Toyota Financial Services (TFS), being part of a highly regulated industry needs to ensure that all risk management, governance process, and controls are in place to ensure compliance. This entails documenting all the business processes, definitions of their data elements, connecting the defined data elements to the physical attributes in their various applications and databases. Furthermore, they need to document the lineage of the data to ensure that it is flowing correctly through their ecosystem. In addition to these, they must ensure the data quality at the source and through the transformations, it goes through while flowing in their ecosystem.
The problem of the disjointed system to record, store, check and correct all the data in the ecosystem/ no holistic view of data is affecting the employers/ business partners of TFS, the impact of which is unorganized data, manual process of linking physical and business data elements which is time-consuming.
A solution that our team is working towards is to build a data portal where data will be organized by business areas such as Loan Originations, Insurance, Servicing, etc., and various classifications under those areas. We are also implementing a google-like search for any data element which would bring up business definitions, physical attributes, data quality rules, profiles, and any related data associated with it.

Toyota Financial Services (TFS) is the largest automotive lender in the nation with over $125B in total assets. TFS offers financing, leasing, protection plans, and other financial services to customers and dealers all across the United States. In order to serve their customers better, it was required to have a comprehensive view of the customer. The TFS Customer 360 team has worked with TFS to create a Customer 360 view by harnessing the power of graph databases, semantic queries, and graph visualization tools. This view represents all direct and indirect relationships that exist for a customer and will be made available to different stakeholders in the company to make more informed decisions and to better identify potential opportunities.

Oxidative stress refers to the imbalance between free radical activity and antioxidant activity in the body, and is known to play a crucial role in diseases such as age-related macular degeneration in eyes and various neurodegenerative diseases (Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s). To help the body target and rebalance this process, the Green group at TCU has developed pyridinophane macrocycle frameworks (PyN3, Py2N2) for the development of a small multimodal molecule with direct targeting of oxidative stress through various approaches (metal binding, N-oxide formation, radical scavenging, and Nrf2 pathway activation). The group proposed a library of ligands as modifications to the pyridinophane frameworks to enhance antioxidant activity, which resulted in 18,000 possible molecule structures. Computational pre-screening will be essential to select the most promising candidates for synthesis and experimental tests. We wrote a program in Python using the open-source RDKit toolkit to generate a library of 13,000 prospective reduced-dimension pyridinophane macrocycle derivatives from SMILES strings based on the variation of ligands and attaching position to the frameworks, screen these compounds for their basic chemical and pharmacological properties, and identify those that fit the required biocompatibility, metabolic stability, and permeability for medicinal drug development. The properties to be computed through the virtual screening are molecular weight (MW), solubility, ring count, Lipinski’s parameters for orally active drugs, which includes octanol-water partition coefficient cLogP, number of hydrogen bond donors (HBD) and acceptors (HBA), and polar surface area (PSA). This program, therefore, helps save time and resources for synthesis while offering better optimization of chemical frameworks, and thus it can be applied to the development of various types of medicinal drugs.

The Monnig comprises a scientific research collection (the Monnig Meteorite Collection) as well as a Museum (the so-called “Gallery”). The exhibit has an educational game and interactive video screens. While there have been some updates to the technology in the exhibits in the last twenty years, most of the Gallery remains unchanged since its opening in 2003.

The current design is not inclusive for visually impaired visitors. contents are not accessible for non-English speaking visitors, and only less than 5 % of the 3000 meteorite collections are displayed. We address these problems by developing a tour assistance application with sufficient accommodations for visually impaired visitors using Android tablets that will be provided by the MMG to its incoming visitors with a capability of being fine-tuned to the individual’s preference.

The application begins with three separate menus, each with its own screen, which allows the user to customize the app to their needs. Menu 1 allows them to select their language. The beta version includes English, Spanish, and French, but later versions could consist of more language options. Menu 2 provides a font size selection, and menu 3 allows users to identify their color blindness type. These variables can be reset or changed at any time. The Monnig Meteorite Collection database has images of all of the meteorites within the Gallery and the text from each exhibit will be reproduced within the application. The images will be shown on a high contrast background (as compared to the exhibits) to allow for better viewing of the samples. Voice transcription will also eventually be available. Wayfinding, the ability for the user to identify where they are within the Gallery, on the application will be achieved in one of two ways. QR codes will be placed on each display case, allowing users to scan and locate the relevant exhibit on the map when needed. In addition, Bluetooth receivers will be used so that the application can identify where in the Gallery the user is located.

Chinese Learning Platform is a part of STARTALK Program – a federal grant program funded by the National Security Agency. The mission of the program is to assist students in learning languages identified critical by STARTALK, including Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Persian, Korean, Russian, and Turkish. Our project aims to support students in learning Chinese, and will be extended to other languages in a near future. The supports include, but are not limited to, assistance in vocabulary, listening, reading, writing, and speaking Chinese. In addition, our project contains well-designed functionalities dedicated to language learning, thus further improving the learning experience for students.