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: Balasooriya, Janaka
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
Charleston, South Carolina currently faces serious annual flooding issues due to tides and rainfall. These issues are expected to get significantly worse within the next few decades reaching a projected 180 days a year of flooding by 2045 (Carter et al., 2018). Several permanent solutions are in progress by the City of Charleston. However, these solutions are years away at minimum and faced with development issues. This thesis attempts to treat some of the symptoms of flooding, such as navigation, by creating an iPhone application which predicts flooding and helps people navigate around it safely. Specifically, this thesis will take into account rainfall and tide levels to display to users actively flooded areas of downtown Charleston and provide routing to a destination from a user’s location around these flooded areas whenever possible.
ContributorsSalisbury, Mason (Author) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Thesis director) / Faucon, Christophe (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Mobile app development has been the fastest growing software development since the release of the iPhone in 2007 and the creation of the App Store in 2008. After the rise in popularity of the smartphone and mobile app development, businesses started to shift from browser-based software to mobile platforms. There are multiple reasons that any company would want to reach out in the mobile environment, including attracting new customers, creating a better experience, expanding their brand, being more accessible, and overall growth. Developers started to build new platforms that would make it easy for not only their own company but anyone else to develop new applications at a faster pace. Today there are three different ways to create a mobile application: a native app, a hybrid app, and a web app. At DriveTime, we spent time researching and developing possible options for how we could make a mobile application to expand our user involvement. Our conclusion was to use a hybrid application that would incorporate our already existing web app and relaunch it as a native app. I took over this project for DriveTime and planned to implement two new features for their mobile application. Using Apache Cordova, I dived into the Software Development Life Cycle to create and deploy a Rate and Review feature and Push Notification functionality. In the end, I was only able to implement the Rate and Review feature due to some unexpected delays in development. I assumed all roles of a standard Agile development team to understand all of the different aspects that go into planning, creating, and publishing software.
ContributorsAnderson, Jacob Scott (Author) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Thesis director) / Irwin, Don (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Finding applications on Apple’s iOS device Home screen is a difficult task since applications are arranged in a disorganized grid of icons and small labels. By “jailbreaking” an iOS device, it is possible to install third party “tweaks” that modify the operating system to customize and fix annoying aspects of iOS. Current jailbreak tweaks exist that can launch applications differently than Apple’s stock Home screen, but they leave much to be desired in terms of functionality, usability, and aesthetics. HomeList is a watchOS-inspired tweak I created to add an easy to read, quick to navigate, and visually appealing list of applications integrated directly into the Home screen. Research into Apple’s private iOS frameworks was used to figure out how to perform tasks required by an app launcher as well as match iOS design aesthetics.
ContributorsBoxberger, Blake Palmer (Author) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Thesis director) / Faucon, Philippe Christophe (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
In June of 2016, the United Kingdom held a referendum for its citizens to decide whether to remain a part of the European Union or take their leave. The vote was close but ultimately the U.K. decided to leave, triggering the two-year process of negotiations that would shape the U.K.’s departure (Brexit). The question of what will become of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is heavy with implications for the national identity of people living on either side of the border, and this makes it one of the more pressing concerns in Brexit discourse. This research analyzes how national identity is used as a rhetorical tactic in media to influence and persuade readers to vote in accordance with the author’s political goals. It does so by evaluating how borders shape national identity and analyzing newspaper articles from the two highest circulating Northern Irish daily newspapers (The Irish News and the Belfast Telegraph) during the week leading up to the June 23rd, 2016 referendum. In analyzing news articles relating to the Irish border issue of Brexit from The Irish News and the Belfast Telegraph during the time frame of June 16th-23rd, 2016, four analytical categories of how identity-related rhetoric was used were discovered: fear, self-interest, Irish Nationalism, and a negative association of the past. Further, it was hypothesized and confirmed the political leanings of the papers influenced which type of rhetorical tactic was used. In the broad realm of Brexit and media related discussion, this research could help strengthen understanding of how traditional media uses national identity to persuade readers to and influence voting behavior in the midst of such a divisive referendum.
Key Words: Brexit, Irish border, national identity, rhetoric, newspapers
Key Words: Brexit, Irish border, national identity, rhetoric, newspapers
ContributorsCaldwell, Tara (Author) / O'Flaherty, Katherine (Thesis director) / Ripley, Charles (Committee member) / School of Social Transformation (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor, Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
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