Spring 2015 Projects

Operational opportunities in food redistribution
Food for Free is a non-profit partner that redistributes leftover food to places in need – or as their slogan puts it, they are “bridging the gap between waste and want”. As Food for Free expands its network, it is challenged by issues surrounding capacity and information flow. This team will focus on operational improvements that will enable Food for Free to meet its growing demand.

Mentors: Food for Free and Joel Goh (HBS)

21st Century Girlhood
Girlhood is an interesting and complicated period of life, and girls possess and develop important talents that are later shared with the world, through the workforce, as parents, and as community members. Focusing on the United States, what can we discover the aspirations and behaviors of girls as they are today? How is technology’s ubiquity in society affecting them and their family environment, and affecting the social and economic institutions that structure and influence their lives?  Harvard undergraduates and community high school students will meet over the course of the semester to select and discuss a topic of relevance to 21st century girlhood and co-design their response to that issue.  This project will be driven by the interests and ambitions of the girls themselves, including decisions about their responses/interventions.  Potential outcomes may include media pieces, digital tools, school-based interventions, policy proposals, or art work.

Mentor: Kate Krontiris (Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society)

The Systemic Justice Project
The Systemic Justice project is a think tank at Harvard Law School devoted to identifying and fighting systemic injustice. For this work, students, in collaboration with lawyers, academics and activists, will write policy papers on the problems in our society (“problem papers”) and on the common causes of these problems (“problem causer papers”), such as the influence of money in politics, of advertising on our consumption, of corporations on our institutions, and of stereotypes and implicit associations on our decisionmaking. Students will develop a website, including ways to visualize the web of connections between our problems, problem causers and potential problem solvers, and also design tools for a network of experts and wider public to interact in collaborating on and discussing the project’s work. The work will also include designing ways to incorporate images and charts into the online versions of the papers. The rough existing website is at systemicjustice.wordpress.com . See also http://learning.law.harvard.edu/frontiertorts/
Mentors: Jon Hanson & Jacob Lipton

Fall 2014 Projects

OA2014: Open access
Even though Harvard’s open-access policies are widely supported by the community, implementation depends on the cooperation of authors who tend to be overstretched and preoccupied. This team will work towards designing a system of defaults which ‘nudge’ and encourage faculty to deposit their new scholarly articles in DASH, Harvard’s open-access repository.

Mentors: Peter Suber & Colin Lukens (Office of Scholarly Communication)
Team Lead: Wendy Fok
Team Members: Loren N., Ali N., Kojin O.

Developing big data analysis tools 2.0
Building upon the work of a 2013-2014 DPSI team, this team will continue to explore the intersections between big data and privacy, particularly when it comes to data generated by HarvardX courses. Although anonymity is often conflated with privacy, de-identifying data can compromise the integrity of the data set – are there other ways to protect the privacy of the users?

Mentor: Jim Waldo (Chief Technical Officer, Harvard University)
Team Lead: Sharon Stovezky
Team Members: Primavera D., JeeYoung O., Tomo L., You-Myeong K., Avinash S.

A self-sustaining farmer’s market
How can technology and design thinking be used to help the Harvard Farmers’ Market become more self-sustainable? This team will think about the ways in which digital tools can be leveraged for complex questions of long-term sustainability,communications, and outreach.

Mentor: Margiana Petersen-Rockney (Food Literacy Project)
Team Lead: Cindy Yang
Team Members: Christian L., Niousha R.

 AccessED: Accessibility in online education
How can online education be more accessible for people with disabilities? In coordination with the CopyrightX team, this DPSI team will explore and create innovative ways to improve accessibility in online education.

Mentor: Chris Bavitz (Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Cyberlaw Clinic)
Team Lead: Michelle Sohn
Team Members: Jacqueline M., Curren Iyer, Jacqueline L.

#DocShop: Interactive documentary workshop
To help us think through challenges in making and understanding interactive media, metaLAB will host and mentor a team of students devoted to exploring the interactive documentary through making, viewing, and evaluating a variety of projects. Students can bring their own designs and proposals to the team and/or stage critical interventions in the work of others.

Mentors: Matthew Battles, Cris Magliozzi, and Jessica Yurkofsky (metaLAB)
Team Lead: Joseph Steele
Team Members: Rachel B., Lea S., Jenny F., Debbie O., Daniel K.

 Sexual assault on campus
This team will work towards making data on sexual assault accessible and easily leveraged by the Harvard community, possibly in a visualized manner. Taking an intersectional approach to survivor advocacy, this group will work with existing student groups, incorporating the voiced concerns of over 30 student groups.

Mentors: Diane Rosenfeld and Anisha Gopi (Harvard Law School)
Team Leads: Alina Ranjbaran, Tez Clark
Team Members: Ana Maria Q., Julia L., Jen K.

eyeData: Data visualization and exploratory tools applied to real-world research data
In the last decade, the Data Science team at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, IQSS, has developed the Dataverse, an open-source web application that enables sharing, preservation, citation, reusability and analysis for research data. Currently the Dataverse hosted at Harvard (http://thedata.harvard.edu) is the largest research data repository in the world, with a vibrant community of  users and developers at Harvard and beyond. This team will build data visualization and exploratory tools and integrate them with Dataverse using the Data and metadata API, thus being able to directly apply these tools to real-world scientific data shared with the research community. Examples of these tools might include: visualization of network/graph data, visualization of time-series data (e.g. using d3.js), and tools to describe the data and associated analysis (e.g., using ipython Notebook).

Mentor: Mercè Crosas and Vito D’Orazio (Institute for Quantitative Social Science)
Team Lead: Alex Wang
Team Members: Luis P., Batsheva M., Grant G., Nicholas M.