The School of Information’s May 2025 Commencement presented an opportunity to honor faculty and student achievements.
Dean Eric Meyer presented awards for outstanding capstone projects from the Master of Information Management and Systems program, the Master of Information and Data Science program, and the Master of Information and Cybersecurity program.
Students in the MIMS, MIDS, and MICS programs voted for their most outstanding instructors and gave awards to their classmates.
James R. Chen Award for Outstanding MIMS Final Project, 2025
Session 1
In Accra, Ghana, floods are a daily problem, disrupting daily life and endangering citizens. To combat this, the team created FloodNavigator — a community-driven platform for sharing and viewing real-time flood conditions. Unlike typical flood alert systems that rely solely on sensors or predictive modeling, FloodNavigator blends low-bandwidth technology with deep community engagement to build a trustworthy, hyperlocal information ecosystem.
Session 2
With an ever changing modern social existence there has been a growing desire to find and cultivate community in our daily lives. Brain Type is a video game designed to be played concurrently and/or asynchronously within physical community and group spaces. Brain Type successfully brings players in to a fun and ludic experience while also helping fulfill social elements that many players seek and desire in modern games.
Hal R. Varian MIDS Capstone Award, Spring 2025
The streets we live on are often filled with various obstacles, and unexpected hazards can arise at any moment, making it challenging for visually impaired people to walk safely.
SafeWalk is a tool designed specifically to aid visually impaired individuals navigate these streets securely. SafeWalk identifies obstacles near the user and provides timely audio alerts using the fine-tuned object detection model on-device. Additionally, through the integrated visual language model, users can receive detailed descriptions or ask questions about images captured in real-time through their phone’s camera.
Lily L. Chang MICS Capstone Award, Spring 2025
QR codes are increasingly commonplace in restaurants, on flyers, in emails, and in your everyday life.
TrustQR empowers users to navigate the digital landscape safely by instantly verifying the safety of QR codes. With a simple, user-friendly interface, TrustQR provides clear alerts when a scanned QR code leads to a suspicious or malicious URL. This ensures users don’t accidentally navigate to harmful sites or fall victim to phishing scams, malware downloads, or other cyber threats.
For more information on previous MIDS and MICS Capstone awards, please check out our Summer 2024 winners and Fall 2024 winners.
Faculty Awards
Excellence in Teaching Award (MIMS program): Hany Farid, Professor for INFO 206A. Introduction to Programming and Computation; INFO 206B. Introduction to Data Structures and Analytics; and INFO 290T. Computer Vision.
Excellence in Teaching Award (MIDS program): Mark Labovitz, Lecturer for DATASCI 203. Statistics for Data Science.
Excellence in Teaching Award (5th Year MIDS program): Paul Laskowski, Professor for DATASCI 203. Statistics for Data Science.
Excellence in Teaching Award (MICS program): Kim Jones, Lecturer for Cyber 200. Beyond the Code: Cybersecurity in Context.
Student Awards
Student with the Most Spirit (MIMS): Miguel Rodriguez-Arias
Outstanding Teaching Assistant (MIMS): Aishwarya Sriram, INFO 153A. Front-End Web Architecture and INFO 153B. Back-End Web Architecture.
Outstanding Teaching Assistant (MIDS): Rachel Gao, DATASCI 266. Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning.
