funding but most importantly because we strongly believe that, by empowering our interns to assume positions of responsibility in lower and mid-level management and to participate in cross-function collaboration within the five phases of the project, we provide our students with invaluable experiences that prepare them for future successful professional and academic endeavors. Through interviews, surveys and other internal forms of evaluation, this research project aims to understand the process through which students get involved with the Newbook Digital Text Project, the nature of their work, the relation and relevance of this work to their area of study or interests and the outcome of this research internship in terms of skills and experience gained from becoming involved with undergraduate research. Consequently, this research project aims to demonstrate to the university community the high level of innovation, impact and collaboration the undergraduate student community can bring into traditional scholarly research.

For over twenty years the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has managed and developed a set of encoding guidelines for the representation of humanities, social sciences, and linguistics -- to preserve and share -- texts in digital form. Using the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as its backbone, TEI is the generally accepted encoding model for the digital humanities. Due to XML’s extensible nature, it can often be difficult to share these files and even more problematic to make them interoperable. The goal of our project is to build a prototype Application Programming Interface (API) for TEI-XML documents that provides greater interoperability while at the same time being easy to use by an audience with backgrounds in the humanities, social sciences, and linguistics. Currently, we have produced a deliverable with two components. The first: an API that, once installed, can return multiple views of a TEI-XML file using a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) as its query method. The second is a set of user-tested support documentation that is both easily discoverable and easliy usable by our target audience. In future iterations of our prototype we plan to include a more robust listing of return view types, the ability to support multiple TEI-XML files, and API key permissions support.

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection is an important health issue worldwide and consists of two main types, HIV-1 and HIV-2. In the fight against HIV, integrase strand transfer inhibitors (INSTIs) are a relatively newer class of antiretroviral drugs aimed at blocking viral replication. FDA-approved first generation INSTIs include raltegravir (RAL) and elvitegravir while the second generation includes dolutegravir and cabotegravir (CTG). The high mutation rate of HIV often results in resistance to antiretrovirals and leads to treatment failure. However, the mechanisms and mutations that confer INSTI resistance in HIV-2 are not completely understood, despite the growing importance of INSTIs for HIV-2 treatment. The purpose of my research is to identify and characterize genetic changes responsible for INSTI resistance in HIV-2. Specifically, I engineered mutations that have been reported in sequences from patients receiving INSTI treatment into a laboratory strain of HIV-2, and tested the mutants for resistance to RAL and CTG in culture. Initial results indicate that a mutation at integrase position 263 (R263K) does not confer resistance to either RAL or CTG. However, a second variant encoding the mutations G140S+Q148H+N155H is highly resistant to both drugs, with 50% effective concentrations (EC₅₀ values) that were at least 1000-times greater than the wild-type strain. Experiments with additional HIV-2 integrase mutants are in progress. In the future, the mutant HIV-2 clones produced in this study will serve as a reference library for evaluating the resistance profiles of newer integrase inhibitors, thus helping to identify therapeutic strategies for HIV-2 patients that harbor drug-resistant virus.

Our Informatics capstone team of four is creating an Android application to help solve our research question: How do we create an efficient mobile platform that will display real-time airport conditions so that patrons of SeaTac International Airport can navigate through the airport in a more timely and hassle-free manner? We have conducted thorough user research in the form of an online survey and several interviews, aiming to understand the greatest frustrations users encounter while at the airport, and how features of our application could help solve these problems. We found that most people were frustrated by the TSA lines and not knowing how long they would have to wait in them. In the online survey, we collected around 150 responses. We used the survey results to help create interview questions, and then interviewed at least 2 people that fell under each persona category: Business Traveler, Recreational Traveler, International Traveler, and a Family Traveler. From this research we decided that our application would focus on three main features: predicting TSA wait times, predicting baggage check lines, and locating restaurants, shops, and amenities. We believe that our user research was very informative in helping us determine what features our application should support to most benefit users in navigating throughout the airport.  

Research has shown that online mindfulness training is an effective means to reduce stress and increase coping among university students. The beGreatful project builds on the findings of this research to create an online platform which students can use to participate in mindful practices. The platform operates around two key components. The first component is an online gratitude journal. This component is designed to encourage mindful thinking by guiding the user through the process of completing a journal entry. Our goal within this component is to help students build the habit of setting aside time to reflect upon their day. This helps foster the habit of positive thinking which can lead to increased resilience. The second component is an analytical feature designed to help users visualize patterns that occur in their journal entries so that they can become more aware of their thought patterns. This feature also reinforces the habit of writing in the journal daily by providing a snapshot of each day and showing the user’s improvement overtime. The online platform will serve as a low cost, accessible tool for college students to maintain a healthy mindset. We are currently in the design phase of the project. We have surveyed approximately 50 students at the University of Washington to gauge initial student interest in the project and have tested our first iteration of prototypes with 10 students. Based on these tests, we are working on our second iteration of prototypes which we will continue to test and improve. We will begin developing the platform next quarter and will have built the first live version of the beGreatful web application by the end of spring quarter.

Clusters of rocket motors are classically arranged cylindrically for the purpose of maximizing the effective aerodynamics of the overall cross-sectional design. Alternatively, our team’s rocket booster engine configuration was arranged in a unique square formation around the main engine for the first stage of our launch. This not only simplified construction and reduced the need for extra material to support the engines, but also lent itself to increased stability by making use of the corners of the square as part of the fin design. This first stage consisted of nine identical motors ignited simultaneously. Once the second stage ignited, this nine-engine cluster detached from the rocket and propulsion continued via a single motor. Speeds reached approximately 550 m/s, which is to say approximately Mach 1.6. The mainframe was constructed of carbon fiber with Kevlar reinforcement to prevent the fins from self-destructing upon breaking the sound barrier and/or ground impact. Our payload consisted of electronics for measuring and transmitting acceleration, speed, and altitude, along with a GPS unit for tracking purposes. The rocket's objective was to reach 60K feet, the maximum altitude allowed by FAA regulations, with a supersonic square cluster design modeled after SpaceX’s Falcon9. The research conducted was to study the takeoff, flight stability, and landing of our rocket’s more efficient square orientation in comparison to a typical cylinder design.

This project is a modern adaptation of Jason Robert Brown’s musical The Last Five Years, with a specific focus on racial diversity. Diversity in the arts is essential for artistic progression and innovation, and for maintaining sociocultural health; however, the lack of racial diversity in the performing arts has been a persistent, pressing issue. Artists from marginalized groups are grossly underrepresented in all aspects of modern theatre and performance; this prevents new stories and experiences from being developed and shared in the community. Our production has been specifically cast with UW students of color; the play chronicles the relationship between two young artists as they tackle the many challenges they face from society, one another, and themselves. Throughout the rehearsal process, we will inform the original script (which will remain unchanged) with the experiences and perspectives of young artists of colors. We will also explore how the challenges in the play are compounded by factors including gender, class, self-identity, and more; we want this production to address the unique obstacles faced by people from marginalized groups, especially in the arts. This process will culminate in a series of performances at UW’s Ethnic Cultural Theatre from May 20th through the 22nd. Additionally, all proceeds from the show will be donated to arts education in the Seattle area, with a specific focus on underrepresented communities.