Students, Professor Assist Omaha Refugees Through New WebApp

A web app created by a team of UNO students and by UNO's Deepak Khazanchi, Ph.D., Professor of Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis, has recently launched to aid refugees looking for answers about resources within the Omaha community.

The app, called Connect, launched on Saturday, Oct. 30, and is free to access.

Khazanchi and the team of students who created the app, led by Scott Scholar Kamryn Pullen, based the app off of Quora, a crowdfunding platform.

The app, funded by grants from UNO's Leonard and Shirley Goldstein Center for Human Rights and the Goldstein Supporting Foundation, will allow refugees to able to ask questions on the platform and get reliable answers; however, unlike Quora, the answers will come from trusted experts while users can remain completely anonymous.

Laura Alexander, Ph.D., an assistant professor and Goldstein Family Chair in Human Rights, said that the first step was knowing what questions to ask in order to find the most helpful answers for refugee families.

“The [UNO team] worked... to better understand what newly arrived refugees and migrants would need, what kind of questions they might have, and what concerns people might have in terms of being able to gather information.”

Watch: KPTM Talks About UNO Refugee App Development

The app includes verification for respondents, the ability to categorize questions, notifications for answers to questions, speech-to-text functions, and translates into 10 languages. Khazanchi and Pullen intend to add a function that translates languages in real time within the app, and to include wayfinding maps on the site, improving on the a beta version that launched and tested in September.

Even with such improvements in mind, there are still opportunities to further refine the app.

“I'm always thinking about what else can we do in there? I mean, it’s kind of like, if we had more resources, we would do more things with it.,” Khazanchi said.

Plans are to notify refugees about the app through community organizations such as the Refugee Empowerment Center, UNO Center for Afghanistan Studies, and Lutheran Family Services. If the initial launch is successful, hopes are to also serve Lincoln and the greater Nebraska area. For now, however, the group wants to help as many people as they can in Omaha.

“People are so scared to ask questions and then that translates everywhere,” Pullen said. “And then you just think of it being a whole different environment and you don't have a lot of friends or family or resources to pull on. It can be isolating. So, [the point of the app is] empowering them to find that community and find those answers so that they can live awesome lives that they deserve.”