Fostering a Community of Student Scholars

s are listed alphabetically by the presenter’s last name. Footnotes: Crowdsourcing Hikers to Preserve and Maintain our Trails Dong-Jin Ahn, Senior, Informatics Kevin Merritt, Senior, Informatics Benjamin Fields, Senior, Informatics Mentor: Batya Friedman, Information School Mentor: David Hendry, Information School Over the last two years over 40 million young adults went on hikes all over the United States, while volunteer organizations contributed 80,000 hours maintaining these trails annually. Despite these numbers, trail maintenance still lags behind trail use. All of these young hikers represent an unrealized opportunity to improve the system of trail preservation. The way current systems solicit and aggregate trail information (e.g. sending an e-mail to a trail organization about a problem) inadequately facilitate this important job. To design a more flexible trail reporting process, this research and design project investigates the use of crowd-sourcing, a technique through which the public helps capture and systematize large amounts of data. An assessment of user needs was obtained by conducting six informal interviews with leaders of hiking and trail maintenance groups and by evaluating key current reporting systems. A combination of GPS coordinates, pictures, and the hiker’s intuition were found to generate the most helpful reports. Based on this data, our system was developed to record everything from wildlife to trail conditions. Footnotes consisting of a mobile application running on GPS enabled iPhone, allows hikers to tag “notes” with geographic location data. Different trail problems and issues are categorized, so it helps the users can easily report it when they encounter trail issues. We developed an interactive prototype and website to display a comprehensive view of trail conditions for hikers and land managers. Later, we invited 5 participants to test the mobile interactive prototype. Based on their feedback, we made several design changes which made the application easier to use along the trail. With the ability to aggregate trail information for land managers, Footnotes is intended to expedite trail maintenance. By harnessing the hiking community through mobile reporting, a more accurate log of trail conditions can be established. Effects of Muscimol Reversible Inactivation of the Prelimbic Area on Spatial Working Memory Lisa Akiyama, Senior, Psychology, Biology (Molecular, Cellular Developmental) Mentor: Sheri Mizumori, Psychology Spatial working memory (SPWM) is a specific type of working memory that temporarily stores and manipulates incoming spatial information. The function of SPWM is essential in human life, and SPWM deficits have devastating effects on humans. Prefrontal cortical malfunction has been pointed out as the plausible cause of SPWM deficits in several psychiatric disorders, such as Parkinson’s Disease and Schizophrenia. SPWM is strongly functioned by the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the hippocampus (Hip). Recently it has been specifically emphasized that the prelimbic area (PL) of PFC plays an active role in SPWM. Moreover, it has been suggested that spatial learning heavily depends on the Hip-PL circuit. Despite these findings, further investigation is still necessary to clarify the mechanism of Hip-PL circuit’s involvement in purely SPWM activities. In this study, the role of PL in SPWM will be studied by measuring the SPWM ability of mice with inactivated PL. Precisely localized bilateral PL inactivation was achieved by reversible inactivation, involving bilateral local microinfusions of muscimol, a GABAA agonist, in PL. After the infusion of muscimol, followed by food deprivation of the mice, SPWM was assessed using a plus-maze task. Investigating the Influence of Dust Aerosol on the Atmospheric Sulfur Budget in the Marine Boundary Layer Using Oxygen Isotope Measurements of Sulfate Aerosol and a One-Dimensional Box Model Helen Amos, Senior, Atmospheric Sciences