Together we innovate & achieve excellence

Together we innovate

& achieve excellence

2021 - 2022 Annual Report

To learn more about supporting the Jerey S. Raikes

School of Computer Science and Management, contact

Kathy Schubauer, Director of Development.

Kathy Schubauer | 800-432-3216

kathy.schubauer@nufoundation.org

Jerey S. Raikes School of

Computer Science and Management

630 N 14th St, Kauman 123

Lincoln, NE 68588-0690

Raikes School | 402-472-6000

raikes.unl.edu

facebook.com/RaikesSchool | @RaikesSchool

Director's Note

Overview

Faculty

& Sta

Projects

Statistics

Students

& Coaches

Table of Contents

Ready to

shape the

future

Design Studio Annual Report | 2021 - 2022

A note from

the director

Reﬂecting upon this past year in Design Studio, it is not hard to see aspects of the

program impacted by change.

The changes were a result of the evolving

world around us, adjusting to hybrid

methods of business and education, and

changes in stang. We said goodbye to

longtime leaders of the program who left

for new opportunities, and we welcomed

fresh faces to Design Studio. Despite

changes, some things remain the same.

Sta, faculty, community, and students

came together striving to continue

excellence and innovation in

Design Studio.

Students have embraced change. Most

student teams conduct their business

with their sponsors virtually, some hybrid,

and a few in person. That is the world

we are in right now. Sometimes that also

means virtually connecting with your

faculty, your coach, or with one of your

fellow students. What we realized is the

method of meeting really does not matter.

It matters that teams have a solid and

predictable communication strategy that

is consistent and appropriate for

the situation.

Students also stepped up to share

their ideas on how Design Studio could

adapt to the changing environment

in which we found ourselves. Student

feedback provided the foundation and

the opportunity to change how we

teach the best practices of product

development and how we mentor future

student-led startup teams. This is just

another example of how faculty, sta,

and students work together to make

reﬁnements to the program.

Design Studio is excited to share this

annual report with you. We are proud

of the excellent products that students

created for their sponsors and the growth

of the student-led startup. As you read the

summaries of the projects, the real-world

business value is evident in their solutions.

It takes a lot of people to make a program

of innovation and excellence, such as

Design Studio. This is due to many people

working together. We are proud of our

university partners that work with us to

provide students from other disciplines

with the opportunity to join us in Design

Studio as associates. We appreciate

all students, the sponsors who oered

complex problems to solve, the faculty

who stepped up when stang changes

occurred, the coaches who volunteered

their time to guide students as a

trusted ally, and the business oce who

supported us all. Thank you.

Design Studio is so proud of all the

collaboration and teamwork that occurred

this year in this program of excellence.

With innovative focus and continuous

improvement, Design Studio is excited

and energized for the future. We cannot

wait to see what our Design Studio

community achieves next.

Cheryl Nelson

Director of

Design Studio

Overview

Who

105 students, 20 coaches, 19 industry sponsors,

5 faculty, 3 sta, and 1 student-led startup came

together this year to make Design Studio a

smashing success.

What

Design Studio is a capstone program in

partnership with leading industry sponsors,

featuring the best and brightest students

focused on the intersection of business and

technology. Throughout the year, student-

led teams interface directly with sponsors,

faculty, sta, and industry experts to deliver an

impressive catalog of project deliverables.

When

Students in Design Studio participate in a two-

semester partner-sponsored project. Using a

release-driven approach, students work in self-

organized teams to design, develop, and release

project deliverables to sponsors six times over

an academic year.

Where

Design Studio itself is housed in the Kauman

Center on the University's city campus, where

students enjoy fully equipped workspaces and

have immediate access to professional, legal,

and technical support. Industry partners come

from the local, national, and international arenas.

How

Design Studio students split into small teams

and work directly with industry sponsors to

deliver impactful value throughout the year.

Teams also get involved with industry expert

coaches, who provide mentorship and guidance

on best practices.

Why

Through strong, collaborative industry

partnerships, we strengthen the community

and support the transformation of cutting-edge

research into innovation. Moreover, the practice

of iterative development trains students in

both creative solution design and model-driven

engineering processes.

Find us at https://raikes.unl.edu/design-studio

to partner with us for next year’s Design Studio!

SPONSOR

TEAM

PROGRAM

LEAD

LOCAL

MENTORS

TRIBE

LEAD

COACH

ARCHITECTURE AND

ENGINEERING LEAD

OTHER

STAKEHOLDERS

DEVELOPMENT

MANAGER

PRODUCT

OWNER

PRODUCT

MANAGER

PROJECT

EXECUTION

PROJECT

INITIATION

PROJECT

CLOSING

Design

Start of

Project

End of

Project

Release

Code

Test

Design Studio Annual Report | 2021 - 2022

Design Studio Process

Project Initiation

Objective: Become acquainted with sponsor and

project. Leverage design thinking to determine process

for execution of project.

Checkpoints/Releases

Objective: Demonstrate and defend what you have

done to this point. Provide direction and plan for

completing remaining project.

Project Execution

Objective: Produce and deliver value for sponsor

through cumulative iterations.

Project Closing

Objective: Transition value to sponsor. Finalize, assess

project and prove success.

Design Studio Roles

Architecture and Engineering Lead

A sta member in Design Studio who supports the team

and oers pragmatic engineering critique from the

industry perspective.

Product Owner

The representative from the sponsoring organization

who is both the day-to-day contact and has decision

making authority within the project scope.

Team

Students self-organize into teams. Teams have two

speciﬁc roles, the Development Manager and Product

Manager, who together share the responsibility of

leadership for the team.

Coach

A volunteer from the local community who serves as

a professional and technical mentor for the team, an

independent sounding board.

Program Lead

A sta member in Design Studio who supports the team

and provides professional guidance from the

industry perspective.

Tribe Lead

A faculty member in Design Studio who supports the

team and evaluates from an educational and

learning perspective.

Faculty & Sta

Design Studio is a mix of new and familiar

faces this year, not just among the students.

The program has a core sta of three full-time employees, plus the

support of the Raikes School Faculty. But, of course, eight people

cannot possibly support the 100+ students in a program like Design

Studio; it takes a village, including our volunteer coaches. See page

34 to recognize their contributions to making Design Studio what it is

today.

Cheryl Nelson

Director of Design Studio

Newly appointed Director of Design Studio. 20+

years of experience managing and directing software

and engineering teams for large fortune 500

companies. Passionate about mentoring students in

leadership and agile software development.

Jake Koperski

Design Studio Program Lead

Previously a software engineer and startup

entrepreneur, now creating opportunities for

students and mentoring teams on best practices.

Rachel Michaela Bradley

Design Studio Graduate Teaching Assistant

British senior IT technician-turned-software engineer

with over a decade experience who moved to

Nebraska to attend the University of Nebraska-

Lincoln and pursue the American dream.

Dr. Steve Cooper

Executive Director of the Raikes School, Tribe Lead

Comes to Nebraska from Stanford University and

believes in learning by doing and that changing the

world in the 21st century starts with understanding

business and computer science.

Dr. Justin Firestone

Assistant Professor of Practice, Tribe Lead

Focused on the intersection of technology, ethics,

and law. Instructor for the second-year software

engineering courses for the Raikes School and

cyber law at the law school. Interested in promoting

responsible technological innovations.

Dr. David Keck

Professor of Practice, Tribe Lead

Developed and teaches the school’s core sequence

in Data and Models, which includes topics from

probability and statistics, data science, machine

learning, simulation, and optimization. Also teaches

the school’s ﬁnance course.

Dr. Robert Mackalski

Assistant Professor of Practice, Tribe Lead

Software entrepreneur turned academic. Robert

teaches marketing courses at the Raikes School.

Dr. Stephanie Valentine

Assistant Professor of Practice, Tribe Lead

Instructor for most underclassman software

engineering courses at the Raikes School. Passionate

about working with Design Studio teams working on

novel interaction design and applied

machine learning.

Design Studio Annual Report | 2021 - 2022

Sponsors

Our industry, government, and non-proﬁt

sponsors seek solutions to real-world

problems facing their organization.

Design Studio teams deliver.

Design Studio leverages our extensive knowledge base,

interdisciplinary student body, and wealth of industry

experience to bring projects to fruition.

Design Studio Annual Report | 2021 - 2022

Page #: 11Gold

Years

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Analytics Apps

R&D

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Years

Analytics

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Projects

Our iterative development methodologies

lead to the development of robust software

products that address real problems.

Design Studio projects combine agile engineering processes, lean

business development, and interdisciplinary design thinking into an

iterative process for problem solving and product development - our

unique brand of innovation.

Design Studio Annual Report | 2021 - 2022

Reentry Data Tracking

Platform

Bridges to Hope is a non-proﬁt

organization that helps men and women

recently released from correctional

institutions transition to a productive

life after their release. Reentrants can

visit the organization to receive basic

household furnishings, clothing, personal

hygiene products, and connections to

services in the area. Previously, Bridges

to Hope tracked visitor records by

hand through paper and pencil, with

the occasional computer spreadsheet.

In addition to the quantities of each

item that a reentrant received, these

documents included demographic and

incarceration information for each visitor.

The Design Studio team designed and

implemented a top-of-the-line data

management system to replace the

previously used pencil and paper forms

and address these diculties. The new

web-based application increased the

ease of tracking this detailed information.

Security was at the forefront of all

development, from the database and data

access layers built to prevent corruption

to the web client, enforced with extensive

authentication. Additionally, the software

allows the non-proﬁt to generate

comprehensive reports that quantify the

organization’s impact on the community.

With the Design Studio hando, Bridges

to Hope is set up for future success

with an accurate, reliable, and secure

web application that streamlines all

their data management needs. The

Design Studio team designed the entire

project to be user-friendly with a secure

database, an intuitive interface, and

built-in administrative tools. As a result,

Bridges to Hope can easily manage the

application for years to come.

Student Team

Nathan Gentry

Ryan Hruby

Ray Huck

Ryan Olsen

Isabelle Schmidt

Improve Customer

Satisfaction with Machine

Learning

DMSi customers can submit idea requests

on their online portal called The Wedge.

These idea requests suggest to DMSi how

to improve their products, problems they

would like to see solved, and more. They

can also vote on other ideas. Product

owners assign business value to each

idea request to aid in their development

prioritization process. Given the lack of

ﬁltering capabilities and the magnitude

of ideas in the system, customers are not

seeing ideas they might have interest

in. Therefore, product owners cannot

accurately rely on the number of votes on

an idea to indicate customer value.

The team decided to attack this problem

by showing customers ideas that are

relevant and relate to strategic initiatives

at DMSi, as well as decreasing the total

number of ideas by eliminating duplicates

or merging closely related ideas. First,

the team created a duplicate detection

report and a strategic classiﬁcation

report using TFIDF vectorization and

string comparison methods. Second, the

team built a recommendation engine

using natural language processing

methods to cluster similar customers

and ideas. The engine generates a list of

ideas that are most relevant to customers

as well as ideas that have been deemed

“strategic”. The relevance calculation

assigns a value to each idea based on

how similar idea texts are, how customers

voted on the ideas, and ﬁnally takes a

random sampling of these weighted ideas

to ensure a new result every time the

engine runs. Both reports and the engine

script are hosted on Dataiku to be further

implemented by DMSi on The Wedge.

Student Team

Taylor Bernt

Megan Chaey

Alexis Delos Reyes

Jessie Guo

Caitlin McCarthy

Design Studio Annual Report | 2021 - 2022

Customer Operation

Relationship Visualizer

Farm Credit Services of America

is a leading provider of credit and

insurance services to farmers, ranchers,

agribusinesses, and rural residents in the

Midwest. Before this project, FCSAmerica

sales teammates could identify basic

customer operation relationships within

FCSAmerica’s CRM software for their

customers/stockholders, but there was no

system in place to discover, track or share

that operational linkage in the data with

other teammates.

The team was tasked with implementing

a modern graph database which sourced

data from the organization’s internal

data sources to identify relationships

across FCSAmerica’s large customer

base. Pieces of data (including customer

information, product information,

relationship to other producers or entities,

land ownership, etc.) were combined into

a single dynamic and interactive model

visualization to reveal previously unknown

relationships through queries engineered

by the team.

Now, FCSAmerica’s sales teammates can

explore over 14,000 nodes with nearly

27,000 relationships identiﬁed between

them, enabling them to match the right

producer or operation with the right

products and services. Nodes are also

ﬂagged if they are found to have business

or ﬁnancial risks. The team prioritized

scalability and the solution is designed to

automatically parse and upload new data

in mere seconds. These features will allow

FCSAmerica to continue adding new data

in the future with ease.

Student Team

Sophie Hellebusch

Justin Ho

Emily Kraai

Kyle Krueger

Erik Skoog

Culture Platform

Firespring, Certiﬁed B Corp®

headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska,

and a leader in the Do More Good®

Movement, provides strategic guidance

for businesses and nonproﬁts through

creative marketing, printing, and

technology solutions. Firespring's mission

is to help their customers accomplish

their own missions. They have a strong

emphasis on building and maintaining

robust company culture.

The challenge was to create a platform

to help with facilitating internal

communication, drive team/vision

alignment, and centralize tracking of

important internal metrics. Firespring ﬁrst

intends to use this platform for their own

internal use. They later intend to evolve it

into a SaaS oering for current and future

clients. The software oering will be

supported by a recurring revenue stream.

It will be a pivotal oering to clients on

their path to becoming a Do More Good®

company.

The goal of the Design Studio team was

to prioritize building a solid foundation

for future iterations of the project and to

fully build out the daily all-hands meeting

facilitation tool. Firespring calls this

daily meeting the "Firestarter Meeting."

The purpose of these meetings is to

celebrate employees, acknowledge goal

completion, and award those employees

who have gone above and beyond.

The team built a solution that allows an

attendee to enter a meeting and view

slides that are navigated and edited by

a scribe in real-time. This tooling allows

for Firespring scribes to easily facilitate

the meetings virtually. In addition, with

this solution, metrics and insights can be

generated to monitor goal completion

and employee engagement.

The Design Studio team's solution will

allow Firespring to continue their goal of

prioritizing company culture and is the

ﬁrst step in designing a culture portal that

will change the way internal operations

are conducted.

Student Team

Tomo Bessho

Audra Heyne

Michael Kovar

Lilly Moore

Daniel Noon

Design Studio Annual Report | 2021 - 2022

Financial Data Visualization

App – Pocket Galleri

Bank executives have hectic schedules

that can keep them away from their desks

for long periods of time. While in and out

of meetings all day, these executives need

access to Fiserv's rich data to enable

them to make decisions that directly

impact their company's bottom line.

Fiserv provides a web-based solution

called Galleri to support informed

decision-making. Still, executives require

an on-the-go solution to ﬁt their

on-the-go jobs.

The Fiserv Design Studio team set out

to ﬁt Galleri's extensive set of business

insights into a mobile-ﬁrst format

accessible from anywhere in the world,

not just in the conﬁnes of an oce. In

addition, the solution needed to be easy,

quick, and reliable. Executives do not

have the time to learn a complicated new

interface or question whether their data is

fresh and accurate.

Pocket Galleri is a cross-platform mobile

application with a stunning Flutter

frontend and a powerful GraphQL API

to serve all the rich insights that Fiserv

is known for. The Pocket Galleri team

condensed Fiserv's existing trove of

data into a mobile-friendly format

that provides an ecient and intuitive

experience, delivering substantial value

on a tiny screen.

Student Team

Bryce Janke

Nathan Kolbas

Tanner Nash

Brian Reynolds

Bonus Capture

With trends towards virtual contact on

the rise, small colleges are struggling

to recruit. Recruiters cannot get out to

see and evaluate athletes, thus failing to

meet enrollment goals and putting their

future budget and very existence at risk.

Athletes are struggling to know where to

start to begin their recruitment journey

and keep recruiters up to date, given no

direct communication is allowed until

sophomore year. With the diculties

faced by recruiters and athletes, we were

tasked with answering these questions:

What video outside of game footage do

recruiters ﬁnd valuable? What information

do athletes lack? How can we best

provide athletes instruction through the

recruitment process?

Introducing the Athletic Video Resume

(AVR), a sports-agnostic video capturing

mobile app focused on helping athletes

get recruited by guiding them on how

and what video to capture in order to

incite recruiter interest so that they will

investigate the athlete further. With

guidance on how to validate their stats

for recruiters, we enable athletes to insert

themselves into the recruitment pipeline

with ease. Recruiters can trust an athlete’s

progress and easily evaluate them based

on drill footage, knowing video doesn’t

lie.

With this app, the team went beyond

simple development. The team spent

time interviewing nearly 20 coaches,

recruiters, and athletes to ﬁnd which drills

and stats allow recruiters to evaluate

athletes and identify the best way to

deliver instructions to athletes. The team

used the information gathered to build a

mobile application available on iOS and

Android using React Native. The mobile

app allows athletes to record and save

videos of themselves completing drills to

their devices inside the app. From there,

the athlete can share the recordings

with recruiters. For Hudl, the ability to

easily manage available drills and sports

is important when maintaining the app.

To allow for maintainability, the team

built the app around conﬁguration ﬁles

containing meta-data about sports, drills,

and instructions oered in the app.

Student Team

Dylan Chapin

Sierra Futterman

Caleb Koranda

Patrick Murphy

Brysen Reeser

Liam Seper

Design Studio Annual Report | 2021 - 2022

Drone Progress Tracking

Kiewit is one of the largest construction

companies globally and has long pushed

the standards for innovation within the

construction industry. Kiewit operates

on an initiative to be a data-driven

organization. Construction projects track

progress data for various reasons, none

more important than meeting contractual

obligations. Keeping clients in tune with

the status of a given project gives them

peace of mind and correlates directly

with revenue.

For solar projects, quantity claiming is

done by walking up and down rows of

solar panels, posts, and torque tubes

across the project site and manually

entering the status data. The project goal

was to create a secondary automated

version of the manual quantity claiming

process for construction progress tracking.

Kiewit uses drones to capture high-

quality, location-based imagery called

GeoTIFFs over these solar project

sites. An in-house machine learning

model utilizes these ﬁles to predict the

completion of the project sites with up to

95% accuracy.

The primary limiting factor? Training the

model to dierentiate unclear images,

have shadows, or contain warping by

manually labeling posts, torque tubes,

and solar panels. Kiewit’s original solution

contained these labeling capabilities, but

the user interface was small and overall

clunky to use.

The team developed an external

application that allows for streamlined

labeling in a more intuitive interface.

The application also provides more

capabilities on the map, separating the

GeoTIFF ﬁles by project to support long-

term project expansion. In addition, it

hosts easy to read statistics about the AI

model training runs, displays heatmaps

for projects, and displays generated

masks on the map to show labeling.

Student Team

Laura Derowitsch

Kally Karkazis

Damien Niyonshuti

Rachel Nordgren

Savan Patel

Chaitra Pirisingula

Sam Schneider

Monitoring the Performance

of Dynamics 365 Finance

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is an Enterprise

Resource Planning (ERP) system used by

businesses large and small. This project

focused speciﬁcally on the Finance

modules of the Dynamics 365 application.

At the beginning of the project, Microsoft

engineers presented the DS team with a

problem: Dynamics 365 had a reactive

support model, wherein Microsoft

engineers wait for customers to report

performance issues. This model could not

scale. To make performance monitoring

more intelligent, the team created a

custom solution enabling Microsoft

engineers to monitor performance,

visualize trends, and receive proactive

alerts for Dynamics 365

client environments.

The team began by exploring millions

of rows of anonymized telemetry data

from Dynamics 365 client environments.

From this, team members grew to

understand what data points would be

useful to visualize performance trends

for a Microsoft engineer. Using Microsoft

Power BI, the team created custom

dashboards that enable engineers to view

performance data for individual client

environments as well as Dynamics 365

as a whole.

Building on those dashboards, the team

created an automated performance

benchmarking and alerting solution.

This solution computes a reasonable

“baseline” for performance metrics

with respect to each client environment

and compares real-time telemetry

data to these benchmarks. When real-

time performance data exceeds the

benchmark, engineers receive an alert

via Microsoft Teams informing them

of the potential slow-down. The alert

also provides a link to the Power BI

dashboard, where engineers can view

more information about the aected

client environment.

Student Team

Tom Hermanek

Justin Morrow

Karthik Pagilla

TJ Sandhu

Bennett Wright

Design Studio Annual Report | 2021 - 2022

First Time Homebuyers

The Design Studio team has aided in

manifesting Mutual of Omaha Mortgage's

vision by developing a video-ﬁrst home-

buying app targeted towards ﬁrst-time

homebuyers. Mutual of Omaha Real

Estate (MORE) is Mutual of Omaha

Mortgage's new ﬂagship mobile

application. It allows customers to search

listings, engage with real estate agents,

and list their properties for sale all in one

streamlined application.

With MORE, users now have access

to thousands of videos created by

professional realtors and videographers

to convey homes and communities'

attractions and unique experiences across

the nation. By providing a video-ﬁrst

experience potential, homeowners can

see properties like never before.

MORE's features extend to homeowners

as well as homebuyers. Users can now

record videos and images, input property

details, and list their property within the

app. They also provide a direct line of

communication with potential buyers by

using the in-app conversations feature.

With MORE's unique and powerful

features, users can now experience a

premium and seamless home

search experience.

Student Team

Emily Dalton

Jackson Eickho

Vivian Jacobitz

Antonio Linhart

Bryce Yong

Event Ticketing System

Nelnet Business Services is a division of

Nelnet focused on campus payment and

technology solutions. A common request

from higher education clients is an event

ticketing solution integrated with Nelnet's

existing campus product suite. The

project's end goal is to provide a cost-

eective ticketing solution for Nelnet

Business Services' higher

education clients.

The event ticketing solution allows higher

education institutions to create and

manage events, create event venues, and

use scanning devices to scan attendees

into events. Individual users can explore

and ﬁlter events created by their

institution, purchase event tickets, check

in to events, and share tickets with others.

In addition, the solution includes seat

map images to show ticketholders their

seat location before events, and printing

functionality is provided for oine ticket

scanning. It supports a reservation time

for purchasing tickets, conﬁguring a

purchasing window for an event, and

searching for speciﬁc seating criteria.

Features requested by Nelnet Business

Services were integrated into the web

and mobile scanning applications. The

web application allows admins to manage

events and venues. It helps users discover

new events at their institutions and buy

tickets to events. The Wi-Fi-connected

Zebra scanning device and mobile

application enable event volunteers to

scan ticket barcodes to accept users into

an event. Overall, this solution aims to

simplify event creation, management,

and discovery for all higher education

institutions and their communities.

Student Team

John Ang

Ellenna Divingnzzo

Zach Kerkman

Ariel Levi

Jacob Mann

Leah Olson

Design Studio Annual Report | 2021 - 2022

Dynamic Intersection

Creation and Vehicle Crash

Placement

The Nebraska Department of

Transportation (NDOT) works to make

roads safer, reducing fatalities and injuries

from vehicular collisions. NDOT engineers

and data partners use collision diagrams

to study road crash trends and identify

areas for safety-enhancing modiﬁcations.

However, NDOT currently draws roads

and crashes manually, taking days or

weeks to complete, limiting the number

of possible safety analyses.

Our solution is to add the ability to

create accurate collision diagrams in the

Nebraska Transportation Information

Portal (NTIP). When an NDOT employee

or data partner makes a new diagram,

the program ﬁrst downloads an overhead

image of the road to serve as the base

of the diagram. It then runs the image

through a machine learning model to

separate roadways from buildings,

parking lots, and vegetation. Next, a

computer vision algorithm bolds painted

lines to make trac lanes clear. Lastly,

our solution plots crashes onto the outline

using the coordinates and orientation of

each crash. The color of each collision

corresponds to its injury severity so that

viewers can quickly see how serious each

impact is. Analysts and data partners can

use the existing diagram editor features

to add metadata, including stop signs,

trac lights, and speed limits.

The new solution can capture real-world

roadway details that provide a complete

context of the collision environment

using overhead images. In addition, the

new tool drastically decreases the time

needed to create collision diagrams from

days to just a few minutes. Our solution

complements the work of NDOT analysts

who make collision diagrams by allowing

them to focus on diagramming complex

intersections and creating high-ﬁdelity

collision diagrams. All of this supports

NDOT’s eorts to reduce trac fatalities

by designing safer roads.

Student Team

Grace Clausen

Robert Kirkpatrick

Anna Krueger

Ben Wingerter

Data has been edited and does not reﬂect real road conditions.

Automated Phone Survey

System

NRC Health is in the business of

improving healthcare. They partner

with healthcare organizations to gather

feedback from their patients to oer

insights into how organizations can

provide better patient experiences and

care. NRC Health tasked the team with

creating a proof-of-concept phone survey

system. We explore how innovative new

technologies can provide additional value

to their customers at a lower cost while

also creating a backup for their existing

call system.

The team began the project by

researching various calling gateway and

text-to-speech vendors and delivering

a detailed technical whitepaper

justifying vendor selection and

design decisions. This research was

instrumental to the team for creating

cost estimates, discovering scaling

limitations, and comparing features.

In addition, it provided the team and

project stakeholders with the conﬁdence

necessary to pursue the ﬁnal

project architecture.

This foundational research was used

for the rest of the project, leveraging

technologies such as Amazon Polly text-

to-speech and the SignalWire calling

gateway. The team delivered a proof-of-

concept phone survey system capable of

handling hundreds of thousands of calls

per day.

The microservice leverages recent

advancements in speech synthesis

technologies, enabling NRC Health to

oer increased survey customization in

multiple languages. This is signiﬁcantly

cheaper than voice recordings while

preserving the existing call experience.

The system additionally satisﬁes NRC

Health's nonfunctional requirements

for easy integration and can scale to

accommodate growing business needs.

Student Team

Andrew Hossack

Nicole Serpico

Zac Streich

Luke Van Drie

Matt Vavricek

Design Studio Annual Report | 2021 - 2022

NSAAdministrator

The Nebraska School Activities

Association (NSAA) is the sanctioning

body of high school athletics and

activities in the state. With more than

300-member public and non-public

schools, the NSAA maintains an extensive

amount of data to comply with the rules

adopted by its members. The data allows

NSAA to organize, develop, direct, and

regulate interscholastic activities.

As time progresses, the integrity and

reliability of this data becomes more

crucial to sustaining the NSAA purpose.

To help improve their systems, NSAA

came to the Design Studio team to

help revamp and improve their current

software infrastructure to keep track of

interscholastic activities.

For phase one of this multi-year project,

the team created a foundational

solution to help manage students and

games across the state. This solution is

aimed at high school athletic directors,

coaches, and Nebraska School Activities

Association’s sta. With 21 sports and

5 activities, NSAA coordinates student-

athletes and schools within each sport

and exercise.

First, the Design Student team met with

various NSAA sta members, high school

athletic directors, and coaches to further

understand the complex procedure. Next,

the team streamlined an application that

helps manage students, schools, and

sports from these interviews. Member

schools can utilize this information, from

student eligibility to sporting rosters, to

eectively conduct interscholastic activities.

Student Team

Ian Anderson

Caleb Burbach

Erik Konnath

Danny Tran

Keith Tran

Cattle Counting

The New Stockyard Group Design Studio

team worked on an application with

the goal of simplifying the process of

counting cattle at a feedlot. The current

manual methods consist of either

counting the cattle as they walk out of a

trailer and into their lots, or by solving for

the total heads by estimating the amount

of grain on a facility. The key problems

with these two common methods is that

the former is highly labor intensive, and

the latter has up to a 20% margin of error.

Because this count is used to calculate

insurance costs and reserves, a quick,

reliable, and duplicable result is desired.

Originally, the project was pitched

with the idea of using satellite imaging.

However due to the current state of

technology, and a high per-image cost,

the project pivoted instead to using drone

photography. The modeling software

used in the solution is called ImageAI, a

Python library. Once the team received

images from the sponsor or the UNL

Feedlots, RoboFlow was used to annotate

the images and create augmentations

to robustify the training datasets. The

frontend was created using Tkinter,

another Python library.

Student Team

Stan Drvol

Dom Pelini

Praveen Rao

Chris Wieskamp

Andy Zhang

Design Studio Annual Report | 2021 - 2022

Building Eciency Platform

Phase II

Olsson is prepared for the shift to a

hybrid workforce and plans to aid

companies improving upon their physical

infrastructure. As the world adjusts,

they acknowledge physical locations

must adjust too. Based out of Lincoln,

Nebraska, Olsson is a civil engineering

ﬁrm ready to handle any issue through

the usage of critical data that many

companies are not considering yet. They

look to answer questions and determine

why people unconsciously favor certain

parts of the building over others, in

addition to how each part of the building

is being used. Having this knowledge will

allow businesses to be more aware of

their carbon footprints, so they can make

the necessary improvements to reduce

operating costs, make informed decisions

on the design of the space they have, and

only use the natural resources they need.

This leads into the Olsson Building Use

Eciency Platform, the future of data

collection and analysis for buildings.

This project was initially created in

August of 2020, and the solution has

been greatly expanded in the past year.

It went from being only usable in online

environments to being available remotely

without the internet, allowing for oine

data collection and uploading the

moment the device is connected to the

internet. The dashboard also lacked many

features regarding deleting data that is

no longer needed, exporting the graph

formed by the user’s speciﬁed inputs,

editing sensor information recorded by

the device, and adding restrictions to

ensure that features act as expected

while using the device. Another addition

was the implementation of the new

Power Measurement Sensor, expanding

the device to cover many more aspects

of analyzing the eciency of buildings.

These improvements have prepared the

Building Use Eciency Platform to be

deployed to a vast array

of companies.

Student Team

Tate Anderson

Tommy Braccia

Austin Collins

Gracyn Green

Ben Lohrman

AI Sentiment Awareness

From Veteran’s Aairs (VA) and the

Department of Defense to hospitals

around the country, Signature

Performance brings a wealth of health

consulting expertise to make people and

businesses in the community healthier.

Part of this mandate involves the

operation and innovation of the VA call

center experience. Signature Performance

services over 250,000 calls a month and

every month a portion of these calls are

with veterans undergoing crisis scenarios

involving suicidal or homicidal ideation.

Signature’s commitment to providing

the best possible service to our nation’s

veterans extends to excelling and

ensuring their safety, especially in

these moments.

Signature Performance has partnered

with Design Studio to push forward the

frontier of what is considered possible

in terms of response times, satisfaction,

and health outcomes. To this end, the

team designed and built a real-time

call ﬂagging system that employs

a deep neural network to identify

veterans in crisis and alerts call service

representatives (CSR) to such a crisis.

Feedback from this system is sent to the

call service representative via a Microsoft

Teams chat, which enables the CSR to

at any time (either in response to a crisis

message or of their own volition) alert

a manager group to a crisis scenario

at the click of a single button. This ﬁre

alarm mechanism drastically improves

response times while our model sets a

new standard for accuracy in predicting

crisis scenarios.

Student Team

Joey Carrigan

Charlie Floeder

Devin McGuire

Vishnu Menon

Tom Walton

Design Studio Annual Report | 2021 - 2022

Multi-Channel Production

Information Management

(PIM)

Headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska,

Speedway Motors is the oldest speed

shop in the United States. They have been

dedicated to helping car enthusiasts ﬁnd

the best parts for their ride since 1952.

With over 100,000 products on their

website, Speedway takes a signiﬁcant

amount of work to keep their catalog up

to date.

Automotive part data comes to

Speedway from many dierent sources

and can often be very fragmented.

Customers must receive parts that will

ﬁt their car. Hence, fragmented and

ill-ﬁtting data is a big challenge in the

automotive industry. Initial calculations

from Speedway Motors estimate that the

Design Studio team's solution will add

notable revenue opportunities within a

year of launching the project.

The team worked to take Speedway's

manual data ingestion process and

transform it with a streamlined user

interface for Speedway content

specialists. The new interface supports

vendor data uploads, creating customized

rules to control how the data will be

formatted, and allows Speedway

employees to bulk upload data.

The new system delivers in-page help

and an easy-to-understand interface for

new users while balancing power users'

need to manipulate the system at scale.

In addition, by automating a previously

manual and time-consuming process,

the team has helped make product

information management at Speedway

Motors a smooth ride.

Student Team

Parul Aggarwal

Victoria Chin

Anna Holmquist

Kieran McWilliams

Tim Roty

Sifat Syed

Taxonomy Revolution

Spreetail is an omni-channel seller,

listing products from thousands of

vendor partners on over 20 online

marketplaces. Content taxonomy – or

the mapping of product data according

to categories – is at the core of modern

internet organization from social media

to marketplaces. When taxonomy is

done properly and updated consistently

to meet evolving changes, Spreetail’s

products convert to sales at a higher

level, are more discoverable by shoppers,

and fuel growth for both Spreetail and

their vendors.

Currently, the taxonomic process can

be highly manual, requiring updates and

human intervention to keep products

appropriately mapped. Our vision—to

develop an ecient and robust machine

learning solution that provides high

accuracy category recommendations

based on dynamic taxonomic data—

resulted in a process requiring little

human interaction beyond a veriﬁcation

of the recommended category.

Data science and machine learning

converged on the Taxonomy Revolution

project, generating a dynamic solution

that reduces costs tied to manual

updates, increases sales conversions,

produces higher quality matches across

taxonomic categories on multiple

marketplaces, and reduces churn in

updated multiple marketplace data.

The solution this year was centered

on two of Spreetail’s largest primary

marketplaces partners, Amazon and

eBay, but is designed to be expandable to

integrate the remaining channels in

the future.

Student Team

Ciara Baumert

Ritvik Handa

Ben Hanson

Katie Leger

Bertrand Sibomana

Design Studio Annual Report | 2021 - 2022

Project Retail Data Findings

Union Bank & Trust created an expansive

data warehouse with customer data and

provided the Design Studio team access

to an integrated PowerBI environment to

implement exploratory machine learning

models. Numerous models and products

were developed to identify risk across the

database. The insights gathered from the

initial models were then iterated upon in

order to develop risk-aversion strategies

and allow UBT to make data-driven

decisions to maximize proﬁts.

The team developed two primary risk

prediction models for the entire portfolio

of loan data to predict the likelihood of

defaulting on a loan. Using both a logistic

regression and a random forest model,

the team created two separate reports,

with accuracy metrics over 96% on both

models, that assigned a percentage risk

of defaulting based on the current state

of the loan. These reports were able to

serve as live updating dashboards for the

UBT team to reference the state of their

loan portfolio and view the loans at the

highest risk of defaulting.

Beyond that, the team also developed

exploratory reports on the number

of times an account could make late

payments and its impact on defaulting

risk, as well as a speciﬁc regression

breakdown of automotive dealership

loans and the evolution of risk in

those accounts. This demonstrated an

opportunity for the UBT team to apply

their predictive portfolio models to

a subset of training and testing data

speciﬁcally tied to dealership loans, and

to speciﬁcally isolate features of the

dataset that enabled niche

predictive capabilities.

Student Team

Landon Borges

Peter Dunbar

Hunter Godina

Cole Johnson

Noah McCashland

Clipboards Supercharged

To stay competitive, the modern baseball

coach must record and analyze hundreds

of data points per day. A good portion

of these data points are user-entered,

currently with clipboard, pen, and paper.

Inevitably, these papers pile up and

coaches get overwhelmed by the amount

of data they must understand, visualize,

and communicate to their team daily.

Tapp by VIZN Stats exists to solve this

problem by giving coaches the most

intuitive tagging tools and data analysis

blocks to automate these processes.

Currently used by seven baseball teams

across the US, including the Husker

baseball team, the VIZN team is proud

of its product Tapp - a beautiful web

application powered by a robust backend

API and data analysis engine that it has

created in the past year of Design Studio.

Tapp has proven to be useful for coaches

across all levels of baseball, and it has the

platform for the company to skyrocket

into other sports and markets soon.

The team looks forward to continuing

to work on VIZN post-DS with the goal

of delivering on its mission to empower

coaches to make decisions that help

players reach their full potential.

Visit https://viznstats.com for more

information!

Student Team

Jayden Boesch

Jordan Boesch

Michael Kelly

Alex Miller

Parker Miller

Carl Olson

Dan Stara

Design Studio Annual Report | 2021 - 2022

Statistics

Design Studio by the numbers

600

Meetings

Design Studio Program

450

Hours worked

105

Students

Coaches