Master of Information and Data Science (MIDS) alums Beth McBride, Ishani Cheshire, Indri Adisoemarta, Chase Martin, and Ambro Quach are the winners of the Sarukkai Social Impact Award, for their project, Arc Radius.
The Sarukkai Social Impact Award was established by Sekhar and Rajashree Sarukkai in 2021. It recognizes capstone and final projects with the greatest potential to solve important social problems.
The MIDS team developed a platform that helps LGBTQ+ young adults understand how legislation affects their rights and provides tools to respond.
We spoke to the team to learn more —
What inspired your project? How did you decide on the concept?
Ambro: In the LGBTQ+ civic-tech space, the barrier to information is obvious. Advocacy platforms from incredible organizations like the ACLU or HRC operate as ‘multi-hop’ systems: they surface harmful bills, but redirect users to official government websites filled with dense legal jargon. The problem isn’t a lack of alerts; it’s a lack of comprehension.
Instead of just routing people away, we developed ArcRadius as an AI-driven policy navigator to translate that ‘middle part’—what a bill actually does, who it impacts, and how to respond. The goal is to give people the autonomy to fully understand the legislation affecting them so they can engage meaningfully.
“This human-centered thinking was core to all of our decisions, from the technical architecture to the font and color choices.”
We also recognized that this project was an opportunity for representation. Looking at past Berkeley MIDS capstones, we realized there hadn’t been a project specifically dedicated to the LGBTQ+ community, and we wanted to change that. In the spirit of Fiat Lux, we built ArcRadius as a tool for our community, hoping to create a space that future cohorts can see themselves in. We are incredibly grateful for its warm reception and the impact it is already making.
What was the timeline or process like from concept to final project?
Indri: The first two weeks of ArcRadius were focused on refining our project proposal and defining the project scope. During this phase, we identified the policy datasets we would use and selected the ACLU datasets as ground truth for classification.
How did you work as a team? How did you work together as members of an online degree program?
Ambro: One of our team’s greatest strengths was that everyone brought a unique background and skillset. Beth, with her Ph.D. in education, led product framing & strategy, UX research, and interaction & evaluation design. Chase and I tackled system architecture, end-to-end deployment ,and API integration. Indri and Ishani owned the complete machine learning and data pipelines. But we each contributed to every part of ArcRadius.
Navigating an online program meant balancing complex outside responsibilities. We cared about each other’s well-being as much as the project’s success. That showed up as a kind of proactive ownership: if someone had the bandwidth to take on one more thing, they did.
Whenever the scope of the project felt overwhelming, the trust and mutual empathy we built became our psychological safety net, allowing us to focus our energy entirely on the work. We were building a platform centered around autonomy and empowerment, and we practiced those same values internally as a team.
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?
Chase: The MIDS program prepared us to approach problems from multiple perspectives rather than focusing on technology alone. Across the program, we learned to combine machine learning, software engineering, data management, visualization, and human-centered design into complete, practical solutions.
Our foundational coursework in research methods, particularly MIDS 201, reinforced the importance of validating assumptions with users before building. That mindset was central to our project development. We knew our solution needed to be technically sound, but we also understood it had to address real user needs in a clear and usable way. We could not build in a vacuum. Engaging users at multiple stages of the design and development process reflected what we learned in MIDS.
On the technical side, MIDS 255, Machine Learning Systems Engineering, gave us hands-on experience with AWS infrastructure, robust testing practices, system design, and deploying machine learning applications. That experience was especially valuable when we needed to connect our GraphRAG pipeline to a FastAPI backend that could support the user interface and deliver results reliably.
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?
Indri: The feedback we’ve received so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and we plan to continue developing ArcRadius by incorporating the ideas we’ve gathered from users. One feature users are particularly interested in is the ability to explore and compare legislative trends across states, enabling broader policy analysis beyond individual bills. We also plan to implement explainability methods to provide greater transparency into how our bill classification models make their predictions.
Beyond technical improvements, we’re excited to engage more closely with the communities our platform is designed to support. We’ve begun reaching out to organizations like The Trevor Project, Equality California, and the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center to socialize ArcRadius with the users that need it most. We also hope to partner with legal and public policy experts to strengthen the platform’s domain expertise and ensure our results remain accurate and relevant.
How could this project make an impact, or, who will it serve?
Beth: ArcRadius was designed mainly for LGBTQ+ young adults navigating a rapidly changing legislative landscape. Many of the policies affecting this community are written in complex legal language, making it difficult to understand how they may affect everyday life. By translating legislation into accessible language and connecting that understanding with meaningful opportunities for civic engagement, ArcRadius lowers the barrier to civic participation. Instead of asking users to become policy experts, it helps them quickly understand what matters, why it matters, and how they can respond.
Ishani: Being part of a marginalized community while staying engaged with politics is incredibly emotionally taxing. You’re trying to parse information from conflicting sources while navigating a media landscape that can be hostile to your very existence. I remember in our first round of stakeholder interviews, one queer teenager admitted to me that this often made him feel tempted to disengage from politics entirely. ArcRadius removes that mental burden, connecting our users to legislation and letting them contact their representatives with a single click.
You were recognized with the Sarukkai Social Impact Award. How does that feel?
Beth: It is incredibly meaningful. Throughout the project, our goal was to create something that could genuinely help people navigate an increasingly complex policy environment while being technically solid.
Receiving the Social Impact Award is especially rewarding because it recognizes both the technical work and the human-centered thinking behind our project. This human-centered thinking was core to all of our decisions, from the technical architecture to the font and color choices.
Ishani: Beth is completely right that when we were developing ArcRadius, human-centered thinking was completely central to our decisions. We always prioritized trust and safety in our build, even when it wasn’t easy. One moment that comes to mind was the two-week-long manual review, where we read six full-length legislative bills for each model response to verify accuracy. It wasn’t fun, but it was what our users needed to feel fully confident in our product. And for that, it was worth it.
There were many moments like that where we stood at a crossroads between two potential implementations: one faster and cheaper, the other slower but more trustworthy. It often felt scarier to pick the slower route, especially in the context of a time-locked Capstone class—but when we started our user testing, it became immediately clear the difference it made to our users. It’s amazing to be recognized for that commitment.
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?
Beth: You truly get out of this program what you put into it. The courses provide an incredible foundation, but some of the most valuable experiences come from the choices you make outside the assignments. Since this is an online program, you need to be intentional and proactive about the projects you take on, the teammates you work with, and the opportunities you pursue. Reach out to classmates whose work you admire, volunteer for projects that push you outside your comfort zone, and don't be afraid to take on something ambitious. Looking back, the projects where I learned the most were the ones that felt just a little beyond what I thought I could do at the time (for example, this capstone project felt daunting at the beginning of the semester!).
