Recent and Ongoing Projects

Talking Points

Location-aware computing for the sighted and non-sighted.

Talking Points is collaborative student project at the University of Michigan with the objective of designing a community-driven urban orientation and contextual information system for non-sighted and sighted users. The system design consists of three components: a social online database, facilitating user-generated content of POI information; a Wifi positioning system; and a mobile device that detects POIs (Points of Interest) and presents the contextual information through either a speech user interface (SUI) or a graphical user interface (GUI).

Role: Team Leadership, Programming, Project Management, Systems Architecture

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Small Steps

Interaction design project with the goal of helping families live healthier lives by walking.

SmallSteps is a virtual community that helps parents start and maintain neighborhood walking school buses—groups of children walking with responsible adults. While walking school bus programs provide convenience and safety, they can be short-lived due to the burden on volunteers. To create a more rewarding experience for volunteers and sustain groups over time, SmallSteps is designed to help users conveniently manage walking school buses by providing simple tools to make daily tasks easier.

Role: Design Research, Interaction Design

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Exploratory Data Analysis

Statistical visualization of India's 2004 election data with R and ggplot2.

Letting data speak for itself is a key goal of the 'grammar of graphics'. My goal was to visualize 2004 Indian electoral data in order to tell a story about why some parties support the Women's Reservation Bill of 2010, and others do not. My conclusions were very close to those reported in the Indian media, parties in opposition needed to fill out gaps in their caste reservation polls and wanted women to further apportioned to these reservations. In carrying out this analysis, I was surprised to find that "All India" parties perform better across caste reservations than parties specifically directed towards these populations.

Role: R Programming, Facilitation of ggplot2 visualization library

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Friends of Wildlife

Helping a community-run wildlife association communicate better.

Developed a comprehensive solution to help an Ann Arbor non-profit streamline its membership, rehabilitation and internal communications processes. Conducted confidential interviews and analyzed data using Contextual Inquiry to create conceptual models.

Our principle goal was to find ways members of the wildlife rehabilitation community could engage in more meaningful communication while wasting fewer resources. Our process included constructing an affinity wall to explore the language/metaphors at work, performing visioning sessions to creatively answer the questions posed by our insights, and finally a presentation in which recommendations and results were communicated to the client.

Role: Contextual Inquiry, process design, project management, visioning

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School Nurse

Digital emergency records management system for Michigan schools.

Student medical emergency records network for Michigan school systems. The project provides K-12 administrators, nurses, teachers, and parents access to a centralized web service that allows for the sharing of student emergency information. The application combines a rich collection of Web 2.0 tools including SMS, electronic permission slips, and social networking capabilities.

Role: Business plan, concept development

NYMAG

GIS personal geodatabase for the NY Tri-State region.

Project to facilitate easy mapping of Census data for the Baruch research community. I created custom data set from the U.S. Census' American Community Survey and built feature classes using TIGER shapefiles for the Tri-State region.

Role: GIS, VB Programming, end-user documentation

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ShiftSpace + CloudSocial

Clint Newsom

ShiftSpace is an open source layer above any webpage. CloudSocial is a new approach to learning online spearheaded by Sakai stalwart Dr. Charles Severance at the University of Michigan. I did initial research to demonstrate that Severance's wide array of educational tools could be made available over the ShiftSpace platform.

Role: Javascript programming

Ctools Data Analyzer

with Nik Rozaidi Rashid, Angelique Richardson, Matt Rubenstein

Device to analyze large amounts of logging data generated by a cohort of students using Ctools at the University of Michigan. The tool was written specifically to support the dissertation of Steve Lonn, a Ph.D. student in the School of Education.

Role: JavaScript, PHP, Database design