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: Department of Economics
Due to the sheer amount of macro-economic factors and the case specific incidences involved in the determination of a country’s level of economic development, this thesis will focus entirely on the descriptive analysis of the relationship between a country’s GDP sector composition within the agricultural, industrial, and services sectors and their level of economic development measured in GDP per capita. This study will explore the relationship between GDP per capita and geographic regions, growth over time, and economic size as well. These relationships will be used to determine if said factors need to be controlled for when analyzing the relationship between a country’s sector composition and its level of development. A better understanding of what countries look like at all levels of development helps build a complete picture of a what makes a country successful and could be used in future studies that seek to predict economic success based on more and/or separate variables.
Since 1930—with the exception of the break for World War II—every four years, the world’s best national teams face off in a soccer tournament. The last two tournaments hosted by South Africa in 2010 and Brazil in 2014 will be the emphasis of this paper. Each tournament featured the thirty-two countries and captured a television audience of over three billion people throughout the month-long tournament, one billion of which tuned in for the final. For comparison, the Super Bowl XLIX where the New England Patriots defeated the Seattle Seahawks 28 to 24 was the most watched event in United States’ history with a viewership of 114.4 million people.
Countries spend years planning and preparing to win a bid to host one of these mega events. Bids are often times awarded eight to twelve years in advance. There has been a recent trend of developing countries hosting the FIFA World Cups and the future bids already awarded follow that trend. Many people ask the question of whether all the money spent on infrastructure, construction, and tourism to host this tournament and gain international exposure are really worth it? Simply put, the 2010 FIFA World Cup was valuable to South Africa while the 2014 FIFA World Cup was not worth the costs to Brazil.
The goal of this project is to develop a deeper understanding of how machine learning pertains to the business world and how business professionals can capitalize on its capabilities. It explores the end-to-end process of integrating a machine and the tradeoffs and obstacles to consider. This topic is extremely pertinent today as the advent of big data increases and the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence is expanding across industries and functional roles. The approach I took was to expand on a project I championed as a Microsoft intern where I facilitated the integration of a forecasting machine learning model firsthand into the business. I supplement my findings from the experience with research on machine learning as a disruptive technology. This paper will not delve into the technical aspects of coding a machine model, but rather provide a holistic overview of developing the model from a business perspective. My findings show that, while the advantages of machine learning are large and widespread, a lack of visibility and transparency into the algorithms behind machine learning, the necessity for large amounts of data, and the overall complexity of creating accurate models are all tradeoffs to consider when deciding whether or not machine learning is suitable for a certain objective. The results of this paper are important in order to increase the understanding of any business professional on the capabilities and obstacles of integrating machine learning into their business operations.