Master's Final Projects: 2008 Judges

Track 1 — Information Policy and Management

Mano Marks
Mano Marks is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google. His primary interests are in Document Engineering, all things Geo, the non-profit community, history, and video games. He received a MIMS from UC Berkeley's School of Information in 2006, a Masters in History from Columbia in 1993, and a BA in History from UC San Diego in 1992.

Margaret Spring
Margaret Spring is a technical consultant in the design of end-user software, information architecture, and process analysis for software development. Her professional experience has focused on software for financial services and social advocacy. Current work focuses on helping large organizations develop software development lifecycles that creatively combine various methodologies to determine the optimal processes for an organization. Margaret has a master's degree from the I School and regularly uses skills learned there as she works to persuade colleagues that product usability techniques should also be applied to assess business process and the likely success of development lifecycle strategies. As an undergraduate at Northwestern University she double majored in Political Science and International Relations. She has worked with Ivar Jacobson Consulting, Standard Insurance, Wells Fargo, Charles Schwab, Merrill Lynch, Chicago Board of Trade, GetActive Software (now Convio), the Internet Archive, San Francisco Women's Political Committee, and PolicyLink.

Annie Yeh
Annie Yeh is the program development officer for "Big Ideas @ Berkeley," which provides funding, support and encouragement to over 90 interdisciplinary teams of UC Berkeley students who are tackling regional, national, or global challenges such as safe drinking water, clean energy, global poverty reduction, public health, and the future of the Information Society. Annie mentors and advises students receiving funding from "Big Ideas" and works with campus departments, Cal alumni, industry, donors, and foundations to build a community of support for "Big Ideas." Annie previously worked in the computer science education and e-learning industries; she holds a Masters degree from the School of Information, UC Berkeley, where she served as President of the Information Management Students Association and worked as a researcher for the Interactive University Project. Additionally, Annie is an accomplished musician/cellist and recently released a debut Jazz album, 'Something New.' She holds a Masters degree in Music (cello performance) from Ohio University and a B.A. in Asian Studies and Pre-Medicine from the University of Pennsylvania.

Track 2 — Information and User-Centered Design

Allison Bloodworth
Allison Bloodworth is a Senior User Interaction Designer at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently working on the Fluid Project, an effort to improve the usability and accessibility of several community source software projects (Sakai, uPortal, Moodle, Kuali Student, and Open Collection). Allison uses user-centered design processes to improve the user experience of these community source projects, and has led several campus IT projects including the development of the UC Berkeley Calendar Network. In May 2004 she graduated from UC Berkeley’s School of Information with a Masters in Information Management & Systems.

Aaron Marcus
Mr. Marcus is the founder and President of Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc. (AM+A). A graduate in physics from Princeton University and in graphic design from Yale University, in 1967 he became the world's first graphic designer to be involved fulltime in computer graphics. In the 1970s he programmed a prototype desktop publishing page layout application for the Picturephone (tm) at AT&T Bell Labs, programmed virtual reality spaces while a faculty member at Princeton University, and directed an international team of visual communicators as a Research Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu. In the early 1980s he was a Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, founded AM+A, and began research as a Co-Principal Investigator of a project funded by the US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In 1992, he received the National Computer Graphics Association's annual award for contributions to industry. In 2007, he was named an AIGA Fellow by the AIGA Cross-Cultural Design Center. He is the Editor-in-Chief of User Experience (UX), Editor of Information Design Journal, and is a regular columnist of Interactions. He is also on the Editorial Boards of Visible Language, Universal Access Journal, and the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction.

Allison Woodruff
Allison Woodruff is a research scientist at Intel Research Berkeley. Her primary research interests include domestic computing, environmentally sustainable technologies, mobile and communication technologies, and ubiquitous computing. Prior to joining Intel, Woodruff worked as a researcher at PARC from 1998-2004. Woodruff holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, an MS in Computer Science and an MA in Linguistics from the University of California, Davis, and a BA in English from California State University, Chico.

Track 3 — Information System Implementation

Anirvan Chatterjee
Anirvan Chatterjee is the CEO of BookFinder.com. A former SIMS/I School student, he turned his network agent class project into a consumer ecommerce search company, offering a unified point of entry for 150 million new, used, rare, and out of print books from sellers in 59 countries. BookFinder.com is now an independently managed subsidiary of Victoria, BC-based AbeBooks. Prior to graduate school, Anirvan was the CTO of AtreNet, leading a team developing infrastructure for corporate client websites. His areas of interest include book metadata, internationalization, data normalization, and open data and networks.

Peter Merholz
Peter Merholz is President and co-founder of Adaptive Path, an experience strategy and design firm. He is perhaps best known for his blog, peterme.com, publishing since 1998, where he often writes on topics of design, business, and technology. He's most notorious for coining the word "blog" in 1999, and hopes you don't use it against him. He graduated from Cal in 1993 with a B.A. in anthropology. He lived at Cloyne Court Hotel and yet never needed vaccinations for hepatitis. Caffe Nefeli still makes his favorite cappuccino.

Jeff Ubois
Jeff Ubois is exploring new approaches to p2p and personal archiving for Fujitsu Labs of America in Sunnyvale, California, and to video archiving for Intelligent Television and Thirteen/WNET in New York. In 2004–2005, Jeff was a staff research associate at the School of Information, where he investigated barriers to accessing television archives. For the Internet Archive, Jeff has worked on managing orphan works, maintaining archival integrity, and managing the collection and retention of digital library usage data. Jeff has worked as a consultant to the Internet Archive, the Sunlight Foundation, OCLC, Cisco Systems, and the Economist Intelligence Unit. He has been published in First Monday, D-Lib, Release 1.0, Computerworld, Information Week, Messaging News, CFO, and the publications of Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based consultancy specializing in collaboration software.