Awards

Congratulations to the winners and thank you to our sponsors.

Autodesk Best Project Award

This award will highlight the best executed project, including review of factors such as quality of the project execution, feasible outcomes and follow up, strong verbal presentation of material, clear presentation of material on poster, and professionalism of poster and student presenters.

This award is sponsored by Autodesk.

2020 Winners

First Place: Facilitating Communication Among Immigration Advocates // SI 487: User Experience Final Project

Chelsea Ma, Samuel Wood, Alexandra Cortez, Casey Tin

Immigration Advocates Network (IAN) is dedicated to expanding access to legal resources for immigration advocates. Currently, members communicate primarily through listservs, which can be inefficient and overwhelming. We designed a private forum to make communication easier for IAN members.

Honorable Mention: Discovering Discrepancies in the EPA's Motorcycle Certification Process // SI 485: Data Analytics Final Project

Kendall Dyke, Hailey Harris, David Kimmel, Andrew Dicks

Identifying discrepancies between highway motorcycle manufacturer certification reports to the EPA and what manufacturers actually sell to customers. Our process involved web scraping an online motorcycle forum and performing data analysis comparing the EPA's dataset to the data reported online.

Comerica BSI Capstone Final Project Award

All BSI students are required to complete a final project with a external client. Projects in this category are in the areas of social media, user experience and design, and information analytics. Highest consideration is for projects that demonstrate theories and methods taught at UMSI, a clear execution plan, feasible recommendations, and high value for the client organization.

This award is sponsored by Comerica.

2020 Winners

First Place: Great Lakes Water Safety Consortium // SI 487: User Experience Final Project

Julia Lawson, Rebecca Penny, Sydney Lash, Charles Beach

The Great Lakes Water Safety Consortium (GLWSC) is a 501c3 nonprofit organization based in Ann Arbor, with a mission to help people safely enjoy the Great Lakes, and a long-term vision of ending drowning. The ultimate goal of GLWSC is to keep people safe in the Great Lakes by providing life-saving information and easily accessible resources. The team’s first goal for this project was to understand GLWSC's users and their needs, in hopes of reaching a broader audience and providing the most beneficial means of communication and engagement. After months of research, the final deliverable is a fully functioning website redesign prototype.

Honorable Mention: UM Heinz C. Prechter Bipolar Research Program Visualization Project // SI 485: Data Analytics Final Project

Shelby Chasin, Deeya Naval, Erin Saada, Akhila Kadiyala

We created an interactive time-series visualization that tracks questionnaire data and scores per patient. The visualization will help the research team understand where data entry errors occur, how patients complete surveys relative to others, and patients’ overall psychiatric/ bipolar score.

Community Engagement Award

This award is for projects aimed to serve the public good in the public/nonprofit sector or citizen-centered. Projects should demonstrate engagement with government, community, or local non-profits. Strongest consideration will be awarded to projects which work with communities in Southeast Michigan and demonstrate evidence of innovation in concept, design, methodology, process and/or outcome.

2020 Winners

First Place: Care for Corona // Independent Project

Avantika Bagri

A website that shows students and alumni which small businesses near their college campus need financial help due to the pandemic. Individuals can then donate to a business of their choosing.

Honorable Mention: Mercy Education Project // SI 487: User Experience Final Project

Maya Genson, Theresa Nguyen, Serena Sabuda, Savannah Cooper

Mercy Education Project is a Detroit based non-profit that provides free education for underprivileged girls and women. The scope of our project is to redesign their current website so that they are able to attract more donors, as well as making it easier for potential volunteers and students to find the necessary information about them, and allowing the new site to be easily editable by MEP staff. We utilized Squarespace as the platform for the new website to meet the needs of donors, students, staff, and volunteers.

U-M Zell Lurie Institute Innovation and Entrepreneurship Award

This award category is for projects that demonstrate a high degree of innovation, self-agency, risk-taking, and/or entrepreneurism. Students or teams that embraced the opportunity to create value through new innovative solutions that have a positive impact, are collaborative in nature, and demonstrate success in uncertainty will be highly considered.

This award is sponsored by the Zell Lurie Institute at the University of Michigan.

2020 Winners

First Place: YoungRead for Teachers in Rural Elementary Chinese Schools // Independent Project

Sophie Niu, Zixi Li, Botao Lu, Vincent Qiu, Jennifer Huang

Rural elementary school students in China are disadvantaged by limited availability of out-of-class educational resources. We designed YoungRead, a platform that promotes education equity. This project also won 3rd place in the 2020 James A. Kelly Learning Levers education technology innovation competition.

Honorable Mention: BackPac Partner App Redesign // SI 487: User Experience Final Project

Michelle Phillips, Laila Elnaggar, Carrington Tubman

Our project entailed re-designing the Partner Application for a new Ann Arbor start-up BackPac. We re-organized the interface into five easy to use sections: On-boarding, Tutorial, Create, Track and Profile. We conducted several rounds of research and testing, and we feel confident that we created a compelling experience for Volunteer Coordinators to create and track their outreach events.

UMSI Diversity Committee Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award

This award is to recognize students or teams in which the primary goal, inclusive of the participants and methods used in the project, is in support of UMSI's stated 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." Project scope can focus on UMSI, the University of Michigan, other communities or society at large.

This award is sponsored by the UMSI Diversity Committee.

2020 Winners

First Place: Hidden Treasures // SI 548: Principles of Software Design for Learning

Deepti Pandey, Allison Jordet, Louise Liu

An augmented reality app to assist first time visitors to the US feel more included in the US culture.

Honorable Mention: Community and Control in a Colonial Collection: The Dean C. Worcester Photographic Collection // SI 699 Mastery Course: Digital Curation

Emma De Vera

While previous work on ethics and access in information studies has touched on other indigenous groups, this project will explore these themes as they apply to Filipino groups and their materials. This project concentrates on these issues and the Dean C. Worcester Photographic Collection. This collection contains graphic photographs depicting nude Filipino youth and deceased individuals. This project seeks to create a protocol detailing who has access to these images and who makes these decisions. By consulting Philippines scholars and community stakeholders, this project produces guidelines about access and control, offering a case study of ethical frameworks for Filipino collections.

Faculty Choice

This award is chosen by UMSI Faculty members.

2020 Winners

First Place: Mapping Memories of Cape Town’s District Six: Am Interdisciplinary Approach // Global Information Engagement Program (GIEP)

Vaness Cox, Ph.D., Valyn Dall, Vincent Qiu, Jessica Yelk

Together with the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, we published an online map capturing life in the District Six community where, later during apartheid, residents were removed and buildings were demolished: https://bit.ly/districtsixmapping

Honorable Mention: Converting Volunteers to Donors: Why Data Collection + Migration across Platforms Matters! // Alternative Spring Break

Thomas Krouse, Zeping Tao, Lingyun Guo, Ziwei Wang

This project shows why front-end and back-end integrations across platforms matters.

$1000 was awarded for the first place project in each category

$200 was awarded for honorable mention in each category

Report abuse