Master of Information Management and Systems (MIMS) alums Evan Haas, Joshua Mussman, Monica P., and Noah Baier are the winners of the James R. Chen Award, for their project, AV Watch.
The team created an AV incident reporting platform aimed at empowering people to reveal the street-level incidents occurring in their communities.
We spoke to the team to learn more —
What inspired your project? How did you decide on the concept?
Joshua: Transportation touches so many people every day. Our team is inspired by new transportation possibilities, with autonomous vehicles (AVs) having so much unrealized potential. When initially interrogating the problem spaces between AVs and information, it quickly became clear how much room for improvement there is around AV safety.
Evan: We wrestled with this inspiration: we’re letting Google (Waymo), Amazon (Zoox), and Tesla further into our lives as autonomous vehicles become more ubiquitous. How can communities and policymakers shape how big tech, including autonomous vehicles, spreads?
What was the timeline or process like from concept to final project?
Evan: Starting at the end of our fall semester, we spent a lot of time asking questions to I School professors and contacts in adjacent spaces for feedback. We also went to UC Berkeley events hosted by the Institute of Transportation Studies and the Haas School of Business to see how autonomous vehicles are being thought of from a business, policy, and community involvement perspective.
Once we had a better sense of our problem space, we explored spinning up a prototype quickly through vibecoding. This allowed us to get a lot of informal feedback from colleagues to scope down our minimum viable product before serious feature implementation and front-end design work started. While we worked on the prototype, we were also marketing for a survey of AV experiences, like posting flyers all around San Francisco and sharing it across social media.
After collecting more feedback from classmates, professors, experts (like California State AV Policy Analysts) and a review of our survey data of 150+ people across cities where AVs currently operate, we started the development of back-end and front-end systems for AV Watch. We then ran usability tests to quickly iterate on our product and compared it in testing to our main competitor (SF 311) to demonstrate how we have a competitive advantage in usability. We spent the last week before our presentation really focused on how we presented the storyline of our final project, to demonstrate that our work was purposeful and thoughtfully implemented.
Joshua: The process was a great exercise in iteration. We gave every step in the process as much effort as we could to ensure a complete product for the final project showcase. Many people took the time to share their feelings and guidance with us along the way, and we are grateful for all of them!
How did you work as a team?
Noah: Our team blend was perfect. We had a researcher, a product manager, a designer, and an engineer, which made dividing the work feel natural and very much in line with the I School spirit. Beyond just splitting tasks, we learned a lot from each other through our meetings, calls, and check-ins. On paper, our routine was to meet at least once a week as a team and once every two weeks with our advisor. In reality, we met far more than that. Between classes, over dinner in the evenings, and even when we were just hanging out as friends, our conversations would naturally turn into working sessions. That often meant working late into the night, but I thoroughly enjoyed every bit of it. It's a project we're all passionate about, and, most importantly, we were working with great people who became close friends along the way.
Monica: Like Noah mentioned, our team was very well balanced, with each of us bringing different strengths to the project. While we all had our own areas of expertise, what helped us most was working together through every phase of the project. Whether it was doing outreach, conducting user interviews, or helping shape the user experience, we all had a hand in the work, even if it didn’t traditionally fit our individual roles. We were always willing to help each other out at any hour, from refining our website text to running our presentation scripts a million times, to make sure our team felt confident every step of the way.
Joshua: AV Watch is the product of hundreds of hours of hard work, made easier by our awesome team dynamic. We are each experts in our own right, bringing unique and complementary value to the team. We always respected that and trusted one another.
How did your I School curriculum help prepare you for this project? Which course in the program was uniquely helpful in preparing you for your capstone project and why?
Evan: Judd’s Product Design Leadership Workshop gave us a chance to essentially gather a focus group of 20 students and spend 30 minutes asking them about our product. By leading with a desire for our classmates not to be nice (Joshua specifically asked the class, “What’s your biggest disappointment?”), we got loose, honest feedback from our class. I also want to credit Steve’s UX Research class, Laith’s Qualitative Research Methods class, Stef’s UX Design class, and Morgan’s Social Issues of Information class for giving us the academic background and language to run good research and be really thoughtful about the problems we’re trying to solve. I also want to shout-out classes in City Planning (Transportation Policy) and Haas (Marketing Research) that helped us build connections outside of the I School, which we used to support expert outreach and further establish the background to connect with folks in these spaces.
“The impact is that people report what they witness, those reports inform policy, and that policy governs the vehicles. The technology can improve, policy can adapt to real stories from the street, and safety improves, which is our ultimate goal.”
Monica: I second a lot of the classes Evan mentioned. I also want to shout out Stef Hutka’s UX for AI class, Kay Ashaolu’s Front-End and Back-End classes, and Laith Ulaby’s Interaction Design class for giving us a strong foundation in design, research, and development skills to make this project possible. These professors, along with many others, were extremely helpful in and outside of the classroom to help us push our project forward and guide us through our next steps, so a huge shout out and thank you to them!
Do you have any future plans for the project? Do you plan on continuing the work and if so, what are you most excited about?
Noah: Even though we’re all graduating and starting full-time jobs, we want to keep working on this project. Through the many conversations we've had with professors, experts in the field, and industry leaders, we've come to recognize just how important this work is. So we plan to continue it on the side.
We’re realistic that this is a significant time commitment. Our hope is to keep working with the I School and to partner with future students or Ph.D.s to carry it forward together. What we're most excited about is scaling. We have a solid foundation and we've started getting the word out, but we really want to make sure people know AV Watch exists. So that when they witness an incident, they know exactly where to go, and they tell their friends too.
This is a non-profit. We’re not looking to make money from it, and we’re not chasing daily active users or similar metrics (that wouldn’t fit the nature of the platform). It’s an incident reporting tool, so we actually hope people don’t need to come to us every day. But when they do witness something (maybe once every few months) we just want them to know where to go: avwatch.org.
How could this project make an impact, or, who will it serve?
Noah: We believe AV Watch can have a real impact on the future of autonomous driving. It serves the people and communities that autonomous vehicles operate in and gives them a voice in how the technology develops. As we learned at the I School, technology doesn’t operate in a vacuum. When something as powerful as autonomous driving is released on public roads, there are so many more factors that deserve consideration. We want to make sure everyone has a say, not just the big tech players.
The impact is that people report what they witness, those reports inform policy, and that policy governs the vehicles. It’s a win-win, because more accurate data makes everything better. The technology can improve, policy can adapt to real stories from the street, and safety improves, which is our ultimate goal.
Now that you’ve finished your capstone, what advice would you give yourself at the start of the program? What do you wish Day One you knew?
Joshua: It’s never too early to start thinking about capstone, but someday it will be too late. Embrace who you are and the reasons for undertaking MIMS, and keep asking questions about the things that keep you going.
Evan: I’d also highly recommend leveraging capstone for networking in your job search. Not like: “I’d love your feedback on my capstone and also a job;” more like using it to establish connections with folks who get to see what you’re passionately working on in grad school, and keeping those connections if an opportunity around one of those folks pops up.
Monica: If I could go back and give myself one piece of advice, it would be to trust myself and the skillset I’m building. Coming into the program, I often underestimated what I was capable of creating, and I wish I had known sooner how much I would grow over the next two years. Working on AV Watch taught me that with a strong team, a shared vision, and a willingness to tackle difficult problems, you can accomplish a lot. I also learned how important it is to lean on the people around you. Some of my biggest growth came from learning alongside my teammates and facing challenges that pushed me beyond what I thought I was capable of. Their support, along with that of our capstone advisor, faculty, staff, and the broader I School community, made it possible to turn our idea into something real.
Anything else you’d like to share?
Evan: If you see an AV incident, please share at avwatch.org!!!
Noah: We’d love the support of the I School and future students in keeping this project going. We believe AV Watch tackles an issue that will only grow more important over time, and we'd love to collaborate with new students and members of the I School community to keep AV Watch running and help it scale.
