Capstone Projects By Industry

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Professional Experience Project

Dell Medical School

with: Dr. Anjum Khurshid

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BHIL Website Design

The purpose of my project is to design and implement a website for Blockchain in Health Impact Lab associated with Dell Medical School. This lab is led by Dell Medical Schools Division ofHealth Information and Data Analytic Sciences and will serve as a platform for researchers, students and educators active in the field of blockchain and healthcare to be informed of educational seminars, panel discussions and new publications in the field. This website is to highlight the role of this lab and its contributors in filling the gap between healthcare technologies and blockchain applications and its content will be easily managed and updated through a Wordpress Content Management System (CMS).

 

Professional Experience Project

The Texas Observer

with: Loren Lynch

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Reworking the Texas Observer Archives

The Texas Observer is an Austin-based nonprofit news organization that has been publishing magazines since 1954. Currently, their website includes a web archive of their born-digital content and a print archive containing digitized scans of their magazine issues from the past 60+ years. Using principles of information architecture and design, metadata, and digital collections, I created a report that analyzed the archives in their current state, set out the Texas Observers goals for a new design, and made recommendations for how the archives can be improved to optimize discoverability, searchability, and browsing for their rich backlog of content.

 

Thesis/Masters Report

Faculty Advisor:
Dr. Jakki Bailey

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A Comparative Analysis of Nonverbal Communication in Online Multi-User Virtual Environments

This paper examines how nonverbal communication in virtual environments have evolved since their early inception by examining landmark platforms to represent the different periods of advancement in the capabilities of their contemporaries. It examines how some forms of NVC are translated directly from face-to-face to a digital avatar, as well as novel forms of NVC that evolve from the platforms themselves. This article will analyze how these translated and novel forms of NVC can indicate broader trends in the ways that people communicate through digital avatars, and provides some recommendations for further research into this subject.

 

Professional Experience Project

Texas Historical Commission

with: Jamie Ross

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Rethinking Artifact Curation: Updating Archaeological Laboratory Procedures at the Curatorial Facility for Artifact Research

The Curatorial Facility for Artifact Research (CFAR) holds thousands of artifacts from the archaeological investigations of 32 historic sites in Texas under the jurisdiction of the Texas Historical Commission - Historic Sites Division. The Historic Sites Division is dedicated to curating the collections and making them widely accessible to researchers and for future exhibition. To aide in this goal, I created, revised, and updated their laboratory curation procedures and policies manual. In doing so, I explored how to make collections and objects accessible while broadening their usability through implementing information methodologies surrounding description and cataloguing. Additionally, I incorporated physical and intellectual preservation methods, and considered notions of subjective and objective value. The final laboratory manual will serve as a guide to curating legacy, current, and incoming collections.

 

Professional Experience Project

Tesas A&M University Library

with: John Watts

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Evaluation of Metadata Completeness in a Dataverse Repository Self-Deposit Model

The purpose of this project was to assess the current state of the Texas Data Repository metadata in order to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the Texas A&M University collection. This assessment will support library efforts to provide targeted guidance to researchers as they prepare data for deposit. In collaboration with Texas A&M University Library staff, we developed a metadata rubric that focused on a limited set of criteria essential for data sharing and reuse. We then trained a group of volunteer raters in the rubric's use and analyzed the measure of agreement among raters to determine the rubrics' effectiveness.

 

Professional Experience Project

Indeed

with: Bliss Altenhoff

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Job Seeker Ad Targeting Evaluation

The project aims to help job seekers to be matched with great job opportunities, and investigate eleven ad placements across platforms. We conducted the quantitative research using the survey to measure how different factors such as ad placements, job relevance, and targeting reasons can affect job seekers preferences over certain job opportunities. This research seeks to report findings that identify how the mechanisms can be improved to provide better matches, and inform designs to present job opportunities that bring better experiences.

 

Professional Experience Project

Institutional Reporting, Research and Information Systems, The University of Texas at Austin

with: Lindsey Cooper, Mark Sifuentes

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Dashboard Project: IPEDS Financial Aids and Student Charges

In 2020, the world is in a covid panic. Many people are in crisis and even lost their jobs. These factors have led to another crisis in the opportunities for students to receive higher education. Therefore, we can expect that more students will need financial aids. In order to help our future research on the above issues, I used the data related to financial aid and tuition on IPEDS (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) to make the dashboard including a scatter plot, two bump charts, and two Treemaps. For different topics, my dashboard can clearly provide comparisons between universities and provide a ranking or detailed information.

 

Professional Experience Project

Dell Technologies

with: Michael Shepherd, Mustafa Albasha

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Dell Graph Data UI System with GraphQL, React and D3

In support of Dells Data Management research program, this project aims to design a Graph UI System to enable any user to experience and interact with diverse data and machine intelligence systems in a symbiotic and native way. Based on their users needs and database usage, I designed the Graph UI System with Figma first, then implement it with React.js, react-d3-graph, and GraphQL. Using this system, people can query the data and understand the context at the same time. It might also be a potential example for people to interact with graph data visualization in the future.

 

Professional Experience Project

Texas Open Data Portal

with: Tammi Powell

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Developing Interactive Web Elements for Texas Open Data Portal

Texas Open Data Portal (ODP) is an online platform that supports agencies and organizations to publish data to engage citizens, improve operations, and foster transparency. My project is to design and develop interactive web elements that could help engage the audience and better target information for constituents. I conducted user research with the Texas Open Data Portal customers, which are the agencies and organizations that publish data on the Texas Open Data Portal. Based on the user research, I selected six types of web interaction that would be ideal for the Texas Open Data Portal, and created nine corresponding interactive web elements. In addition, I made a demo page and a tutorial to help the Texas Open Data Portal customers with the interactive web elements.

 

Professional Experience Project

Austin History Center

with: Jennifer Hecker

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Austin History Center Website Redesign

I worked with the Austin History Center to prepare recommendations for a website redesign scheduled to begin in the Summer of 2021. The goal of the Austin History Center is to make their website more accessible to their various users. After analyzing the Austin History Centers current web presence and compiled documentation I created a project plan. This plan included a staff survey, heuristic evaluation of the website, competitive analysis of peer websites, user card sorting exercise, and the building of a wireframe. All my work and recommendations will be documented in a final report and presented to the Austin History Center to guide their redesign work.

 

Professional Experience Project

Texas After Violence Project

with: Jane Field

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Bilingual Justice: Creating Spanish-Language Metadata for the Texas After Violence Project

The Texas After Violence Project is a community-based archive and documentary project located in Austin, Texas that seeks to cultivate deeper understandings of the impacts of state-sanctioned violence on individuals, families, and communities. Their archive includes a current collection of 103 public-access interviews with individuals from across the state of Texas and a variety of different walks of life. My capstone project sought to translate the Dublin Core-style metadata of these interviews from English to Spanish, including subject headings, rights statements from the Creative Commons, and abstracts of each interview. I also translated TAVP's main finding aid from English to Spanish. By investing in a translation project, TAVP hopes to create a more inclusive and accessible archive, particularly for the many Spanish-speakers in Texas that are impacted in some way or another by state-sanctioned violence. This project is dedicated to the memory of my great-uncle Jerry Lehman, who always showed an active interest in whatever I was up to.

 

Professional Experience Project

Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

with: Carol Mead

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Increasing Access to the Archivo General de Indias and the Archivo General de México Collections at the Briscoe Center for American History

This capstone project explores the history and provenance of the Archivo General de Indias and the Archivo General de Mxico collections at the Briscoe Center, which contain transcriptions of original materials housed at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain, and the Archivo General de la Nacin in Mexico City, Mexico, respectively. It also examines the contents of the collections, the relationship between the two collections and other Spanish and Mexican-related collections at the Briscoe Center, disparities found in them, and the changes in organization to the collections throughout their time at the Briscoe Center. In exploring such topics, this project seeks to increase the accessibility of the collections to the public and ensure they are discoverable online. The deliverables of the project include a LibGuide, which synthesizes the findings gathered for this project into a multi-part guide to help researchers use the collections, and revision recommendations, for Briscoe Center staff, for transferring the contents of the collections existing paper-based documentation into digital finding aids.

 

Professional Experience Project

Institute for Media Innovation

with: S. Craig Watkins

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Postpartum support-bot: An AI-powered chatbot for parents with postpartum

The project is supported by Postpartum Support International (PSI). Postpartum disorders affect up to one in five women globally, but most of them are left untreated. The objective of the project is to design an AI-powered chatbot application that helps parents with postpartum easily seek support and get comfort. We analyzed hundreds of PSI conversation data and developed personas and user journeys to inform the chatbot design. However, our NLP model in the chatbot is not mature enough, so we first developed a hard-coded prototype to test the effectiveness and reliability of the concept. We believe that by improving the chatting experience, we can make up for the AI limitations and establish a trusting relationship with users.

 

Professional Experience Project

Austin History Center

with: Jennifer Hecker

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Drafting Zine Collection Development Policy.

Many libraries collect zines (a type of homemade magazine) in order to better represent marginalized perspectives within their communities. I have worked with the Austin History Center to draft a policy on how to expand their own zine collection. First, I looked through their spreadsheet to see what zines are already in their collection. I then researched similar policies at peer institutions using both information posted on their websites and survey responses from their employees. My main deliverable is a draft policy incorporating my knowledge about the practices of other libraries with comparable collections. It includes a brief outline of the collections scope and importance, followed by suggestions for where the Austin History Center can acquire zines and how to treat them once they are accessioned. I recommended that they solicit donations on their websites and through fliers placed in local coffee shops, in addition to collecting zines at a local zine festival and buying them directly from distributors. One of my other suggestions was that zines be inventoried upon accession, and then hopefully cataloged at some point so that the collection can be shared through WorldCat and ZineCat.

 

Professional Experience Project

University of Texas Reporting, Analytics and Data Team

with: Siew Ang

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Predicting Foundation Gifting Capacity

Accessing public IRS 990 forms and scraping data of different foundations under management at UT to devise metrics for non parametric predictive models that forecast the giving capacities of the trust funds in the future.

 

Professional Experience Project

Kamana

with: Dave Dworschak, John Kim

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Streamlining Professional Profile Management for Healthcare Professionals

Kamana is a tool that empowers healthcare professionals by providing them with a place to store and update every aspect of their professional profile, and connecting them to staffing agencies for job opportunities. This project focuses on streamlining the user experience of the Kamana app, encouraging users to fill out their profiles more thoroughly to maximize the visibility of their profiles to different agencies and in turn the breadth of their potential opportunities. My design explorations go into how the interface can support users in quickly and accurately filling out their profiles on-the-go, and incentivize them to fill out their profile to completion. The final deliverables included a prototype for entering medical history information, as well as design documentation for a more user-friendly navigation system.

 

Professional Experience Project

Athenahealth

with: Claire Kohler

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Learning the Hard Way: How Young Adults are Navigating the Healthcare System and Opportunities for Improvement

Healthcare is an inevitable service for millions of people, yet it remains a complex, confusing, and often stressful experience to manage. The research conducted explored the complexity that exists specifically for young adults navigating healthcare independently for the first time. After analyzing qualitative and quantitative data from 45 interviews, I created and facilitated two UX design workshops to ideate opportunities and solutions informed by the generative research findings. The final project is a multi-modal presentation that mixes storyboarding, user interface designs, and interactive research readouts that allow stakeholders to truly immerse themselves in the research and experience.

 

Professional Experience Project

Texas Archeological Research Laboratory

with: Marybeth Tomka

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Digitization of the Mission Espiritu Santo Collection

The Mission Espiritu Santo Collection (state site number 41GD1) both an archival and artifact collection from this third location of the Mission in the town of Goliad, Texas. The archival materials contain photographs of artifacts, a complete survey report from the 1933 A.T. Jackson excavation, the Human Osteology Project, and a daily journal from R.E. Beard. These materials are held at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory. The materials in this collection help to illuminate what daily life was like for the Spanish and native inhabitants living in the Mission Espiritu Santo three centuries ago. I am digitizing the collection by scanning the documents and creating a workflow for performing inventory on them in order to make them accessible off-site to a wider academic audience.

 

Professional Experience Project

Texas After Violence Project

with: Jane Field

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Texas After Violence Project Content Migration

Texas After Violence Project (TAVP) is a community-based archive that records, preserves, and provides access to oral history interviews that document experiences with state and interpersonal violence. For my capstone, I migrated about one hundred interviews to Mukurtu Content Management System. This required setting up the structure of the Mukurtu instance, establishing controlled vocabularies for descriptive metadata, implementing the controlled vocabularies by standardizing and creating new metadata, ingesting the interviews and metadata, and writing documentation for the organization. My project enhances the discoverability of the materials in TAVPs collection, allowing users to more easily find what they need.

 

Professional Experience Project

Texas Department of Information Resources

with: Sharon Blue

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IT contract procurement and monitoring

I worked with the Texas Department of Information Resources to develop customized solutions for performing automated checks, data retrieval, and management to support ongoing IT contract procurement and monitoring activities. I worked on 2 projects Texas SmartBuy Dashboard and Vendor Checks. SmartBuy Dashboard: Extract data from Excel worksheets and analyze it to find the status of Texas SmartBuy Memberships for the State of Texas Department of Information Resources (the D.I.R.).Vendor Checks: Create an automated process to complete and store the results of the checks on Vendors using Web Scrapping and browser automation.

 

Professional Experience Project

Texas Grants Resource Center (TGRC) and UT Austin Center for Community Engagement (CCE)

with: Suchitra Gururaj, Amory Krueger

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Constituent Resource Management (CRM) for the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement (DDCE)

The goal of this project with the Texas Grants Resource Center and the Center for Community Engagement of the University of Texas at Austin was to assess the current Constituent Resource Management system of both departments and the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement as a whole, and to provide recommendations for the purchase of a CRM platform based on data collection and management needs identified through that assessment. As outward-facing programs that serve the UT, Austin, and Central Texas communities, efficient and streamlined data management using a CRM with features that best meets the needs of all departments will maximize the reach and measure the impact of DDCE programs and services. This project aims to start the conversation across DDCE departments about how to continue to connect the Division to UTs students, faculty, and community members and measure the impact of these constituents interactions with UTs service-oriented programs.

 

Professional Experience Project

Athenahealth

with: Claire Kohler

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Improving the Experience of Family Caregivers for Adolescents with ADHD

Theres an estimation of 53 million caregivers that provided unpaid care to family members in 2020 in U.S. Study shows about 22% of them felt unable to handle all their caregiving responsibilities. This project will explore how to improve family caregivers' experience for adolescents with ADHD in using athenahealth patient portals. It carries qualitative research on the pain points that potential users had, with a background study on competitors, archival analyses of users' pain points online, ideate solutions to help solve the problems for family caregivers especially those from a less advantageous background, and iterate prototypes to showcase design solutions.

 

Professional Experience Project

Texas Archeological Research Laboratory

with: Marybeth S. Tomka

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Unearthing Texas' Digital Archeology Records

The overarching goal of my capstone project is to facilitate access to files currently stored on a collection of approximately 200 floppy discs for the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL). To that end, I have developed a multi-step workflow starting with converting data from the floppy discs into .e01 disc image files using BitCurator. Disc image files are subsequently scanned through Autopsys digital forensics platform which generates human-readable text that can be transferred into a modern Excel spreadsheet. Disc image files, their associated digital forensics reports, and the reformatted data are then uploaded to a shared UTBox folder along with institutional metadata. The overall outcome of the endeavor has been providing TARL with accurately reformatted files that are accessible with modern software while also retaining all of the original data for their repository.

 

Professional Experience Project

Dell Medical School

with: Mbemba Jabbi

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Using Machine Learning of Demographics and Clinical History to Predict Suicide Outcomes

According to the CDC, there were 47,511 suicide deaths in the US in 2019 alone. This excludes suicide attempts and cases not reported as suicide due to social stigma. Predicting who attempts or commits suicide is challenging, but recent advances in machine learning may allow for improvements. In this project, mood disorder and related clinical features were extracted from free-text descriptions to predict suicide mortality. Using these features and demographic data on deceased individuals collected by the National Institute of Mental Health, a machine learning model was trained to predict suicide/non-suicide outcome with a weighted F-1 score of ~84%.

 

Professional Experience Project

Briscoe Center for American History

with: Jessi Fishman

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Amplifying Women's Voices in the Archives

In order to draw attention to womens histories and stories at the Briscoe Center for American History, I reviewed the finding aids for more than 350 collections containing materials created by women. I focused on a small subset of these collections and I took a multi-method approach to making their materials more findable. My work included writing and editing finding aids to highlight womens lives and contributions, as well as digitizing materials created by women. I also transcribed the 284-page diary of Frances Cox Henderson in order to create a searchable document that would be more accessible for future researchers.

 

Professional Experience Project

Kamana

with: Dave Dworschak, John Kim

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Enhancing the Experience of Kamana’s Healthcare Staffing Software

Kamana simplifies credential and talent management in the healthcare field by providing software solutions for staffing agencies, nurses and allied health professionals. The project contributes to the design strategy of Kamanas B2B product by crafting conceptual designs based on critical thinking and an analysis of the research. The insights are gained from evaluating the existing product along with their competitors, constructing experience and customer journey maps, and an exploration of quantitative data (from surveys and product-analytics). The final contribution to the strategy involves exploring and modifying existing information architecture through site maps, and designing high-fidelity mockups of these concepts in order to validate them with users.

 

Thesis/Masters Report

Faculty Advisor:
Dr. Ciaran Trace

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Seeking Justice under Archival Erasure

This project explores the role of records, recordkeeping and archiving in the legal arguments of Cobell v Salazar a largest class-action lawsuit in the U.S. history. Through close reading and critical discourse analysis of deposition statements, Congressional hearings, witness statements, and legal opinions in this case, it traces the summoning of financial records as evidence of governments performance of its duties and as evidence of its failure to do so. The findings lead to a formulation of several propositions on the co-evolution of governing, record-keeping, and the struggle for social justice.

 

Professional Experience Project

Athenahealth

with: Kenny Rosenberg

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A Usability Study on Athenahealth’s Billing System

Athenahealth's QuickPay payment experience allows consumers to view and pay their medical bills online using a unique access code that they receive in their paper statement. This payment experience has recently undergone an update and redesign process, and in order to gauge the effectiveness of the new design, heuristic evaluations and usability testing was conducted on the beta version of the redesigned prototype. Overall, although the proposed redesigned prototype has some cosmetic issues that need to be addressed, the results found the new prototype design highly usable, and recommendations for next-steps are given based on the outcome of the testing.

 

Professional Experience Project

Athenahealth

with: Ansa Antonishen

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Inclusive Healthcare: Understanding the invisible barriers in the American Healthcare System

The project is a generative research study that delves into individual user choices around their healthcare decisions, and the factors that affect them. There exist barriers in healthcare that influence user decisions - particularly users from diverse populations. One of them is the Social Determinants of Health: socio-economic factors that affect an individuals access and engagement with healthcare. Through moderated and unmoderated interviews, this research study attempts to find user pain points, motivations, biases, and potential solutions to bring awareness about this into the organization, and promote critical thinking when building a more inclusive healthcare service platform.

 

Professional Experience Project

The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

with: Justin Kovar

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Scan with a Plan: The Creation and Standardizion of Digitization Manuals for the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

As a bastion of preservation and access to archival collections, The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History engages with digitization efforts on a frequent basis. Despite this, current guides for digitization efforts act primarily as an appeal for digitization practices and their importance. Furthermore, written over a period of eleven years and by various staff, the existing guides each feature varied scope, purpose, and diction. This project will create a central page within the centers Wiki which hosts accessible and easily understandable guides for station and equipment setup, material handling, and digitization workflows within multiple media formats.

 

Professional Experience Project

Texas Archeological Research Laboratory

with: Marybeth Tomka

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Digitizing Audio Collections at the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory

I worked with the Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL) to digitize their oral history and conference recording collections. With the assistance of the School of Information, I ran mass digitization at the departments Information Technology laboratory to create preservation-quality masters and access copies of the 66 audio cassettes in TARLs collection. Along with digitizing the audio, I also performed maintenance work on the physical cassette materials. After producing the access copies, I created time-stamped transcripts, formatting them to allow them to be both readable to researchers and usable as subtitles for the audio files in a digital asset management system.

 

Professional Experience Project

University of Texas Institute for Geophysics

with: Susanne Morrison

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Documenting Records Management at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics

The University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) is a research unit in the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior records management workflows at UTIG were developed by Brady Cox. I worked with UTIG to digitize personnel files, organize digitized personnel files in Box, update existing workflows, and produce new, detailed workflows in order to improve documentation of the records management process. This process is an important part of initial hire and end of employment at UTIG. Deliverables included a set of detailed workflows, a one-page summary of the detailed workflows, and organized and digitized personnel files stored in Box.

 

Professional Experience Project

Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

with: Olivia Solis

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Legacy Metadata Mapping for the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

The objective of this professional experience project was to develop metadata mapping for the Briscoe Center to migrate its legacy metadata from Dublin Core (DC) and Metadata Object Description Shema (MODS) metadata standards to Resource Description Framework (RDF) for its eventual incorporation into Islandora 8, a digital repository system. To develop my mapping recommendations, I researched the DC to MODS mapping created by my supervisor, Olivia Solis, and the MODS to RDF Mapping Recommendations document created by the Samvera MODS to RDF Working Group.

 

Professional Experience Project

Revify, LLC

with: Ali Ajam

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Resume Reviewer Dashboard Design and Development

Revify helps software engineers land their dream jobs by making it seamless to request a resume/portfolio review from an employee of their dream company. As a resume review platform, its important for Revify to make this process efficient for both parties, the reviewee and the reviewer. Previously, this service was in a proof of concept stage and was using Google Drive as its dashboard for resume reviewers. However, the limitations and constraints posed by Google Drive had made it cumbersome for reviewers to swiftly and efficiently review resumes assigned to them. In this project I tackled design and development of a dashboard for reviewers to provide an efficient and pleasurable experience to those who are willing to give their time and review job seekers resumes and help them navigate the job search process in a more frictionless manner. The design and development process employs best practices from UX design to software development and implementation.

 

Professional Experience Project

Dell Technologies

with: Fleming Seay

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Dell Developer Portal: Competitive Usability Evaluation of API Documentation Sites

This research project explored 8 existing API documentation sites and their respective task completion rates, satisfaction scores, and likes/dislikes from 6 different user personas in order to drive the user experience requirements for the creation of a new developer portal for Dell Technologies. The research consisted of 2-hour one-on-one interview sessions with 17 participants, during which quantitative and qualitative data were collected. This data was then analyzed and a final report and presentation were delivered to the stakeholder team in order to inform the design process of the new site.

 

Professional Experience Project

Institute for Media Innovation

with: S. Craig Watkins

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Chatbot design for parents who are suffering from Postpartum Depression

The project is designing a chatbot for parents who are suffering from Postpartum Depression. We conducted the research related to mental health support tools and compared the existing application in the market. According to the data from Postpartum Depression Support International, we defined the typical working flow of the volunteers to respond to the parents. We collaboratively worked with another team that is focusing on creating an NLP model to integrate into the chatbot system. The final deliverable is a typical conversational flow to provide the parents with some resources based on their needs and preparing the prototype for user testing in the next stage.

 

Thesis/Masters Report

Faculty Advisor:
Dr. Jon Tamir

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A GPU-accelerated MRI Sequence Simulation for Differentiable Optimization and Learning

The Extended Phase Graph (EPG) Algorithm is a powerful tool for MRI sequence simulation and quantitative fitting, but such simulators are mostly written to run on CPU only and (with some exception) are poorly parallelized. A parallelized simulator compatible with other learning-based frameworks would be a useful tool to optimize scan parameters. Thus, we created an open source, GPU-accelerated EPG simulator in PyTorch. Since the simulator is fully differentiable by means of automatic differentiation, it canbe used to take derivatives with respect to sequence parameters, e.g. flip angles, as well as tissue parameters, e.g. T1 and T2.

 

Professional Experience Project

Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center

with: Tanya Zastrow

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Nature Rx: Mapping Outdoor Spaces Across the University Campus to Promote Mental Health and Wellness

Nature Rx is a program that promotes spending time outdoors as a means of improving one's overall mental and physical health. In collaboration with the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, the Counseling and Mental Health Center, and the Longhorn Wellness Center, my goal for this project was to collect data on various outdoor spaces across UTs campus and build a prototype of a story map visualizing these spaces, as well as providing additional information on the benefits associated with each and their accessibility. The story map will eventually be featured on the Longhorn Wellness Centers website.

 

Professional Experience Project

athenahealth

with: Claire Kohler

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Adapting the Patient Healthcare Portal for Postpartum Users

Informed by the current direction of Consumer Health at athenahealth, I adapted the patient-facing healthcare portal to become sensitive to the needs of postpartum mothers. Through user and design research, I learned about the pain points in the current experience and identified areas that needed to be addressed. I brought these insights into UX design and prototyping, focusing on solutions that expand on the existing portal framework and make it easier for mothers to address their mental health, find relevant and reliable information, and manage healthcare for their family.

 

Professional Experience Project

Dell Children's Family Resource Center Library

with: Darlene Ennis

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A Good Book is Good Medicine

My project was to assist the Dell Childrens Family Resource Center Library in formulating a suitable collection of books that were specifically for the purpose of bibliotherapy. To understand the concept more thoroughly I did some research on bibliotherapy and how hospitals have used it in the past, identifying its effectiveness on patients, and completed an additional PowerPoint presentation for the hospital staff on the topic.To form the collection, I looked at a list of books already owned by the library and some of the common topics that were researched by patients, and then looked online for novels whose subject matter was specifically related to the ailments listed. After I found them, I placed them in an Amazon book list created by Darlene Ennis, the director of the center. I also made a list of them categorized by the physical or mental illness discussed within, and shared it with Ms. Ennis on Google Drive. After the list was completed, we discussed ways to indicate that they were related to bibliotherapy, and our ultimate decision was to have them marked with a sticker, possibly one that looks like a row of books and has Healing written on it.The outcome of all this was that I successfully created a list of new books for the library to add to their shelves that would hopefully help patients coping with specific types of ailments.

 

Professional Experience Project

Texas Archeological Research Laboratory

with: Marybeth Tomka

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Processing and Digitization: WPA's Morhiss Mound (41VT1) Primary Documents

The Texas Archeological Research Laboratory (TARL) at the University of Texas at Austin, an unconventional archive, is a nationally recognized archeological research facility and the largest in the state of Texas. Their mission is to collect preserve, and curate archeological specimens and records, train students, conduct archeological research, and disseminate information about Texas archeological legacy. From 1932 to 1939 the Works Project Administration completed site excavations of the Morhiss Mound (41VT1) site in Victoria County, Texas. The primary documents of these excavations, stewarded by TARL and including over 8 linear feet of text documents, photographic prints, nitrate and glass negatives, and maps, were inventoried, organized, treated with preservation techniques, and digitized to ensure the greater preservation of sensitive record formats and allow TARL to provide more expedient and complete access of site records to students and qualified researchers.

 

Professional Experience Project

UT Development - Reporting, Analytics and Data

with: Ang Siew, Neelesh Tekal

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Exploring Data Segmentation and Donation Giving Behaviors

The main aim of the project was to build a machine learning model to predict if a person donates to the university or not. The prediction model uses the demographic information, professional information, educational qualification, and prior donation details as input features. The project flow includes tasks like data collection and cleaning, exploratory data analysis, selecting appropriate algorithms, training the model, and getting accurate predictions. I was able to develop a binary classification model using XGB Classifier with an ROC-AUC score of 0.92. The initial analysis was focused on understanding the demographics of people who donated continuously from 2015-2020. The analysis and the results should help the RAD team to understand the circumstances under which a prospect will donate, the relationship between giving amount and ask amount.

 

Professional Experience Project

Tye Preston Memorial Library

with: Rachel Keeler

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Rural Public Library Communications: Branding and Pandemic-Centric Strategies

Rural public libraries have unique communications challenges during the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. This capstone project was done at Tye Preston Memorial Library in Canyon Lake, Texas with a population of 25,325. This project focused on branding the entire organization by first creating a brand style guide to streamline and create consistency in their digital media message. Next steps included designing social media guidelines and best practices, newsletter recommendations, website enhancements, and a flex library programming strategy. Methodologies were based on qualitative library staff research, library communications literature review, and my professional knowledge of Canyon Lake-specific marketing techniques.

 

Professional Experience Project

Dell Technologies

with: Mustafa Albasha, Michael Shepherd

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GraphQL based UI/UX web service for Services AI Graph Research, Dell Technologies

In support of Dells Data Management research program, the Services AI Research team has determined that UI/UX needs to be foundational to the Architecture of all new Graph data systems. The objective of this project is to create and research front-end web service UIs that enable any user to experience and interact with diverse data and machine intelligence systems in a symbiotic and native way. The end goal is to create a front-end Web Services UI that delivers a UX that allows users to natively interact through GraphQL queries to Dell data integrated into our Graph Management Project.

 

Professional Experience Project

BrightLeaf Group

with: Julienne VanDerZiel

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Research, Design, Repeat: Creating a Delightful Website for the BrightLeaf Group

My project goal was to create a modern and engaging website for the BrightLeaf Group that enables their clients to easily understand the companys brand identity, expertise, and impact. With guidance from the BrightLeaf Groups leadership, I utilized both UX Research and Design methodologies. First, I reviewed the existing site, interviewed stakeholders, and studied competitors sites. Next, I created an information architecture and a low-fidelity prototype, which I tested and refined. Ultimately, I generated a high-fidelity prototype that I tested and handed off to the BrightLeaf Group for further visual design work and implementation.

 

Professional Experience Project

School of Information, UT Austin

with: Eric Nordquist

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Knowledge Management: Increasing Insight Value for a UX Team

UX research is valuable. However, the artifacts, analysis and insights that shape innovation are sometimes lost after a project is completed. This can lead to redundant research or under-utilized reports, which is costly. Repositories and formalized structures for data are therefore important, but the return on investment is sometimes hard to see and hard to sell. My project focused on a small UX research department at an Austin agency. Joining a team that was learning and using a complex UX research method (called Jobs-to-be-done), I used participant observation, journey and ecosystem mapping plus stakeholder interviews to find pain points, learning obstacles and opportunities in their data organization process. Then, referencing theories like the Diffusion of Innovation, I considered the benefits of certain changes and the risks of inaction. Creating a final questionnaire for the team, I had them score pain points based on their role and was able to provide prioritized recommendations for next steps with this data.

 

Professional Experience Project

Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

with: Olivia Solis & David Zepeda

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Extracting and Migrating Legacy Metadata for Bexar Archives Online

Bexar Archives Online is an online repository of digitized colonial records, and their translations, documenting Spanish and Mexican Texas between 1717 and 1836. The Bexar Archives, which contain roughly 300,000 pages, have been managed and preserved by the University of Texas for over a century. In preparation for the implementation of a new content hosting system, I developed a Proof of Concept and project workflow to extract, generate, and structure metadata for the digitized originals and translations using legacy reference materials. I also created and compiled comprehensive documentation on the history of the project and the collection, outstanding issues and potential solutions, and recommendations for broader policies and procedures regarding translation practices.

 

Library Practicum

Barbara Jordan ECPS - Austin Independent School District

with: Kay Gooch

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Curating Book Joy in the Time of Quarantine: A School Library’s Response to Covid-19

For students, parents, and teachers alike, the 2020-2021 school year has been a source of overwhelming challenges. Many students still lack access to the meaningful services offered by both school and public libraries. The objective of this project is to provide literature-based experiences for students and their families through the curation of four Covid-safe school library events at Barbara Jordan Elementary. The Second Thursday Bedtime Story, Books Are Poppin Book Drive, Barbaras Bookshelf Parent Workshop, and the Reading is Dino-Mite Scholastic Book Fair strive to strengthen the school to home connection while making books and reading an authentic source of joy in a time of uncertainty.

 

Professional Experience Project

Permanent Legacy Foundation

with: Robert Friedman

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An Onboarding Experience Designed with Actionable Data

This project addresses a common problem in the startup world: retaining new users. Users come, they create an account, and then they never return. Such was the case with Permanent Legacy Foundation. They wanted to change this pattern and make the usage of their website follow their user growth. I met with the Permanent team weekly, and we decided the best way to address their problem was to design and introduce a user onboarding experience. To make that user experience as successful as possible, I developed a research plan to gather data that would drive the design. Ultimately, the onboarding plan was iterated several times to reflect the data, and recommendations were made to Permanent for changes beyond the onboarding experience to address deeper issues.

 

Professional Experience Project

The Gender and Sexuality Center at the University of Texas at Austin

with: Liz Elsen

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Reading the Rainbow: Evaluating the Collection of the Gender and Sexuality Center’s Ana Sisnett Library

The Gender and Sexuality Center is home to the Ana Sisnett Library and has a large collection of books, magazines, zines, and DVDs. The goal of this project was to evaluate the current selection, cataloging and deselection methods of the library, and recommended practices that streamline collection processes and increase the librarys ability to meet the needs of its patrons. Through research, meetings with stakeholders and focus groups I was able to create a short and long term collection development plan. I also performed cataloging updates and created a new primer focusing on disabilities in the LGBTQ+ community.

 

Professional Experience Project

Bellhop

with: Lauren Mullins

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Automating Monthly Partner Billing Data

This project involved re-regulating Bellhop's operating practices for capturing specific financial data about corporate partners, aligning multiple teams on the source of the data, and querying the company database to execute a single Tableau workbook that standardized the multiple files each separate team was using previously. Creating a single source of truth for financial data gives more transparency into partner-related expenses, and also decreased the work time of multiple teams each month during the billing cycle. The workbook is also structured to be flexible to adjust with the companys rapidly-shifting processes and initiatives in the future.

 

Professional Experience Project

WellSky

with: Carlos Tovar

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Digitizing Health Record Data Management System in Post-Acute Healthcare Company

This project aims at digitizing the health record data management system for stakeholders of healthcare agencies to track and collect incidents from high-risk patients. The existing solution relies on hand-written paper forms, which makes it infeasible for future data analysis. To tackle the problem, we utilize user experience design process to improve the system. Specifically, we adopt the double diamond design process to discover three pain points, then we provide three corresponding solutions to form our final product. The prototype succeeded the user concept testing and is adopted for product development.

 

Professional Experience Project

Texas Historical Commission

with: Jamie Ross

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The Kreische Brewery State Historic Site Collections: An Evaluation of Collection Scope and Condition Assessment

The Kreische Brewery (located in LaGrange) was one of the first commercial breweries in Texas. Founded by a German immigrant and stonemason, Heinrich Ludwig Kreische, and his family in the 1860s, the ruins of the grounds, consisting of the brewery and the Kreische family home, are now an historic site under the purview of the Historic Sites Division of the Texas Historical Commission (THC). The Kreische Brewery State Historic Site Collections include around 375 historical objects and approximately 19 linear feet of records stored at the THCs Curatorial Facility for Archival Research (CFAR) in Austin and around 1,200 objects at the historical site itself. The collections have changed hands four different times, so THCs staff would like to gain intellectual and physical control of their collection. I assisted in this process by performing a collection inventory and assessment, which includes recommendations for future preservation, use, and outreach.

 

Professional Experience Project

Texas Digital Library

with: Lea DeForest

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Open Access Engagement: A Look Into the Repositories Hosted by the Texas Digital Library

Establishing, maintaining, and growing institutional digital repositories is yet another effort librarians make to ensure greater material access and availability. The Texas Digital Library (TDL) hosts such repositories for over 20 member institutions across the state and consistently seeks ways to encourage use of the associated materials. This capstone project was conducted in an effort to understand university-wide use and understanding of institutional repositories, which elucidates patterns of involvement with materials created by each institutions surrounding community and associated ontologies of open access. Interviews were conducted with TDLs member institutions to gain greater insight into how these tools are used across higher education, as well as to provide recommendations geared toward facilitating greater use and engagement with the materials housed within the repositories.

 

Professional Experience Project

the University of Texas at Austin

with: Ying Ding

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COVID-19 Portal: Profiling Researchers, Bio-entities, and Institutions

COVID-19 portal displays the research profiles of scientists, bio entities (e.g., gene, drug, disease), and institutions based on the integration of CORD-19 research literature, COVID-19 related clinical trials, PubMed knowledge graph, and the drug discovery knowledge graph. This portal provides the following profiles related to COVID-19: 1) the profile of a research scientist with his/her COVID-19 related publications and clinical trials 2) the profile of a bio entity which could be a gene, a drug, or a disease with articles and clinical trials mentioned this bio entity; and 3) the profile of an institution with papers authored by researchers.

 

Professional Experience Project

Texas Department of Information Resources and School of Information

with: Sharon Blue and Jacek Gwizdka

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Vendor Check Automation

This project aims to complete vendor checks and store the results as openable documents for the DIR contract managers. It is a python-based program that involves web scraping, database query, and auto-creation of documents. Vendor account information is fetched from Salesforce by using a REST API. This program is primarily for contract managers to perform pipelined checks on a specific vendor. The contract manager only needs to provide the vendor's name or id, and the program will automatically execute all the checks in sequence. The checks include Franchise Tax Status check, HUB Status check, Vendor Performance check, and etc. The output files will be saved on the users laptop.

 

Professional Experience Project

Athenahealth

with: Chris Lovin

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Redesigning the Agenda View for Athena Scheduling Product

The project is to redesign the agenda view for Athena Scheduling Product to provide a better user experience for multiple roles including the front desk, providers and practice managers, who all have unique needs and wants. This redesign also aims to improve the flexibility of the appointment card to contain additional features coming along with COVID-19. The final outcomes will be high-fidelity prototypes of the agenda view displayed on the home page and a skim version to allow providers to put up their schedule aside for quick check.

 

Professional Experience Project

Dell Medical School Library

with: Imelda Vetter

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Dell Medical School LibGuide: Creating and Developing the Graduate Medical Residency Resources Section

My project involved creating and developing the Medical Residency Resources section of the Dell Medical School LibGuide. To start, I explored other medical LibGuides and distributed a survey to the Schools medical residents for input. I then added general information, associations and search help to the Resources section. I then created a separate Mobile Apps section on the LibGuide. The majority of my project was creating sub-sections for five of the Schools residency programs. For each residency program, I created a selection of databases, journals, books, clinical guidelines and associations and societies specific and relevant to each residency.

 

Professional Experience Project

Dell Medical School

with: Justin F. Rousseau, MD.

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Medical Dashboard Development and Visualization for Critical Care Data

The project aims to design and develop a dashboard of the MIMIC-iii dataset for doctors. With the guidance of my supervisors from Dell Medical School, I developed a dashboard application using Cube.js and designed visualization of the MIMIC-iii demo dataset. The application consists of a playground where doctors can try out different graphs with easy drag-and-drop operations, a demo data visualization of various graphs focusing on Sepsis, and a user account system providing a customized dashboard for each account. In conclusion, this is a medical data dashboard application of the doctors, by the doctors, and for the doctors.

 

Library Practicum

Summitt Elementary School

with: Kay Gooch, Denise Richey

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Building a Collection for Early Transitioning Readers

For my capstone project, a school librarian and I built a collection in an elementary school for young readers whos reading level falls between early reader and chapter books. Through creating a list of early chapter book series through Follet Tidal Wave, we built a list of books that are inclusive, diverse, and that fit the appropriate reading level. Through applying to a grant that was created by the PTA association, we received $1,000 that went towards books and storage space. The project represents efforts to include new and diverse books that are available to students who are emerging readers.