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The Information School gathered on June 4 to celebrate student milestones from the academic year with more than 100 projects on display at the 2025 iSchool Showcase. Students from all five iSchool degree programs had the opportunity to present their work to family, friends, colleagues, employers and industry partners in the HUB ballroom.

Judge John Chun of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington gave the keynote address to mark the beginning of the Showcase. Chun commended students for their hard work, and he emphasized the importance of information in society, saying it is crucial to democracy.

“Without the free flow of accurate information, the democratic institutions would simply wither and die,” Chun said. “Democracy itself is fundamentally an information dependent system. Citizens cannot make informed choices without access to reliable information. Elected officials cannot govern effectively without accurate data. Institutions cannot maintain legitimacy without transparent communications.”

In recent years, the students displayed their projects as the iSchool Capstone Gala, an event that included presentations in multiple classrooms and awards from industry judges. This year, the school took a new approach, gathering instead in one ballroom where students had the opportunity to present their work using posters and other displays in one of three sessions. 

Capstones, theses, independent research projects, study abroad experiences and more were on display, highlighting the diversity of student interests at the iSchool. Projects included teams developing new data sets to uncover the history of deaths from hazing, the history of dogs in museum digital artifacts, indexing public records, and many more.

Aiming to draw spectators to their poster, one Informatics Capstone team wore matching red superhero capes. Dubbed “Cyberheroes,” the team built a website to educate kids about cybersecurity using visually enticing characters and games.

One Museology thesis, “Artists First: An Exhibition of Good Care,” was the work of two students to support and promote digital artists in an era where generative AI is being used in the video game and animation industries. 

Their thesis included an exhibit at the Brooklyn Arts Center, “Artists First,” where invited digital artists displayed their work. They also made a zine with the work of their selected artists. They focused their project message on generative AI in the context of digital art, providing resources to artists to protect their artwork when posted online to keep it safe from algorithms. 

“The gallery itself was focused on the skills of artists,” Emma Mattix-Wand said. “We were able to provide some economic opportunities for artists as well. We were able to have a print shop for them to sell their works without having to pay gallery fees. So all of the payments went straight to the artists instead of to the gallery.”

The event also included work from competitions. Ph.D. student Kayla Duskin and her team, including MSIM student Hongfan Lu, participated in the Prosocial Ranking Challenge hosted by UC Berkeley, where they were tasked to come up with their own social media algorithm design and implement it on Facebook, X and Reddit. 

What the team developed was “Feedspan: Bridging Political Divides through Algorithmic Intervention,” a feed-ranking algorithm that replaces polarizing and divisive content on social media with bridging content that will appeal to users across the political spectrum. 

“The goals of the intervention are to reduce political polarization and also to improve mental health outcomes and well-being outcomes,” Duskin said.

While hundreds gathered in the HUB ballroom, the community also had the option to attend or present via Zoom, where the entire event was live-streamed. The format of both in-person and online presentations allowed participants and attendees the flexibility to attend from wherever was easiest to them, with eight projects being presented online.

Third year Ph.D. student Isaac Slaughter was in New York during the Showcase as he presented his research project, “Community notes reduce engagement with and diffusion of false information online,” via Zoom. Online participants could hop into his breakout room while in-person attendees could put on a pair of headphones and interact online.

“It’s been nice. We had a few people pop in, and it’s fun to talk about the work,” Slaughter said.

With the event taking place just days before many students graduated, it was a moment to reflect on their hard work and all they had accomplished during their time with the school. 

Informatics student Carolyn Chen presented her team’s Capstone project, “Vidar: Securing the Android Ecosystem through Intelligent Patch-porting Automation.” As an international student, coming to the UW alone was hard, Chen said, but being at the Showcase reminded her of her journey and made her emotional about completing her degree.

“This is so heartwarming and wholesome to me,” she said. “And after learning from the courses and meeting industry professionals through [the iSchool] and meeting this community, it just gave me so much more perspective, things that I would not have learned at home. Now that I am graduating I reflect and [know] I've been through so much, and I learned so much.” 

There were three award categories, and attendees could vote for their favorite projects in each category. Dozens of projects received enough votes to be awarded the Bridge-Builder Award for Equity, the Spark Award for Creativity and the Visionary Lens Award for Insightfulness.