Advancing knowledge and practice wherever people interact with information and technology

On the morning of Sunday, May 17, 168 students from the I School class of May 2020 graduated, but instead of the typical celebration on campus, graduates, families, and friends watched a tribute from their homes. Students shared photos of family watch sessions on Zoom, and the comments in the YouTube chat flowed with messages of congratulations.   

“It’s dynamic times like these when the cross-disciplinary expertise and blend of quantitative and qualitative knowledge that we see in our I School graduates is of paramount importance,” said Dean Jennifer Chayes. “Now more than ever we need experts to help surface the sources of misinformation, to visualize trends in disease emergence and spread, to find ways to leverage health data while still protecting privacy.”

The School of Information’s Tribute to Spring 2020 Graduates celebrated outstanding MIMS, MIDS, and MICS capstone projects and faculty and students.

The Chen Award-winning MIMS projects, respectively, attempt to digitize and optimize street sweeping with “Sweep Smart,” a tool designed to minimize potential street sweeping associated parking violations, and promote the creation and consumption of VR content with “Malloci,” a WebVR framework that uses Natural Language Processing and information visualization techniques.

The Varian Award-winning MIDS project “Sidewaukee” is improving sidewalk accessibility for an estimated 15 million wheelchair and mobility-challenged users in the US.

The Chang Award-winning MICS project “That’s a Hard Pass” provides a password manager that encrypts all data on the client-side before it is stored in the cloud by using a simple hardware token.