2005 Final Projects Presentation

9:10 AM

9:40 AM

10:10 AM

10:40 AM

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11:00 AM

11:30 AM

12:00 Noon

Panel Discussion

12:30 PM - 1 PM

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Panel Discussion

Panel Discussion

9:10 AM

RDIR is a web application with two important goals driving its development. First, RDIR seeks to inform systems and application administrators on campus about the various federal, state and institutional policies that place restrictions on data and that put forth requirements or recommendations in protecting that sensitive information. Second, RDIR seeks to create inventories of the restricted data maintained by campus systems. Given the recent compromise of student data, it’s more important than ever to know which UC Berkeley systems maintain what kinds of restricted data.

Campus policy experts will use RDIR to describe the legislation or policies that affect UC Berkeley systems, such as HIPAA, FERPA and California Senate Bill 1386. Each of these policies is described as a set of data elements and rules, which RDIR uses to create a questionnaire, or wizard, through which system administrators and/or application managers on campus can identify and register their systems’ sensitive data. A core function of RDIR is to provide those administrators with a high level understanding of the restricted data policies that may apply to their systems and recommendations for protecting their data.

9:40 AM

SylViA, the Syllabus Viewing Application, has been developed to alleviate the lack of standardization and occasional poor usability of SIMS syllabi. SylViA is a model-based application encompassing both an editing component for professors and TA’s and a viewing component for students. SylViA captures all essential information about a syllabus in a standard data model and can then present various views of both a single class and combinations of classes.

One of our main goals with SylViA is to develop a fully functional, usable, and robust application in hopes that it can be deployed and become part of every day life at SIMS, in the spirit of eDecisions. Fondly known as eD, eDecisions is the only SIMS masters project that has continues to be used after the graduation of its creators, and we hope that SylViA will be the second. We are committed to working with professors, students, and the SIMS computing staff to design SylViA for continued use in the years to come.

10:10 AM

The Uhle Collections @Berkeley is a digital archive and web-based interface to a valuable collection of Peruvian artifacts excavated by the archaeologist Max Uhle at the turn of the century. These artifacts are critical to Peruvian and South American archaeology, but access to the physical collection is extremely limited; other forms of access are urgently needed.

This project takes the diverse Uhle materials and links them together into a cohesive digital collection for use by archaeologists and archaeology students, using an XML dataset which supports multiple permutations of Boolean queries. The system allows researchers to view and compare artifacts, locate materials related to specific artifacts and sites, and prepare for research with the physical collection. Our interface allows users to search or browse artifacts by attributes such as keyword, artifact type, materials, location, and time period, as well as navigate via a geographic interface.

10:40 AM

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11:00 AM

Mobile devices are increasingly used to obtain data and information, such as browsing the web or exchanging MMS messages. Mobile devices are inherently different from conventional desktop computers in their hardware, software and network configurations. In order to present contents functionally to mobile devices, the contents need to be adapted based on the device capabilities. These capabilities need to be communicated in a systematic way from the client to the server. In this project, a data model was developed to uniformly represent device capabilities. Several existing representations were analyzed and consolidated into a unified data model, with the consideration for extensibility in the future with new device features and functionalities. Ultimately the data model can serve as a framework for mobile devices to describe their capabilities so that the server can logically extract the capabilities and adapt contents to the devices.

11:30 AM

At SIMS, and indeed across a variety of academic environments, group projects are common. However, the large number of complicating factors involved in starting group projects often leads to great inefficiencies and unnecessary pains. Forming a group and/or choosing a project, finding the right partners, sharing project ideas and interests, choosing a project advisor, and finding project sponsors can all be difficult and thorny tasks.

To meet this challenge, we have developed ProjectPeopleMatch. ProjectPeopleMatch is a web-based tool which allows SIMS students to set up groups, find and then invite others to join their groups, post/express interest in/take project ideas, and find sponsors and advisors for projects. In addition to searching, the tool generates ranked recommendations of the ideal group partners for each user, based on an algorithm developed from a survey we conducted to capture the important criteria for a successful project experience.

12:00 Noon - 12:30 PM

9:10 AM

In recent years technologies for producing multimedia content have become cheap and ubiquitous, while the effective bandwidth for distributing this content has increased, due to greater network capacity and new protocols and formats for using this capacity more efficiently. Unfortunately, the development of applications for finding, sharing, and recombining this content, rather than simply consuming it, has not kept pace. The MSMDX (Media Streams Metadata Exchange) project plans to remedy this by developing a platform to enable users to annotate, find, share, and remix audio and video content in a networked, collaborative fashion. This spring we have studied a single community of active audiovisual content consumer/producers in order to understand their current practices and how they might be supported or changed by new tools. The results of this study have resulted in a set of initial user requirements for the MSMDX platform, to be implemented this summer.

9:40 AM

mReplay is a solution to an intriguing problem: individuals attending sporting events have less information than those watching the same game on television or even listening to the game on the radio, where commentators attempt to explain events and sometimes replay events repeatedly, showing the viewer a certain play. mReplay is a patent-pending information system that provides on-demand instant sports replay and traditional media convergence functionality to most mobile devices, (for example non-3G mobile phones, PDAs, and even the new Sony PSP) including those mobile devices without video playback. mReplay also allows users to vote for their favorite play of the game, or on whether an officiating call was accurate, or for their favorite player, all from their mobile device.

10:10 AM

Orpheus is a platform independent MP3 player and exploration tool for discovering the universe of new and independent recording artists. We introduce a novel approach to music organization and discovery by mining the rich repository of data from the web, matching this data to a user's digital music collection, and building a network visualization of artists in the user's collection, as well as artists that are not in their collection.

Imagine exploring new artists based on a producer you love, or a label you like, or with whom a particular artist has collaborated. Now imagine all of this information linked to your MP3 collection, so that as you listen to an artist, you can view how this artist relates to other artists in a dynamic, interactive network. As you browse, reviews, discographies, interviews and recommendations are made available at a click of your mouse.

10:40 AM

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11:00 AM

Sharing photos on a camera phone is unnecessarily tedious, complex, and expensive. PhotoRouter makes it fun and effortless. Instead of having to navigate through endless menus and buttons, PhotoRouter intelligently routes photos based on your previous sharing behavior. We designed a simple user interface for taking pictures and setting tags, rating, and privacy to describe a picture. These descriptors trigger a rule-based routing algorithm. For instance, if a baby photo has been sent to grandma, uncle Bob, and your blog, then PhotoRouter will ask if you want to create a AutoShare rule that sends future baby photos to these destinations automatically. If cost is a concern, PhotoRouter wait until it finds a Bluetooth or Internet connection to send it for free. PhotoRouter lets you share life experiences through your camera phone. You take a picture and tag it—PhotoRouter will take care of the rest.

http://www.photo-router.com

11:30 AM

PlaceSite introduces a new way of using wireless networks -- to create a digital community service by, for and about people who are in the same cafe together. PlaceSite is a web application that people see when they open their web browsers in a wireless Internet cafe. It allows people to create and share personal profiles, post messages in a digital bulletin board and see who else is (and was) in the cafe. We launched PlaceSite in a Berkeley cafe and explored two questions through surveys, observations and interviews:1) What information, if any, would people like to share digitally with others in the same cafe?2) How will this digital information service affect social interactions in a cafe?

12:00 Noon

This research project is focused on a set of online communities where commmunication between participants takes place through a highly visual medium--webcam portals. Portals are set of pages where participants can submit small, low resolution images that they can update at will. The project is concerned with developing a methodology for analyzing the community behavior. Visual content analysis is much too complex and time consuming for such a large community. I am using a social network analysis to determine high-level community affiliation and a technical analysis to validate assumptions about community behavior formed over the 2+ year span of a larger investigation into webcam portals, interactions and practices.

12:30 PM - 1 PM

Panel Discussion

9:10 AM

Expressing oneself through stories is a fundamental part of childhood learning and social development. The process of making and telling a story is often collaborative and social, as children play with each other's ideas and with ideas from popular media in the process of expressing themselves and creating a shared world. During this design research project, we spent eight weeks working with fifth grade children at a local elementary school in order to explore ideas that would satisfy our participants' requirements for an online, collaborative tool for creating stories, sharing them with others, and accessing other storytellers as resources for ideas and inspiration.

9:40 AM

As stated in the title this project is an ethnography; it is the result of six months of qualitative research that took place between October 2004 and March 2005. The research question is a relatively simple one; what would happen if the docents at a hands-on science museum were given a Wi-Fi enabled PDA to use while they work? Would they use it? If they used it, what would they use it for? This is precisely what this project explores, how the front line educators at the Exploratorium Science Museum in San Francisco navigated the introduction of technology into their work at the museum, and what their use tells us about learning, education, technology, and choice.

10:10 AM

In 2004 a new record was set by video and computer game sales, $7.3 billion dollars. International attention is focusing on video games and the teenage gamers that spend hours in front of a TV or computer. This research project explores how one group of teenagers makes gaming a social experience.

The research takes place at a cyber café where people can play a variety of games against fellow patrons or with other gamers on the Internet. The most popular games at the café are team-based where a player joins a squad to virtually conquer the other team. You can hear cheers or jeers shouted across the room or typed furiously into the keyboard.

This project looks at online and offline interaction of teenagers and how games fit into their social world. Through observation, interviews, and focus groups, this research hopes to illuminate playing games from a teen's perspective.

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Technology plays an integral role in the life of the 18-year-old Berkeley freshmen as they transform from high school students living at home into college students living in dorms. Most students use a variety of technologies allowing them to access their social networks any time, anywhere, instantly. We will summarize our study including a survey of 234 Berkeley undergraduates and interviews with 22 Berkeley freshmen detailing how they use technology to support their social networks. Among our results, we will show how technology use varies with time, place, and social groups; how they began using those technologies; and how they negotiate the role of technologies in their lives.

11:30 AM

The extensive data set of evolutionary relationships between organisms is often referred to as the Tree of Life. Providing an effective visual interface for teachers and students to interact with this data set requires bringing together work from many disciplines: computer science, information visualization, human-computer interaction, information classification and retrieval, systematic biology, and evolution education. Through interviews and a survey with teachers and professionals in the field of biology we have developed key recommendations for designing and evaluating the efficacy of existing and future tree-structured data browsers.

12:00 Noon

Our web application, called the Accessible Course Community Project, is the result of a qualitative needs assessment we conducted with students with disabilities, campus web developers, and disability specialists. It is a space where students can share their experiences regarding courses, instructors, and locations. The application also acts as a framework for a tutorial that will help guide web developers in the design of accessible web sites. Our web accessibility tutorial highlights fundamental accessibility features and resources including those set forth by legal guidelines and web standards.

12:30 PM - 1 PM

Panel Discussion