Hello! I hope you are as excited about the beginning of the school year as we are here at the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology! This year, we are again offering VIP: a 1 or 2 credit course that is cross-listed as CSE495 or ENGR 297/497 Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP). We have two active projects under VIP this year:
(*) AccessMap/OpenSidewalks: Community engagement through accessible routing & navigation,
and
(*) Husky ADAPT (Accessible Design and Play Technology): a multidisciplinary collaboration between BioE Outreach, the Ability and Innovation Lab (MechE), & the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology (Allen School of CS&E). The collaboration is focused on designing solutions to enhance inclusive play for people of all abilities.
Please read below about the AccessMap/OpenSidewalks project and the structure of the VIP program. If interested, please apply here by September 25th.
Please contact uwtcat@uw.edu with any questions about TCAT’s other independent research opportunities, the Accessibility Capstone, the Autonomous Wheelchair project or CSE490D: Introduction to Accessible Technology and Participatory Design , please contact uwtcat@uw.edu
The VIP course demand:
VIP team members typically commit 3-7 hours per week if registered for 1 credit and 7-12 hours per week if registered for 2 credits. Students are required to maintain a lab notebook and produce a project write-up.
The VIP course structure: continuity, technical depth, and disciplinary breadth
This course operates in conjunction with the University of Washington Vertically-Integrated Projects (VIP) Program, which supports hands-on, project-based, graduate and undergraduate research and exploration. The VIP Program operates in a research and development context, with teams of students and faculty working on real-world projects. Undergraduate students that participate in VIP earn academic credit for their participation in design/discovery efforts and over time become project leads over small teams.
The teams are:
- Multidisciplinary – drawing students from all disciplines on campus;
- Vertically-integrated – maintaining a mix of sophomores through PhD students each quarter;
- Long-term – each undergraduate student may participate in a project for up to three years and each graduate student may participate for the duration of their graduate career. The longevity of students’ involvement enables the completion of large-scale design/discovery projects that are of significant benefit to research programs.
As part of a VIP course, you get to help define, realize, and publish a real-world project. Projects in a VIP course can extend over multiple quarters, giving you an opportunity to implement truly ambitious and impactful projects. Additional information regarding VIP at UW can be found at http://vip.uw.edu/.
About AccessMap/OpenSidewalks
We are building a mapping, routing and navigation application, accessmap.io, that creates interactive map displays of the physical environment in and around pedestrian ways, models accessible travel and calculates optimal custom routes through sidewalks for people of all abilities. Our aim is to enhance representations and accessible travel models to assist people with disabilities in planning routes through sidewalks and pedestrian ways. The application incorporates mapping, GIS data, municipality-specific data, landscape architecture, transportation information, and eventually weather and other temporal information like construction. It is highly synergistic with crowdsourcing projects like Project Sidewalk and, in fact, one of the proposed VIP projects would offer data integration from similar projects into the OpenStreetMap data commons.This VIP course has a focus on data and accessibility, with past projects including analytic dashboards to investigate the accessibility of neighborhoods for people with impaired mobility and mobile applications for gathering and analyzing pedestrian-centric GPS data.
While you can help define your own project, here are some projects that will likely be part of this year’s course offering:
– Web dashboards showcasing novel analytic visuals, particularly interactive maps.
– Synthesizing data and new insights from existing projects (like Project Sidewalk), other large datasets, particularly building practical machine learning data flows for both tabular data and street-level imagery.
– Mobile game development with an emphasis on education and gathering data for Safe Routes to Schools.
– Building tools to make gathering complex pedestrian data simple and fun.
Whether you are a programmer, designer, or anyone enthusiastic about data and accessibility, you can make a contribution. Depending on your focus, you will gain these skills as part of a VIP course:
- Everyone: Project management, keeping and managing deadlines, the full engineering/design workflow (design/build/test).
- Programming focus: Real-world full-stack (web) development and/or mobile development, local and cloud deployment stacks, version control and collaborative coding, medium-scale real-world projects.
- Data focus: Analytics workflows (Python/R, Jupyter notebooks), machine learning (scikit-learn and/or TensorFlow), static visualizations, manipulating map data. Room for interactive (JavaScript) visualizations.
- Design/UI/UX: mobile/desktop implementations, particularly for accessibility (a11y) and engagement (the fun factor). Ground-up implementations of a design vision and access to end users for user testing (when the project is ready).
If interested, please apply here by September 25th.
Please contact uwtcat@uw.edu with any questions.
—
Anat Caspi, PhD
Director, Taskar Center for Accessible Technology
Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington
caspian@cs.washington.edu