MIMS Final Project Showcase

Judges

Session 1

Dina Bseiso (MIMS ’17) started her career working as a user experience researcher at YouTube and is there to this day. Her first team was a horizontal research team that exposed her to various product teams within the company — from VR, live, gaming, and more. A year later she joined the discovery team, becoming the UX research lead for the YouTube homepage and recommendations. Across her years of experience at the company, she’s applied learnings from her time at the I School. From thinking about the power of defaults, applying behavioral economics, or equitable design Dina has led various research efforts from trying to make YouTube products more empowering for their users as well as cater to a diverse range of needs as diverse as the user base is. The focus of her capstone project (VR the Change, a VR experience following a monarch butterfly migration centered around mitigating climate change through everyday action) hasn’t left her. In her free time she admires birds, plants, and flowers; while indoors, she’s playing the latest horror indie game or VR experience.

Jill Blue Lin (MIMS ’08) has extensive experience as a designer and researcher. She’s worked at both startups and Fortune 500 companies, including Autodesk, Salesforce and AWS. Jill specializes in designing for enterprise-scale problems. She is currently a principal designer at Informatica, focusing on AI. Jill also serves on the board of The Potter’s Studio, with a focus on increasing diversity.  

She holds a bachelor’s degree in art and design from MIT, and a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley School of Information.

Steve Trush (MIMS ’18) (he/him) has been involved in securing people and technology for the last two decades in government, academia, and the nonprofit world. He is the founder of West County Labs, a holistic security consultancy for public interest organizations, activists, and journalists facing threats such as cyber attacks, online harassment, doxxing, and disinformation. Before West County Labs, Steve was deputy director at the UC Berkeley School of Information’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity Citizen Clinic where he taught and designed defenses against cybersecurity threats to politically-targeted organizations and communities. He also serves as a board director and researcher for Secure Justice, an Oakland-based non-profit organization that advocates against state abuse of power and for reduction in government and corporate overreach. The challenges of climate change, labor rights, and land rights has inspired him to explore the world of sustainable agriculture–he is currently managing a 10 acre sustainable flower farm in Solano County. Steve graduated from the MIMS program in 2018 where he focused on ICTD, privacy, and policy design.

Session 2

Laura Desmond-Black (MIMS ‘16) is a staff product manager at Guru Technologies, Inc. where she works with the search and discovery team on ML solutions that enable Guru’s customers to easily find the information they are looking for. Before joining Guru in 2020 she spent four years at Workday as a product manager for Workday’s aPaaS solution, Workday Extend, which she helped grow from idea to a significant paying customer base. Prior to Workday she held various roles at Zendesk and Apple after switching into the software industry from architecture. She is a MIMS 2016 graduate and currently lives in San Francisco.

Seema Hari (MIMS ’14) is a non-binary engineer, multi-hyphenated artist and activist. They are currently the head of partner engineering at Snapchat, helping developers build the most innovative integrations inside and outside the Snapchat app. Through their activism they hope to annihilate the caste system and break the stigma around dark skin through their work across mediums. They believe art is the ultimate expression of the self, so their activism is their art — rooted in their multidimensional self, pouring out through multiple art forms like photos, music, poetry and cinema.

Jenny Lo (MIMS ’15) evolved her marketing insights experience into a career in user experience after graduating from the MIMS program when she joined Uber to help guide their expansion into China. The interdisciplinary nature of the program equipped her well for having to distill new regulations, a different urban infrastructure, and social economics. During her time at Uber, she conducted many large-scale design and experiment projects and led research teams across diverse topics. As the Rides research manager, she built interdisciplinary teams to tackle complicated user problems in quant-heavy topics.

Currently, Jenny is the head of research at Grammarly, where she is working on creating AI language-based technologies to help students and professionals improve communication. During her time, she has created a centralized research unit that spans product, design, and marketing, combining quantitative and qualitative research specializations to produce cohesive insights about our product centered around the human experience.

Jenny was born and raised in Hong Kong and received her bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. Her past work has focused on the study of information technology in developing countries (ICTD). Outside of work, she is passionate about experiencing other cultures through different cuisines, board games, and hiking her way through all of the national parks in the US.