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
- Creators: Economics Program in CLAS
Description
This study estimates the capitalization effect of golf courses in Maricopa County using the hedonic pricing method. It draws upon a dataset of 574,989 residential transactions from 2000 to 2006 to examine how the aesthetic, non-golf benefits of golf courses capitalize across a gradient of proximity measures. The measures for amenity value extend beyond home adjacency and include considerations for homes within a range of discrete walkability buffers of golf courses. The models also distinguish between public and private golf courses as a proxy for the level of golf course access perceived by non-golfers. Unobserved spatial characteristics of the neighborhoods around golf courses are controlled for by increasing the extent of spatial fixed effects from city, to census tract, and finally to 2000 meter golf course ‘neighborhoods.’ The estimation results support two primary conclusions. First, golf course proximity is found to be highly valued for adjacent homes and homes up to 50 meters way from a course, still evident but minimal between 50 and 150 meters, and insignificant at all other distance ranges. Second, private golf courses do not command a higher proximity premia compared to public courses with the exception of homes within 25 to 50 meters of a course, indicating that the non-golf benefits of courses capitalize similarly, regardless of course type. The results of this study motivate further investigation into golf course features that signal access or add value to homes in the range of capitalization, particularly for near-adjacent homes between 50 and 150 meters thought previously not to capitalize.
ContributorsJoiner, Emily (Author) / Abbott, Joshua (Thesis director) / Smith, Kerry (Committee member) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
The current trend of interconnected devices, or the internet of things (IOT) has led to the popularization of single board computers (SBC). This is primarily due to their form-factor and low price. This has led to unique networks of devices that can have unstable network connections and minimal processing power. Many parallel program- ming libraries are intended for use in high performance computing (HPC) clusters. Unlike the IOT environment described, HPC clusters will in general look to obtain very consistent network speeds and topologies. There are a significant number of software choices that make up what is referred to as the HPC stack or parallel processing stack. My thesis focused on building an HPC stack that would run on the SCB computer name the Raspberry Pi. The intention in making this Raspberry Pi cluster is to research performance of MPI implementations in an IOT environment, which had an impact on the design choices of the cluster. This thesis is a compilation of my research efforts in creating this cluster as well as an evaluation of the software that was chosen to create the parallel processing stack.
ContributorsO'Meara, Braedon Richard (Author) / Meuth, Ryan (Thesis director) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
This thesis discusses three recent optimization problems that seek to reduce disease spread on arbitrary graphs by deleting edges, and it discusses three approximation algorithms developed for these problems. Important definitions are presented including the Linear Threshold and Triggering Set models and the set function properties of submodularity and monotonicity. Also, important results regarding the Linear Threshold model and computation of the influence function are presented along with proof sketches. The three main problems are formally presented, and NP-hardness results along with proof sketches are presented where applicable. The first problem seeks to reduce spread of infection over the Linear Threshold process by making use of an efficient tree data structure. The second problem seeks to reduce the spread of infection over the Linear Threshold process while preserving the PageRank distribution of the input graph. The third problem seeks to minimize the spectral radius of the input graph. The algorithms designed for these problems are described in writing and with pseudocode, and their approximation bounds are stated along with time complexities. Discussion of these algorithms considers how these algorithms could see real-world use. Challenges and the ways in which these algorithms do or do not overcome them are noted. Two related works, one which presents an edge-deletion disease spread reduction problem over a deterministic threshold process and the other which considers a graph modification problem aimed at minimizing worst-case disease spread, are compared with the three main works to provide interesting perspectives. Furthermore, a new problem is proposed that could avoid some issues faced by the three main problems described, and directions for future work are suggested.
ContributorsStanton, Andrew Warren (Author) / Richa, Andrea (Thesis director) / Czygrinow, Andrzej (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
In the last few years, billion-dollar companies like Yahoo and Equifax have had data breaches causing millions of people’s personal information to be leaked online. Other billion-dollar companies like Google and Facebook have gotten in trouble for abusing people’s personal information for financial gain as well. In this new age of technology where everything is being digitalized and stored online, people all over the world are concerned about what is happening to their personal information and how they can trust it is being kept safe. This paper describes, first, the importance of protecting user data, second, one easy tool that companies and developers can use to help ensure that their user’s information (credit card information specifically) is kept safe, how to implement that tool, and finally, future work and research that needs to be done. The solution I propose is a software tool that will keep credit card data secured. It is only a small step towards achieving a completely secure data anonymized system, but when implemented correctly, it can reduce the risk of credit card data from being exposed to the public. The software tool is a script that can scan every viable file in any given system, server, or other file-structured Linux system and detect if there any visible credit card numbers that should be hidden.
ContributorsPappas, Alexander (Author) / Zhao, Ming (Thesis director) / Kuznetsov, Eugene (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
Political polarization is the coalescence of political parties -- and the individuals of which parties are composed -- around opposing ends of the ideological spectrum. Political parties in the United States have always been divided, however, in recent years this division has only intensified. Recently, polarization has also wound its way to the Supreme Court and the nomination processes of justices to the Court. This paper examines how prevalent polarization in the Supreme Court nomination process has become by looking specifically at the failed nomination of Judge Merrick Garland and the confirmations of now-Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. This is accomplished by comparing the ideologies and qualifications of the three most recent nominees to those of previous nominees, as well as analysing the ideological composition of the Senate at the times of the individual nominations.
ContributorsJoss, Jacob (Author) / Hoekstra, Valerie (Thesis director) / Critchlow, Donald (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
The original version of Helix, the one I pitched when first deciding to make a video game
for my thesis, is an action-platformer, with the intent of metroidvania-style progression
and an interconnected world map.
The current version of Helix is a turn based role-playing game, with the intent of roguelike
gameplay and a dark fantasy theme. We will first be exploring the challenges that came
with programming my own game - not quite from scratch, but also without a prebuilt
engine - then transition into game design and how Helix has evolved from its original form
to what we see today.
for my thesis, is an action-platformer, with the intent of metroidvania-style progression
and an interconnected world map.
The current version of Helix is a turn based role-playing game, with the intent of roguelike
gameplay and a dark fantasy theme. We will first be exploring the challenges that came
with programming my own game - not quite from scratch, but also without a prebuilt
engine - then transition into game design and how Helix has evolved from its original form
to what we see today.
ContributorsDiscipulo, Isaiah K (Author) / Meuth, Ryan (Thesis director) / Kobayashi, Yoshihiro (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
RecyclePlus is an iOS mobile application that allows users to be knowledgeable in the realms of sustainability. It gives encourages users to be environmental responsible by providing them access to recycling information. In particular, it allows users to search up certain materials and learn about its recyclability and how to properly dispose of the material. Some searches will show locations of facilities near users that collect certain materials and dispose of the materials properly. This is a full stack software project that explores open source software and APIs, UI/UX design, and iOS development.
ContributorsTran, Nikki (Author) / Ganesh, Tirupalavanam (Thesis director) / Meuth, Ryan (Committee member) / Watts College of Public Service & Community Solut (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
At present, the vast majority of human subjects with neurological disease are still diagnosed through in-person assessments and qualitative analysis of patient data. In this paper, we propose to use Topological Data Analysis (TDA) together with machine learning tools to automate the process of Parkinson’s disease classification and severity assessment. An automated, stable, and accurate method to evaluate Parkinson’s would be significant in streamlining diagnoses of patients and providing families more time for corrective measures. We propose a methodology which incorporates TDA into analyzing Parkinson’s disease postural shifts data through the representation of persistence images. Studying the topology of a system has proven to be invariant to small changes in data and has been shown to perform well in discrimination tasks. The contributions of the paper are twofold. We propose a method to 1) classify healthy patients from those afflicted by disease and 2) diagnose the severity of disease. We explore the use of the proposed method in an application involving a Parkinson’s disease dataset comprised of healthy-elderly, healthy-young and Parkinson’s disease patients.
ContributorsRahman, Farhan Nadir (Co-author) / Nawar, Afra (Co-author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis director) / Krishnamurthi, Narayanan (Committee member) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05
Description
This paper will focus on the changes in China's OFDI while also explaining its growth. However, another primary focus will be comparing the relationships between China, Hong Kong, and Africa. This paper will show the correlating changes between the three regions and explain the distribution of China's investments. One argument is that Hong Kong may play a large role in facilitating Chinese investment into Africa, which if not disaggregated, could lead to inaccurate numbers of China's FDI into Africa. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the importance of China's relationship with Hong Kong and Africa. In 2012, Garth Shelton argued that Hong Kong was an important gateway in South Africa's trade with China. Since then, many others have made similar claims in support of Hong Kong's bigger role. However, due to the difficulty of finding specific data for each region, these analyses are incomplete and fail to clearly substantiate their theory. I will try to find a correlation by gathering my own data, tables, and through different interviews.
ContributorsSon, James (Author) / Simonson, Mark (Thesis director) / Iheduru, Okechukwu (Committee member) / Economics Program in CLAS (Contributor) / Department of Finance (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