2019 Summer Internship Guest Blog Post #33 by Jin Han

Throughout the summer, Skandalaris Center Summer Internship Program participants will be writing guest blog posts about their internship experience. Following is one such post. 

Visualizing Shared Work Fleets

By Jin Han (SI)

My name is Jin Han and I am a Master’s student studying Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis. This summer, I took part in Skandalaris Center Summer Internship Program and my intern host was HiHo Mobility. HiHo Mobility is a startup that provides a complete suite of Mobile Workforce Management (MWM) tools for companies with staff who work “in the field”. The software was created when a founder needed easy-to-use, powerful and affordable tools to manage his company’s workforce. Recently, HiHo started offering shared work fleets that help tradespeople get more jobs done on campus. It provides On-demand access to all tools, supplies and rides. I applied for this internship because of my research interest in visualization, and I was looking for hand on practices on visual analytics. During my internship, I designed and built two visualization tools that analyzes the data of HiHo’s shared work fleets. My first task was to design a 3D map that visualizes the travel history of HiHo’s shared work fleets. To tackle this, I firstly analyzed the requirements and mapped the requirements to design features through discussions with my supervisor. I then built the visualization prototype with the use of a set of JavaScript libraries. I discussed my prototype with my supervisor and further refined it. Finally, I created a report using HiHo’s template that summarized the insights and a documentation for the visualization software I developed. In addition to this project, I also developed a time-of-day utilization visualization that analyzed the utilization rate of the work fleets. I really enjoyed the workspace provided by my host. It is CIC St. Louis, near the Cortex metro station. It is an open, convenient, clean, modern co-working space. There is a kitchen offering free coffee, soft drinks and snacks. Their phone booths, meeting rooms, popup lounges and printing machines are convenient. I had the chance to network people working there and enjoyed a variety of the Cortex innovation community events. Furthermore, I enjoyed the Wednesday panels organized by Skandalaris Center where I had in-depth discussions with startups from St. Louis innovation community. I also moderated a panel on July 31 and received acclaim from the participating startups and the audiences. This summer internship at Skandalaris Center is fruitful and I really appreciate it. As an international student, I explored the St. Louis innovation community and achieved an in-depth understanding of American entrepreneurship. I would recommend anyone who had a passion of innovation to apply it. Company links: https://HiHomobility.com/ My Workspace: Phone Booth: Coffee Machine: