The Capstone Project Experience
In the final two quarters of the program, students gain real world experience working in small groups on a data science challenge facing a company or not-for-profit. At the conclusion of the capstone project, sponsoring organizations are invited to attend a formal Capstone Event where students showcase their work. Capstone projects typically span a wide range of interests, including energy, agriculture, retail, urban planning, healthcare, marketing, and education.
Examples of Previous Capstone Sponsors
- Adobe
- Amplero
- Boeing
- Biblioteca Italiana Seattle
- Civil & Environmental Engineering, WSU
- Clobotics
- Equal Opportunity Schools
- iSchool, UW
- JLL
- Kids on 45th
- Microsoft
- Milliman
- Seattle Children’s Hospital
- Tiller
- Urban Planning, UW
- Zillow
Capstone 2020-21 Archives (Gather.Town)
Due to the pandemic, our March 2021 Capstone 2021 was held entirely online in the Gather.Town platform, to which we added a gallery of March 2020 Capstone projects that we never got to celebrate with a live event.
Gather presents a map-based, interactive platform where you can wander among projects, see media like posters, infographics, and video, and do video/audio chat with others who are logged into the space. You can read some basics about using this platform at the Gather site. One of the other benefits of Gather is that it created a persistent archive of our Capstone 2020 and 2021 projects, which you can view and digitally wander among here:
https://tinyurl.com/msdsfair
Other Examples of Past Projects

Visualizing Gentrification in Seattle
MSDS students Deepa Agrawal, Angel Wang, and Erin Orbits created an interactive mapping tool to visualize gentrification in Seattle.
Sponsor: Urban Planning, University of Washington

Using Artificial Intelligence to Monitor Inventory in Real Time
Capstone researchers Havan Agrawal, Toan Luong, Vishnu Nandakumar, and Tejas Hosangadi explored new methods for optimizing supply chains and product placements to improve sales.
Sponsor: Clobotics

Predicting Soil Moisture with Machine Learning
MSDS students Samir Patel, Rex Thompson, Michael Grant, and Dane Jordan developed machine learning models to accurately estimate soil moisture using satellite imagery.
Sponsor: Civil & Environmental Engineering, Washington State University