Awards Honor May 2024 Graduates (2024)

The School of Information’s May 2024 Commencementpresented an opportunity to honor faculty and student achievements.

Interim Dean Marti Hearst presented awards for outstanding capstone projects from the Master of Information Management and Systems program, the Master of Information and Data Science program, and the Master of Information and Cybersecurity program.

Students in the MIMS, MIDS, and MICS programs voted for their most outstanding instructors and gave awards to their classmates.

James R. Chen Award for Outstanding MIMS Final Project, 2024

Session 1:

Research indicates thatchildren globally are increasingly disconnected from nature, spending more time indoors. To combat this, the team created PlayScape to cultivate children’s connection with nature through an outdoor play experience and an accompanying digital application. Children will learn more about local biodiversity while engaging in playful learning, focusing on educational and sensory experiences.

Judges praised the project, stating that “the idea of creating an outdoor interactive installation is clever, and even with just a few screenshots of the digital app, the design stood out as innovative and child-friendly.”

Session 2:

Young adults in the United States below the age of thirty-four remain underserved by available political information sources, report more negative attitudes toward politics, and engage less in politics relative to other age groups. Magenta is a mobile application that provides young adults with highly accessible local political information and connects these individuals with their local community.

“Magenta took a look at a real problem (how to increase civic engagement) through the lens of the most important tool of the day (mobile phones),” judges remarked. “The innovative result is a polished, engaging, and usable mobile app that can be successful out of the box and extended in multiple promising ways.”

Hal R. Varian MIDS Capstone Award, Spring 2024

After an unknown oil barage capsized off the shore of Trinidad and Tobago earlier this year, it took four days to discover the wreckage. At that point, nearly 10 miles of coastline were affected and the oil spill eventually spread over 100 km away.This incident underscored the critical importance of early detection and rapid response mechanisms in mitigating the devastating impact of oil spills on marine ecosystems and coastal communities.

OceanWatch aims to provide a solution for swift and automated oil spill detection by utilizing Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery and cutting-edge machine learning techniques to ensure timely and accurate detection, enabling precise response and the preservation of our invaluable marine ecosystems.

Lily L. Chang MICSCapstone Award, Spring 2024

Seeing a rise in automobile theft but a decrease in carjackings throughout the years, the team behind NFC Sentinel identified a trend:criminals are relying on more high tech means of automobile theft, especially those related tokey fobs or passive keyless entry (PKE) hacks.

To combat this issue, NFC Sentinelaims to improve on the security of keyless car key fobs by integrating a novel multi-factor authentification system using Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. This willwork in tandem with existing key fobs and ensure the key fob's signal is authorized via a secondary, secure channel to nullify the threat posed by most entry attacks.

For more information on previous MIDS and MICS Capstone awards, please check out our Summer 2023winners and Fall 2023 winners.

Faculty Awards

Distinguished Faculty Award (MIMS program): John Chuang, Professor for INFO 206A. Introduction to Programming and Computation;INFO 206B. Introduction to Data Structures and Analytics; INFO 134. Information Technology Economics, Strategy, and Policy; andINFO 290. Climate, People, and Informatics.

Distinguished Faculty Award (MIDS program):Mark Butler, Lecturer forDATASCI 266: Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning and DATASCI 290: Generative AI: Foundations, Techniques, Challenges, and Opportunities.

Distinguished Faculty Award (5th Year MIDS program):Joyce Shen, Lecturer forDATASCI 210: CapstoneandDATSCI 221: Modern Data Applications.

Distinguished Faculty Award (MICS program):Jennia Hizver,Lecturer for CYBER284: Web Application Security Assessment and CYBER 204: Software Security.

Student Awards

Student with the Most Spirit (MIMS):TanayMahindru

Outstanding Teaching Assistant (MIMS): Drake White, INFO 202:Information Organization and Retrieval.

Outstanding Teaching Assistant (MIDS):Amy Ho, DATASCI 203: Statistics for Data Science.