Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University proudly showcases the work of undergraduate honors students by sharing this collection exclusively with the ASU community.
Barrett accepts high performing, academically engaged undergraduate students and works with them in collaboration with all of the other academic units at Arizona State University. All Barrett students complete a thesis or creative project which is an opportunity to explore an intellectual interest and produce an original piece of scholarly research. The thesis or creative project is supervised and defended in front of a faculty committee. Students are able to engage with professors who are nationally recognized in their fields and committed to working with honors students. Completing a Barrett thesis or creative project is an opportunity for undergraduate honors students to contribute to the ASU academic community in a meaningful way.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 142
Filtering by
- All Subjects: artificial intelligence
- All Subjects: Poetry
Description
Waltz, is a collection of poems written to play along the boundaries between sound, language, and meaning. As a vehicle for exploration, the poems in Waltz, commandeer themes of nostalgia, love, loss, and abstraction, all of which build up and break each other down to create something of a nonlinear narrative, and concomitant sketch of the poet.
ContributorsAieta, Joseph (Author) / Ball, Sally (Thesis director) / Liston, Chelsea (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
In this project, the use of deep neural networks for the process of selecting actions to execute within an environment to achieve a goal is explored. Scenarios like this are common in crafting based games such as Terraria or Minecraft. Goals in these environments have recursive sub-goal dependencies which form a dependency tree. An agent operating within these environments have access to low amounts of data about the environment before interacting with it, so it is crucial that this agent is able to effectively utilize a tree of dependencies and its environmental surroundings to make judgements about which sub-goals are most efficient to pursue at any point in time. A successful agent aims to minimizes cost when completing a given goal. A deep neural network in combination with Q-learning techniques was employed to act as the agent in this environment. This agent consistently performed better than agents using alternate models (models that used dependency tree heuristics or human-like approaches to make sub-goal oriented choices), with an average performance advantage of 33.86% (with a standard deviation of 14.69%) over the best alternate agent. This shows that machine learning techniques can be consistently employed to make goal-oriented choices within an environment with recursive sub-goal dependencies and low amounts of pre-known information.
ContributorsKoleber, Derek (Author) / Acuna, Ruben (Thesis director) / Bansal, Ajay (Committee member) / W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Software Engineering (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Pandora is a play exploring our relationship with gendered technology through the lens of artificial intelligence. Can women be subjective under patriarchy? Do robots who look like women have subjectivity? Hoping to create a better version of ourselves, The Engineer must navigate the loss of her creation, and Pandora must navigate their new world. The original premiere run was March 27-28, 2018, original cast: Caitlin Andelora, Rikki Tremblay, and Michael Tristano Jr.
ContributorsToye, Abigail Elizabeth (Author) / Linde, Jennifer (Thesis director) / Abele, Kelsey (Committee member) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
This thesis dives into the world of artificial intelligence by exploring the functionality of a single layer artificial neural network through a simple housing price classification example while simultaneously considering its impact from a data management perspective on both the software and hardware level. To begin this study, the universally accepted model of an artificial neuron is broken down into its key components and then analyzed for functionality by relating back to its biological counterpart. The role of a neuron is then described in the context of a neural network, with equal emphasis placed on how it individually undergoes training and then for an entire network. Using the technique of supervised learning, the neural network is trained with three main factors for housing price classification, including its total number of rooms, bathrooms, and square footage. Once trained with most of the generated data set, it is tested for accuracy by introducing the remainder of the data-set and observing how closely its computed output for each set of inputs compares to the target value. From a programming perspective, the artificial neuron is implemented in C so that it would be more closely tied to the operating system and therefore make the collected profiler data more precise during the program's execution. The program is designed to break down each stage of the neuron's training process into distinct functions. In addition to utilizing more functional code, the struct data type is used as the underlying data structure for this project to not only represent the neuron but for implementing the neuron's training and test data. Once fully trained, the neuron's test results are then graphed to visually depict how well the neuron learned from its sample training set. Finally, the profiler data is analyzed to describe how the program operated from a data management perspective on the software and hardware level.
ContributorsRichards, Nicholas Giovanni (Author) / Miller, Phillip (Thesis director) / Meuth, Ryan (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Same Bed is a twelve-piece book of poetry that explores the theme of sexual violence. The speaker of the poems is processing the trauma surrounding her rape which leads her to explore her own family's dynamics regarding gender, power, and acknowledgment of sexuality. The speaker also observes the broader issue of how society reacts to rape and the effects that can have on a survivor of sexual violence. In the peak of the manuscript, the speaker pieces together part of her own police report, pinning her own voice and perspective against her rapists.
ContributorsPetersen, Gabrielle Nicole (Author) / Ball, Sally (Thesis director) / Kelsey, Meghan (Committee member) / Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics (Contributor) / Department of Management and Entrepreneurship (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
This project focuses on techniques contemporary American poets use in their work. Ten different poetry collections are analyzed for dominant writing styles and techniques, which I then apply to my own poems, concentrating on modeling that particular poet. I then reflect on those poems through an evaluation of my writing process, how those techniques were implemented, and how they affected the poem. In addition to these reviews and reflections, I also wrote three articles about the literary community and what I've learned from my interactions in that community. All these materials are organized into a website, which shows the connections between the different writings via links and menus. Creating this website brings all the materials together to demonstrate my growth as a poet, writer, and designer. This heavy focus on poetry and analysis has helped sharpen my critical thinking skills and has better prepared me for a career in design and journalism.
ContributorsHansen, Elizabeth Sarah (Author) / Murphy, Patricia (Thesis director) / Savard, Jeannine (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Hugh Downs School of Human Communication (Contributor) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Poetry serves as a window through which we can convey emotions and experiences otherwise difficult to access and express. This chapbook addresses the moments in life that have dramatic transformational effects and those moments and events we wish to deny. Through my poetry, I reveal the honest revelations of hurt and pain, and the raw emotions evoked from the things that have occurred throughout my life. In doing so, I confront these painful experiences from a place of conscious awareness of the way in which they have impacted my life, and I allow others access to my hurt, self-hatred, and imperfection acknowledged throughout. This chapbook symbolizes the movement from a place of denial to a place of awareness and finally to a place of transformation and growth. As my poetry transformed from weak poems only accessible on an abstract level to powerful poems of honest and tangible pain and hurt, I experienced my own transformation. Allowing myself to candidly share my experiences with others has enabled me to grow from these experiences.
ContributorsLarson, Amanda Beth (Author) / Montesano, Mark (Thesis director) / Comeaux, Alexandra (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Nutrition and Health Promotion (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2014-12
Description
Poems for the Future President is a chapbook of poetry by Michael Bartelt. Rooted in the democratic idealism of Walt Whitman and the American poetic tradition, the collection is a reflection on Americas of the past, the America we live in now, and an America that could be. The poems encompass a thematic breadth that includes ecological examinations filtered through ancient Taoist and modern ecocritical philosophy, searches for political and ethical authenticity in an over-stimulated information age, and questions about the meaning of romance and tradition in a dystopian present. Included here is the manuscript's critical framework, which highlights the poetry's main influences. The manuscript itself is also included.
ContributorsBartelt, Michael Joseph (Author) / Dombrowski, Rosemarie (Thesis director) / Orion, Shawnte (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2014-12
Description
The title means nothing because the stories have little in common, aside from the fact that I wrote them. The common theme of anxiety was unintentional, though it is prevalent in the stories, poetry and my life. Each story is written from a different style, with a different interest in mind. The poetry that breaks up the stories is mine, and also free of common bonds. People whom I love inspired some of them; others stem from people with whom I was (or still am) angry. Some of them are just me trying to write poetry like other successful poets, who seem to know something I don't. I wrote this set of stories and poems because I wanted to see if I could do it. I wanted to challenge myself in a new medium (two new mediums really, if you separate literature and poetry). I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, if I really set my mind to it. I wanted to have some wealth of words, which I could record myself reading. Overall, I hope that you enjoy these stories and words. I wrote them to entertain myself, and they seem to do that pretty well. If you don't like them, stop reading. If you do like them, keep reading and tell everyone you know about this collection. I'm proud of my work here, so anything beyond that is icing on my cake.
ContributorsRagatz, Zachariah Edward (Author) / Scott, Jason Davids (Thesis director) / Espinosa, Micha (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / School of Film, Dance and Theatre (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Abstract The Space Between Us is a poetic project about the grieving process. Formally, the piece is seven sections of prose couched within a crown of seven sonnets. The first-person sections of prose allow for personal discussion in the confessional tradition of my own lived experience of grief, while the sonnets are a fictional conversation between David Bowie and Stephen Hawking in 1973. The claim of this piece is that death creates space. When a loved one passes away, what we inherit is a gap. What is the role of this gap in the world? How do we interact with it, see it, interpret it, or touch it? Can we put our hands on its form? Can we put it into words? And if the exploration of this space does lead us to words, should they be shared? The round form of the sonnet crown echoes the cyclical motion of questioning, and its allegorical themes: grieving as a black hole, the boundaries of language, the subjectivity of conversation, the limits of space, the dehumanization of obsession, the space between you and who you are perceived to be, and the clash between artistic desires and scientific discoveries.
ContributorsVan Slyke, Laura Marie (Author) / Hogue, Cynthia (Thesis director) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2015-05