Barrett

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.

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ReL GoalD (Reinforcement Learning for Goal Dependencies)

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…

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
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State Press Live

Description
As our relationship with technology continues to encourage people to spend more time engaged online, traditional means of journalism must adapt in order to communicate with audiences. While many news organizations default to social media outlets, the goal of this project is to allow users a more direct experience with…

As our relationship with technology continues to encourage people to spend more time engaged online, traditional means of journalism must adapt in order to communicate with audiences. While many news organizations default to social media outlets, the goal of this project is to allow users a more direct experience with reporters, photographers and editors. It will allow The State Press, the official, student-run news organization covering ASU, to create content within Slack, an internal messaging platform commonly used in newsrooms. Secondly, it will provide a means for viewers to conveniently ingest their news as it unfolds, with updates, media, and analysis appearing in front of them without having to refresh the page.
ContributorsQuigley, James Alan (Author) / Gary, Kevin (Thesis director) / Squire, Susan (Committee member) / Software Engineering (Contributor) / W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05