Congratulations to the four teams of FIA-Deutsch Seed Grant Competition winners!
Four winning teams were chosen from among 12 semifinalist teams after making five-minute pitches in a public program on December 10, 2014.
The winning teams, whose members have been named FIA-Deutsch Seed Grant Fellows, will share in up to $25,000 per team in stipends and expenses to carry out projects aimed at a variety of information challenges and opportunities. Altogether, these four teams included 18 students and eight faculty mentors from nine UMD colleges and schools: Arts and Humanities; Behavioral and Social Sciences; Business; Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences; Education; Engineering; Information; Journalism; and Public Health. The teams plan to consult with six of the FIA’s Founding Partners during the course of their work, including: the National Park Service; the Barrie School; the Library of Congress; the National Archives; the Smithsonian Institution; and the Newseum.
The winning teams gave their final presentations on May 6, 2015. Watch their final presentations and the videos summaries of their projects here.
Flip the Museum: A Platform to Extend the Audience Engagement Life Cycle Through Gamification of Content
- Amir Kashani-Pour, A. James Clark School of Engineering
- Christine Herlihy, College of Behavioral and Social Sciences
- Gaurav Sharma, A. James Clark School of Engineering
- Lianyi Ma, Robert H. Smith School of Business
- Yiying Xiao, Robert H. Smith School of Business
- Dr. Helene Cohen, College of Education (Faculty Mentor)
- Dr. Marcio A. Oliveira, School of Public Health (Faculty Mentor)
Our group intends to develop a digital platform that will allow museum visitors to engage with museum content above and beyond the limits of a short visit. This platform will enable visitors to appreciate the importance and context of each exhibit in depth. It will also allow content providers and “experience leaders” (i.e. museum curators, docents, and/or teachers) to become location-based game designers. The platform will turn each museum visit into a networked, social experience, and will allow visitors to share their stories and compete on educational/content-based tasks, quizzes, and games in real time. Our market research of the mobile gaming industry leads us to expect that such games will increase visitor engagement before, during, and after visits. This will make museums and their content more visible, accessible, and appealing to the public. The pedagogical potential is also high: our platform will allow teachers to customize museum visits using the curated games on our mobile app, and the iBeacon technology will let them control and guide the physical aspects of such visits (i.e., students’ paths through the museum; scavenger hunts; time- and location-specific quizzes, etc.).
iAnon: Third Party Application for Cyberbullying Detection and Mitigation
- Zahra Ashktorab, College of Information
- Soham De, College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences
- Srijan Kumar, College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences
- Dr. Jennifer Golbeck, College of Information (Faculty Mentor)
- Dr. Jessica Vitak, College of Information (Faculty Mentor)
We propose to develop a tool that allows do-gooders to send victims of cyberbullying positive and supportive messages. We will be working closely with the Barrie School to develop surveys and conduct participatory design that will influence how we design and implement our system. In our participatory design sessions, we will create cyberbullying scenarios with the students based on their world knowledge and experiences and will ask students to share ideas about their methods of intervention and help in the bullying scenarios. We will also conduct surveys with students about their experiences regarding support-seeking behavior when they are bullied. All of this data will be used in the design and implementation of our cyberbullying-detection mitigation system, iAnon.
Revisiting Segregation through Computational History: the case of the WWII Japanese American Tule Lake Segregation Center
- Drew Barker, College of Information
- James Howland, College of Information
- Emily Keithley, College of Information
- Liz Tobey, College of Information
- Karen Mawdsley, Philip Merrill College of Journalism
- Dr. Richard Marciano, College of Information (Faculty Mentor)
- Dr. Nicholas Diakopoulos, Philip Merrill College of Journalism (Faculty Mentor)
The team explores the integration of archival and user-contributed data and proposes to investigate and prototype a GIS platform that links people, places, and events from distributed sources. The approach is based on a case study involving WWII Japanese American incarceration camp archival records from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). These records are examined for their potential to generate new forms of archival analysis and historical research engagement at the Tule Lake Unit, a recently established National Monument of the National Park Service (NPS) through a December 2008 Presidential proclamation. The project works closely with NARA staff from the Office of Innovation (and Digitization Division), and NPS staff from the Center for Media Services at Harpers Ferry. Advisors include NPS Tule Lake Unit staff as well as prominent Tule Lake historians, colleagues from King’s College London, and experts from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. The project has the potential to contribute to a number of national and international initiatives.
Through Venetian Eyes
- Karl Dempsey, College of Arts and Humanities
- Andrew Ethnasios, College of Arts and Humanities
- Brandon Perlman, College of Behavioral and Social Sciences
- Henry Twist, College of Education
- Ashley Vogel, College of Arts and Humanities
- Dr. Bernard Cooperman, College of Arts and Humanities (Faculty Mentor)
- Dr. Stefano Villani, College of Arts and Humanities (Faculty Mentor)
- Graduate Consultant: Kate Bailey, College of Arts and Humanities
Through Venetian Eyes is an interactive web-based experience that will bring Renaissance Venice alive through primary sources—original sources from that time period. Our format will be somewhere between a massive open online course (MOOC) and a Wiki. Our site will deal only in credible primary resources that relate to Renaissance Venice. It will strive to make primary sources, some of which have never been translated before, accessible through multimedia presentations that can be accessed through a web browser. We chose the topic of Renaissance Venice in part because through learning about an older culture, we can better understand our own and those of others who share our world. Our project is intimately concerned with collaboration, as part of our challenge comes from working with at least 6 partners, including one from Italy. Our team believes that our project will prove that it is possible for all of these institutions to work together and through the efforts of our team, create a resource that will be open to all, making this free resource available to students across the globe. This online interactive resource will introduce users to primary source scholarship and guide them to our partnered institutions.
This competition is made possible by funding from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation. More information about the Seed Grant program can be found on the Seed Grants page. The award-winning teams were chosen from among 12 semifinalist groups after making five-minute pitches in a public program at McKeldin Library on Dec. 10, 2014. The judges were: Maggie Saponaro, University of Maryland librarian and FIA Brainstorming Board member; Eric Chapman, Assistant Vice President for Research Development in the Office of the Vice President for Research; Bryan Eichhorn, a member of the FIA Brainstorming Board and a Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and an Affiliate Professor in Materials Science and Engineering; FIA co-director Allison Druin, Professor in the College of Information and Chief Futurist in the Office of the Vice President for Research; and FIA co-director Ira Chinoy, Associate Dean and Associate Professor in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism. This is the third year of the FIA-Deutsch competition. A list of the winners from other years and video stories about each can be found here, along with videos of their final project presentations.
