January 23, 2023
Every semester, students in Cornell Information Science’s master of professional studies (MPS) program draw on ingenuity, problem-solving, and teamwork to develop solutions for client companies.
In Fall 2022, eight student teams designed solutions for organizations like Assurant, the National Center for Biotechnology Information, PepsiCo, and TISTA, among others.
"While many of the skills were new, such as natural language processing (NLP) and Blockchain, student teams did what was necessary to arrive at a feasible solution," said Sharlane Cleare, lecturer in information science and course instructor for INFO 5900, the MPS Project Practicum.
Here’s a rundown of some of the projects:
Assurant – This student team used the human-centered iterative design process to redesign Assurant's core mobile application. Students used processes of clustering and integrating to provide end users with an efficient and smooth user experience. Market and user experience (UX) design research informed the final prototype.
Equitable – Utilizing an open-source NLP model, the team trained call transcripts specifically to extract the intent of the caller. The target audiences are the Equitable Financial Service customers who previously called the company’s call center.
National Center for Biotechnology (NCBI) – This student team created a machine learning model that optimizes sequence searching of three of NCBI's large databases housing bioinformatics data. The model defined thresholds for the taxonomy trees. The team also refined the UX and user interface of NBCI's Pebblescout website.
Pepsi Data Analytics – MPS students optimized the Pepsi Data Analytics dashboard to satisfy the client’s needs identified in the interviews. They also improved the end-to-end waste management tool to make it easier for clients to navigate and find the requested information in less time, with fewer clicks, and with minimal data manipulation.
TISTA – Cornell MPS students have worked with TISTA – a company specializing in providing IT services to federal, state, and local governments – for the last three semesters. This past fall, a student team picked up on an ongoing TISTA-Cornell collaboration and refined a web-based cryptocurrency fundraising platform by streamlining navigation and design consistency and designing a short online tutorial to walk first-time donors through the donation process.