ISSD Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Presentation 12/9 (regularly scheduled class time, Room 202)

• Frontline World - Vision 2015 (Donna Leo, Michael Porath, Jeremy Whitaker)

Frontline World is a non-profit journalistic organization and a subsidiary of WGBH's Education Foundation. FLWorld is partnered with the highly regarded Frontline, but breaks from Frontline's more traditional documentary, long format journalism, by producing shorter Internationally themed pieces, emphasizing the web for added value, distribution, and user engagement.

In order to define a service system for Frontline World, we outlined a vision for five years from now, naming it Vision 2015. The service system takes into consideration the type of audience that the FLWorld team wants to serve. A central entity ("the portal") serves both as the metaphor and the back end system for an integrated process workflow that is used by editors, consumers, journalists and syndication services as primary stakeholders. The service system evolves around the portal.

• Education Portfolio Service System (Erin Knight, Nathan Gandomi, JinYoung Baik)

There are two common issues students and instructors face in most education environments.  The first is that there are typically a large set of documents and resources - including course content provided by the instructor, student-generated content and social content - in multiple formats and mediums, that the students must manage for each course. This issue is exponentially increased when students are enrolled in multiple courses.  The second issue is that for each course, all of the content and material is typically "stuck" within the coursesite and essentially disappears once the course is completed.  Both of these issues make it difficult to revisit content or to find connections across resources, thus limiting the amount of reflection and synthesis students can achieve.

In response to these issues, e-Portfolios emerged in the last 10 years, offering content management, lifetime access to content, and transformation tools to students. However, the existing e-Portfolio systems require the student to manually upload or publish content to the portfolio.  While this starts to mitigate the issues, it still puts a heavy burden on the student and only captures content that the student thought to upload at that particular time, which still limits any comprehensive reflection or discovery across material, especially after some time has passed.  Additionally, these systems typically save content in the traditional desktop manner, with content buried within folders and difficult to reconnect.

We are developing a Portfolio Service System that automatically captures all content from the course site and organizes it based on the tags provided by the class, as well as the contextual metadata provided by the course site.  And instead of presenting the information as a set of folders, our system will present "learning trails" and a wider "learning graph" so that students can traverse the entire learning experience, and find connections within and across courses.

• Diasporta (A Brooks, M Manoochehri, S Lee, B Ekaterin)

Diasporta helps to satisfy social gaps in the way sports media is consumed, by meeting the needs of geographically dispersed sports fans who crave the intermittent social contact that characterizes supporting professional sports teams. Disporta will provide fans with tools to meet other "expat" fans near them, and provide  them with low-effort ways in which they can leverage already existing social networks to make support of their favorite teams more enjoyable.

• MUSE (Jessica Voytek, Ljuba Miljkovic, Eva Reinstadler)

Our project proposes to design a mobile application for visitors to interact with art in ways that are not yet widely available, and an affordable, simple to implement system for museum staff to create, organize, and publish authoritative content to augment their physical collections.  In addition to the authoritative content, we would also like to explore features that would allow visitors to create their own content associated with specific artifacts inside and outside of the physical museum space.  These features include the ability to rate and comment on artifacts, and explore supplementary material associated with an artifact.

• Crohnology.MD (Ayush Khanna, Christian Schraml, Nikolai Kirienko)

We want to build a system that aids patients of the Crohn's disease record,manage and visualize their information. The typical doctor appointment is a 10-15 minute window, and presenting the right data to your physician is a challenging task. The difficulty in measuring Crohn's symptoms further complicates this problem. By empowering the patient and the provider with data, we want to improve the overall healthcare quality for Crohn's patients.

Presentation 12/15 (2:00-3:30 in Room 202)

• Reseller Service System (Amy Haas, Prateek Kakirwar, Priyanka Reddy)

The implementation of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA) has now made selling recalled products illegal. Consequently, the CPSIA has created the need for dramatic changes to the existing business processes within the reseller marketplace. New requirements imposed on importers and manufacturers should result in safer products entering the resale market in the future, but right now, resellers need a solution for checking their inventories to determine if any products have been recalled. The goal of our group project is to help fill this gap and provide a solution for resellers in the form of a customizable “Inventory Checker” application. Our group has partnered with the product safety group, WeMakeItSafer, to expand upon their beta web-hosted “Inventory Checker” solution to create a customizable solution that resellers can use on any platform they wish (i.e. computer, mobile device, in-store kiosk, etc.).

• Smart Home (Karen, Heather, Stephanie, Sohyeong)

MiCasaVerde makes Vera, an easy to use Smart Home technology based on a wireless router.  Currently, it has basic functionality and is not as user friendly as MiCasaVerde claims. We designed a service system to empower developers at all levels with the intention of creating a more diverse and active development community that will lead to richer features and improved usability.

• Medical Messaging (Abe Coffman, Annette Greiner, Kimra McPherson, Lee Schneider)

The UCSF Urological Oncology clinic deals with a large number of phone and online messages each day relating to patient lab work: whether patients have had labs done, whether the results have arrived at the clinic, whether doctors have discussed those results with patients, etc. Currently the system has two major components: Mercury Message, a system that sends messages between the UCSF call center and the clinic, and Relay Health, a portal used by providers and patients. We envision a system that would seamlessly communicate lab report status and results between the parties, eliminating the need for patients to phone the call center only to learn their results aren't in and the need for providers to follow a complicated and time-consuming trail to track down results from various patients, hospitals, and labs.

• Smart Water Management - California Agricultural Irrigation Management Solutions (Marianne, Jackson, Kate)

MyCIMIS - California Irrigation Management Information System (CIMIS) - Department Of Water Resources, Office Of Water Use Efficiency (http://wwwcimis.water.ca.gov/cimis/myCimis.jsp)

CIMIS is a project of the California Department of Water Resource’s Office of Water Efficiency. CIMIS provides California’s irrigators with weather data, free of charge, to help them manage their water resources effectively and efficiently. MyCIMIS was created for irrigators to have individual accounts and request customized information reports. The report preferences include weather stations (130 locations throughout California), data types (e.g. evapo-transpiration rate) and frequency of report.

Our project aims to improve the current MyCIMIS platform and help expand the farmer user base. Our approach is to provide value-added services to the current data offerings to attract farmers to MyCIMIS. Non-water efficiency related services for farmers will be explored as a potentially beneficial component of MyCIMIS, such as frost warnings and fertilizer management recommendations from onsite sensor networks. In order to achieve this goal, we aim to understand what information farmers utilize most frequently to inform irrigation management practices and to understand other data that would prove useful to farmers.

We will create multi-channel solutions to accommodate the wide variance in technology adoption by farmers:

1. Improve the MyCIMIS online custom report manager interface. Not only will we expand the offerings to entice farmers, but additionally will adjust some existing complications with the report request process. Create a report format that highlights the most important data in a comprehensive manner. The current format is raw data in an Excel spreadsheet.
2. Develop the user interface for a smartphone application utilizing our improved version of MyCIMIS.
3. Outline offerings for low-tech farmers that provides access to similar data via telephone calling, fax, and SMS services.

We are considering dispensing synthesized data presented in charts and graphs, and would like to know what is the most useful data format for farmers. We will generate prototypes of the report request website, the customized report deliverable, and the smartphone application interface.