INFO’s iConsultancy program has a tangible impact, executing over 150 capstone projects last academic year
Working with Prince George’s County on a geographical information system, assisting the Piscataway Conoy tribe in educational outreach, redesigning kiosks for Royal Farms convenience stores—these are just a few of the capstone projects students engage in through the iConsultancy experiential learning program at the University of Maryland College of Information.
“We really do emphasize the engagement in human-centered thinking across all of the projects. We also embrace the idea of information and technology for good,” says TJ Rainsford, director of the iConsultancy.
The program meticulously aligns students’ skills with client needs. “For example, we have students who have design experience from taking UI and UX-based courses and can design websites for clients. Every project we scope out with a client aligns with our service catalog,” says Rainsford. This well-structured matchmaking ensures high success rates across projects.
Although faculty serve as mentors, the degree to which they interact with clients varies. “Faculty have a certain amount of ownership over how projects are executed. If they want a hands-on approach with clients, they are free to do so, provided they keep iConsultancy informed. Conversely, if they prefer to step back from client management, we step in to handle those aspects,” says Rainsford. This approach not only eases the burden on faculty but also allows them to focus on the academic growth of students.
While most experiential programs in other colleges manage around 25 projects per semester, iConsultancy’s scale is substantially larger. “We executed 152 projects last year, and we’re anticipating over 200 this academic year,” says Rainsford. This expansive reach is attributed primarily to iConsultancy’s unique model, which lifts the load of project and client management off instructors, enabling them to concentrate on teaching and mentorship.
Working with NASA
This past year, Pooja Pandey and Jay Jayachandran were members of a team working with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center on an artificial intelligence (AI) platform to streamline the process of performing academic literature reviews in support of its engineering and science initiatives.
“Conducting literature views was foundational to any innovation in that research institution, but it was notably time-consuming and it was also very comprehensive,” says Pandey. “It requires a lot of manual labor in the sense that you’re sifting through plenty of databases, you’re sifting through a lot of articles and papers, and sometimes it’s not in languages or fields or domains that are known to you.”
“The core idea was to expedite the discovery process and make it easier for researchers to process information quicker,” says Jayachandran. “Since the dataset is very large and diverse, a Gen AI platform makes a lot of sense in breaking down information into bite sized pieces and then using relevant information to find more relevant information.”
“They can focus honestly more on the innovation and more on the knowledge that they’re gaining and the knowledge that they’re trying to create as opposed to just reading through papers, seeing whether it’s right for them or not,” says Pandey.
Jayachandran initially thought their project for NASA might be low-priority but was surprised by the strong interest from the team. “I was initially cautious that our work may not be all that important to the client,” says Jayachandran. Deputy Chief of AI Matthew Dosberg valued human-centered design, resulting in regular meetings, collaborative exercises, and encouraging feedback.
“The HCIM team provided expert-level design services that resulted with an excellent product design,” says Dosberg. “Excited to see where the team takes the product strategy/design.”
“They did trust us enough with our expertise to let us guide the project and trust that we would make the right decisions and we would come up with the right solutions,” says Pandey. “And that was super nice to be able to have that opportunity. And they also pushed us to think about the project at a larger scope beyond just catering to NASA’s needs and to focus on building a product that also addresses a broader market appeal or has a broader market appeal.”
Since graduating this May, they have been working full time on the platform. “We became a lot more ambitious with our goal of the product alone,” says Pandey. Instead of just focusing on academic literature reviews, they expanded into general search and ways to give access to information across different perspectives and domains. They aim to make data understandable and promote critical thinking. Currently, they’re developing a version of the platform, which is called Nebulai, with both open-source and premium features to cater to various user needs.