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.
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- Creators: Computer Science and Engineering Program
Description
A common challenge faced by students is that they often have questions about course material that they cannot ask during lecture time. There are many ways for students to have these questions answered, such as office hours and online discussion boards. However, office hours may be at inconvenient times or locations, and online discussion boards are difficult to navigate and may be inactive. The purpose of this project was to create an Alexa skill that allows users to ask their Alexa-equipped device a question concerning their course material and to receive an answer retrieved from discussion board data. User questions are mapped to discussion board posts by use of the cosine similarity algorithm. In this algorithm, posts from the discussion board and the user’s question are converted into mathematical vectors, with each term in the vector corresponding to a word. The values of these terms are computed based on the word’s frequency within the vector’s corresponding document, the frequency of that word within all the documents, and the length of the document. After the question and candidate posts are converted into vectors, the algorithm determines the post most similar to the user’s question by computing the angle between the vectors. With the most similar discussion board post determined, the user receives the replies to the post, if any, as their answer. Users are able to indicate to their Alexa device whether they were satisfied by the answer, and if they were unsatisfied then they are given the opportunity to either rephrase their question or to have the question sent to a database of unanswered questions. The professor can view and answer the questions in this database on a website hosted by use of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service. The Alexa skill does well at answering questions that have already been asked in the discussion board. However, the skill depends heavily on the user’s word choice. Two questions that are semantically identical but different in phrasing are often given different answers. This is because the cosine algorithm measures similarity on the basis of word overlap, not semantic meaning, and thus the application never truly “understands” what type of answer the user desires. Improving the performance of this Alexa skill will require a more advanced question answering algorithm, but the limitations of Amazon Web Services as a development platform make implementing such an algorithm difficult. Nevertheless, this project has created the basis of a question answering Alexa skill by demonstrating a feasible way that the resources offered by Amazon can be utilized in order to build such an application.
ContributorsBaker, Matthew Elias (Author) / Chen, Yinong (Thesis director) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Committee member) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
The main objective of this thesis is to describe and analyze Clippr, an ASU startup founded by four students: Adam Lynch, Eric Gottfried, Ty Sivley, and Thomas Carpaneto. This paper will describe the formation of Clippr as a business, analyze the work and reasoning for dissolving the business, and suggest three pivots that could increase the chances of success for the future of Clippr. These three pivots are: mini salons, a concierge service, and an online resource. The idea for Clippr came from Sam, the team's friend's experience within the cosmetology industry. Sam graduated from cosmetology school in Phoenix and started his career as an assistant, which is the most common entry level position within the industry. Assistants do not get to work with clients and primarily do chores around the salon so he was not gaining any valuable experience. Eventually Sam found a position at a salon in Flagstaff. Unfortunately, he was not scheduled enough hours to pay his rent which forced him to travel back to Phoenix to cut his friend's and family's hair to make ends meet. Sam is not alone experiencing these issues within the industry, they are a common trend throughout the cosmetology field. It was found that there is a clear problem that affects every stylist: they struggle to reap the benefits of their self-employment. Most stylists become independent contractors where they are constrained by the salon's management. They are generally forced to work during the salon's hours of operations, promote specific products, adhere to a dress code, and forfeit their clients information. On the other hand, freelance workers outside of salons do enjoy greater freedoms within their work but with significant hurdles to overcome. They have a much harder time building a client base and face prohibitive start-up costs that make it harder to break into the industry.
ContributorsGottfried, Eric (Co-author) / Lynch, Adam (Co-author) / Sebold, Brent (Thesis director) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-12
Description
An application called "Productivity Heatmap" was created with this project with the goal of allowing users to track how productive they are over the course of a day and week, input through scheduled prompts separated by 30 minutes to 4 hours, depending on preference. The result is a heat map colored according to a user's productivity at particular times of each day during the week. The aim is to allow a user to have a visualization on when he or she is best able to be productive, given that every individual has different habits and life patterns. This application was made completely in Google's Android Studio environment using Java and XML, with SQLite being used for database management. The application runs on any Android device, and was designed to be a balance of providing useful information to a user while maintaining an attractive and intuitive interface. This thesis explores the creation of a functional mobile application for mass distribution, with a particular set of end users in mind, namely college students. Many challenges in the form of learning a new development environment were encountered and overcome, as explained in the report. The application created is a core functionality proof-of-concept of a much larger personal project in creating a versatile and useful mobile application for student use. The principles covered are the creation of a mobile application, meeting requirements specified by others, and investigating the interest generated by such a concept. Beyond this thesis, testing will be done, and future enhancements will be made for mass-market consumption.
ContributorsWeser, Matthew Paul (Author) / Nelson, Brian (Thesis director) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
User interface development on iOS is in a major transitionary state as Apple introduces a declarative and interactive framework called SwiftUI. SwiftUI’s success depends on how well it integrates its new tooling for novice developers. This paper will demonstrate and discuss where SwiftUI succeeds and fails at carving a new path for user interface development for new developers. This is done by comparisons against its existing imperative UI framework UIKit as well as elaborating on the background of SwiftUI and examples of how SwiftUI works to help developers. The paper will also discuss what exactly led to SwiftUI and how it is currently faring on Apple's latest operating systems. SwiftUI is a framework growing and evolving to serve the needs of 5 very different platforms with code that claims to be simpler to write and easier to deploy. The world of UI programming in iOS has been dominated by a Storyboard canvas for years, but SwiftUI claims to link this graphic-first development process with the code programmers are used to by keeping them side by side in constant sync. This bold move requires interactive programming capable of recompilation on the fly. As this paper will discuss, SwiftUI has garnered a community of developers giving it the main property it needs to succeed: a component library.
ContributorsGilchrist, Ethan (Author) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis director) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2021-12
Description
The aim of this project was to provide college applicants with the ability to apply using a video instead of an essay. These videos are analyzed automatically and their scripts are taken and submitted with the application. This was implemented through the use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their S3 buckets along with their speech to text transcription service. This type of application process can give admissions teams the opportunity to get to know who will potentially be attending their university and allows the applicants to express themselves to admissions teams in a new and unique way.
ContributorsStephan, Meagan (Co-author) / Pratt, Devan (Co-author) / Chen, Yinong (Thesis director) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-12
Description
Appointment scheduling in health care systems is a well-established domain, however, the top commercial services neglect scheduling analytics. This project explores the benefit of utilizing data analysis to equip health care offices with insights on how to improve their existing schedules. The insights are generated by comparing patients’ preferred appointment times with the current schedule coverage and calculating utilization of past appointments. While untested in the field, the project yielded promising results using generated sample data as a proof of concept for the benefits of using data analytics to remove deficiencies in a health care office’s schedule.
ContributorsBowman, Jedde James (Author) / Chen, Yinong (Thesis director) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
There exist many very effective calendar platforms out there, from Google Calendar, to Microsoft’s Outlook, and various implementations by other service providers. While all those services serve their purpose, they may be missing in the capacity to be easily portable for some, or the capacity to offer to the user a ranking of their various events and tasks in order of priority. This is that, while some of these services do offer reliable support for portability on smaller devices, it could be even more beneficial to the user to constantly have an idea of which calendar entry they should prioritize at a given point in time, based on the necessities of each entry and regardless of which entry occurs first on a chronologic line. Many of these capacities are missing in the technology currently used at ASU for course management. This project attempts to address this issue by providing a Software Application that offers to store a user’s calendar events and present those events back to the user after arranging them by order of priority. The project makes use of technologies such as Fibrease, Angular and Android to make the service available through a web browser as well as an Android mobile client. We explore possible avenues of implementations to make the services of this platform accessible and usable through other existing platforms such as Blackboard or Canvas. We also consider ways to incorporate this software into the already existing workflow of other web platforms such as Google Calendar, Blackboard or Canvas, by allowing one platform to be aware of any item creation or update from the other platform, and thus removing the necessity of creating one calendar entry multiple times in different platforms.
ContributorsNdombe, Kelly (Author) / Chen, Yinong (Thesis director) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05