This thesis project was an inter-disciplinary effort involving four graduate students. Our objective was to give researchers new tools to explore political language transfer between policy documents, by augmenting traditional text search with natural language processing algorithms.

To inform our designs, input was gathered from journalists, academics, and policy makers. Simultaneously, we partnered with big minds from Intel Research and Berkeley EECS. The final product earned special distinction as a winner of the James R. Chen Award for Outstanding Master's Final Projects.

Using a corpora of over 1.1 million documents generated by the federal government and beltway policy groups, MigratoryWords gives users the power to search large blocks of text, extracting the algorithmically "interesting" language.

Showing how language ownership and usage can change over time, the results are visualized against a timeline while providing new contextual cues for further research. Ultimately, the system acts to augment human intuition by suggesting new ways to explore linguistic relationships between organizations while pointing out avenues for further inquiry.

A thorough analysis of the content production process and systems utilized by WGBH Boston's FRONTLINE/World. Through detailed on-site interviews, process modeling, and future needs assessments a wide set of client "wants" were constrained to a manageable group of "needs".

The end-product was a strategy document that conceptualized a next generation content management system tailored for media production and customer engagement, simultaneously giving deference to the client's technical, political, and communicational constraints.

Three independent new technology offerings were recommended based upon a new service "Portal" that improved user interaction with FRONTLINE/World's deep archive of existing content, while capitalizing on content production stages to enrich metadata and smooth out communication overhead.

Our recommendations were staged against a five year timeline so that proper organizational support could be generated for this substantial redesign of FRONTLINE/World's underlying philosophies toward content management and user experience.

Beginning with a social science approach, this group project identified trends in youth volunteerism by surveying attitudes of high school and college age students.

As respondents emphasized the "social" benefits of group volunteering, our service design illustrated how feedback effects and inter-group rewards latent in social networks could be tapped by non-profits seeking to increase rates of volunteerism.

Our final products were web services funded by Americorps grants and produced in collaboration with UC Berkeley's CalCorps and non-profit volunteer aggregator, VolunteerMatch.

With CalCorps we assessed organizational needs to create Cal2Action, a localized portal to help volunteers find nearby opportunities in their particular interest areas.

With VolunteerMatch we participated in summer internships that focused on the feature design and user experience testing of Facebook Connect as a mechanism to activate network effects for social volunteering.