Research Corporation for Scientific Advancement puts on a series of unique conferences designed to catalyze new scientific reasearch collaboration. I led teams at Datascope that have run collaboration network surveys and used simulated annealing (a stochastic optimization technique) to help RCSA most effectively group up scientists during their conferences for the past 3 years. The algorithm maximizes mixing, interest in topics, and other factors.
I worked on a team at Datascope that helped design and run an educational data modeling competition for CapitalOne.
I was on a team at Datascope that developed a text extraction, processing, and summarization API for the nonprofit IssueLab.
I led a team at Datascope that helped the market research community startup HERELife develop concepts around sensor-enabled design research in a college residence.
In 2015 I led the rebranding of Datascope, the data science consultancy I was working for. We did all the identity work (logo, color, typography, graphic elements) internally, wanting the resulting identity to be scrappy and "Datascopey". I generated ideas and facilitated critiques and exercises to settle on the final set of choices.
During my first quarter at Datascope Analytics, the City of Chicago opened their Data Portal with lots of civic information, and started the Apps for Metro Chicago (A4MC) competition to encourage developers to make use of that data. To learn the Python/Django/jQuery/HTML stack that Datascope was using at the time, I built inThirty and entered it.
InThirty is an interactive web app that arose out of the concept of "neighborhood shopping" - looking for where to live in a city based on an area's accessibility to certain amenities. Rather than simply focusing on the amenities available in a neighborhood, we chose to focus on the amenities (in this case, parks and libraries from the city's database) one could reach in 30 minutes (hence the name) by any means necessary- transit, walking, or biking. We displayed this information in neighborhood heatmaps and also allowed users to input any address in the Chicago area to see the specific metrics for that location.
InThirty took 3rd place in the Transportation round of A4MC. You can read more about the process of developing inThirty in the Datascope blog post, and see what Nathan Yau had to say about it in the FlowingData blog post.
Moving from the delicious brunch, noodle, chicken, taco, and Mediterranean restaurants in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood to the sad fast food reality of Chicago's Loop was somewhat of a shock to the employees at Datascope when we moved into a bigger office in 2012. Lucky for us, dozens of unique food trucks roam the streets of the Loop- if you can find them.
Rather than have to skim through Twitter timelines to figure out which trucks would be nearby on a given day, we built a web app to do the heavy lifting for us. lunch.datascopeanalytics.com (also known as Lunch?) reads in tweets from nearly 90 food trucks every few minutes, parses out locations like street corners and skyscrapers in the Loop and at the University of Chicago's Hyde Park campus, and locates the trucks on a map to easily show the user who's nearby. People with favorite trucks can also click their favorites in the sidebar to zap to the truck's most recent location and see its recent tweets.
Rather than try to build out highly complex NLP logic to ensure our app could parse schedules, times, misspelled street names, and other corner cases, we chose to make the actual Twitter data highly visible to the user– at a glance, they can see the tweets we used to infer a location and confirm for themselves whether the truck is still at that location.
The app is live at http://lunch.datascopeanalytics.com/.
Originally started in NUVention Web, a software and entrepreneurship class at Northwestern, Podium is a web platform that helps professionals get feedback on important presentations like sales and funding pitches. It allows users to post videos of dry runs of their presentations, share them to anyone with an email address, and receive feedback that’s automatically time-tagged to the relevant part of the video.
I am 50% of the development team for Podium, and was involved in pretty much all the decisions made about it, from business model to branding to technology. I developed the logo and color scheme for it, and have worked on the back end, front end, customer service, and integration with external services like Mandrill and Amazon Elastic Transcoder.
Podium is still active today and has been used by notable organizations like the Techstars incubators to help their members sharpen and perfect their pitches.
Check out Podium at http://usepodium.com
When I joined the National Team of the nonprofit Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW) in the summer of 2013, the group had a logo and a shade of green, but little else in the way of a polished or consistent brand. From my very first contacts with the team at a retreat during that summer, I set about building a visual identity and branding guidelines and materials for the group, including logo variations, typographic families, a color palette, and supporting materials to help members of the national team implement designs.
I led a brainstorm with the entire National Team to nail down six key adjectives that capture how ESW perceives itself as an organization and wishes to be perceived by the public. Building off of those core values, I went through iterations with other members of the team and a graphic design professional to develop a color palette, choose open-source typographic families that fit the group's needs, and develop an iBook/PDF Branding Guide for general consumption by the national team and the organization's hundreds of student and professional members.
The latest iteration of my efforts is visible to the public at http://eswusa.org/drupal/brand.
For my Microprocessors senior design project at Northwestern, I was part of a team that developed the Gamma Handle, an ergonomic steering wheel attachment with touch sensitive controls to allow stroke survivors, amputees, and others to safely drive a car with only one hand. There are existing solutions out there for this purpose, but none offer an ergonomic way to control critical functions like turn signals and the horn without removing one's hand from the handle. The Gamma Handle features integrated electronics and buttons that lay under every finger which can wirelessly send commands to the car.
Over the course of two quarters, we iterated the design of the handle externals using 3D printed parts, while developing the electronics on a 16-bit low power PIC24 platform. By the end of the class we had a functioning prototype, featuring a handle with touch buttons and a battery-powered PCB inside which could send commands via Bluetooth to a receiver PCB connected to a plexiglass 'car'.
For the team I lead software design and implementation efforts and also contributed to design decisions and technical writing. I wrote C code for the PIC to manage the button inputs and Bluetooth wireless communication of the handle unit, as well as power management logic.
In my second quarter at Datascope Analytics, the company was moving offices to Chicago's Loop and I took on the task of leading the design efforts of the new space. Using expertise from an interior design project done in my 3rd quarter at Northwestern and the Stanford d.school's phenomenal book about creative workplaces titled Make Space, I created a modular workplace for the company that allowed employees to redivide the space on the fly as projects began and ended, and gave space for people to commune and relax or get away and focus.
I wrote 2 blog posts documenting the final design for the Datascope website, further detail is available there.
Daykeeper is a concept hybrid task/calendar app which I designed and prototyped as part of a team for EECS 330, the Human Computer Interaction class at Northwestern. As a team we interviewed several busy Northwestern students to learn about how they manage their time and tasks, and found a common pattern was to block out periods of time on their calendar for specific tasks.
We drew sketches, storyboards, and wireframes of an app that would allow users to place tasks from their task list onto their calendar seamlessly, allowing busy students to block out the free time in their days for specific tasks. After the designated time for a task passes, it drops into "Limbo" - a list which users can review at the end of the day to mark what they successfully completed and reschedule things that didn't get finished to free time the next day.
We implemented a rough prototype using Ratchet, a toolkit that lets one prototype iPhone apps with HTML5 and CSS. For data backend we used Parse in conjunction with their Javascript library built off of Backbone.js.
