ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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Description
This qualitative, action research study examines how teacher-writers' identities are constructed through the practice of revision in an extra-curriculum writing group. The writing group was designed to support the teacher-writers as they revised classroom research projects for submission for a scholarly journal. Using discourse analysis, the researcher explores how the teacher-writers' identities are constructed in the contested spaces of revision. This exploration focuses on contested issues that invariably emerge in a dynamic binary of reader/writer, issues of authority, ownership, and unstable reader and writer identities. By negotiating these contested spaces--these contact zones--the teacher-writers construct opportunities to flex their rhetorical agency. Through rhetorical agency, the teacher-writers shift their discoursal identities by discarding and acquiring a variety of discourses. As a result, the practice of revision constructs the teacher-writers identities as hybrid, as consisting of self and other.
ContributorsClark-Oates, Angela (Author) / Smith, Karen (Thesis advisor) / Roen, Duane (Thesis advisor) / Fischman, Gustavo (Committee member) / Early, Jessica (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
A simple passion for reading compels many to enter the university literature classroom. What happens once they arrive may fuel that passion, or possibly destroy it. A romanticized relationship with literature proves to be an obstacle that hinders a deeper and richer engagement with texts. Primary research consisting of personal interviews, observations, and surveys, form the source of data for this dissertation project which was designed to examine how literature teachers engage their students with texts, discussion, and assignments in the university setting. Traditionally text centered and resolute, literature courses will need refashioning if they are to advance beyond erstwhile conventions. The goal of this study is to create space for a dialogue about the need for a pedagogy of literature.
ContributorsSanchez, Shillana (Author) / Goggin, Maureen (Thesis advisor) / Tobin, Beth (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
As the complexity of robotic systems and applications grows rapidly, development of high-performance, easy to use, and fully integrated development environments for those systems is inevitable. Model-Based Design (MBD) of dynamic systems using engineering software such as Simulink® from MathWorks®, SciCos from Metalau team and SystemModeler® from Wolfram® is quite popular nowadays. They provide tools for modeling, simulation, verification and in some cases automatic code generation for desktop applications, embedded systems and robots. For real-world implementation of models on the actual hardware, those models should be converted into compilable machine code either manually or automatically. Due to the complexity of robotic systems, manual code translation from model to code is not a feasible optimal solution so we need to move towards automated code generation for such systems. MathWorks® offers code generation facilities called Coder® products for this purpose. However in order to fully exploit the power of model-based design and code generation tools for robotic applications, we need to enhance those software systems by adding and modifying toolboxes, files and other artifacts as well as developing guidelines and procedures. In this thesis, an effort has been made to propose a guideline as well as a Simulink® library, StateFlow® interface API and a C/C++ interface API to complete this toolchain for NAO humanoid robots. Thus the model of the hierarchical control architecture can be easily and properly converted to code and built for implementation.
ContributorsRaji Kermani, Ramtin (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Lee, Yann-Hang (Committee member) / Sarjoughian, Hessam S. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This study compares some sites, structures, theories and praxis of transnational feminisms in India and the U.S., simultaneously guided by and interrogating contemporary academic feminist theoretical and methodological trends. The goal is twofold: to understand similarities and differences in feminist praxis of two geo-epistemological spaces; and to interrogate the notion and currency of the "transnational" within feminist knowledge-creation. The phenomenon of transnational feminist knowledge-making is interrogated from a philosophical/theoretical and phenomenological/experiential standpoint. The philosophical inquiry is concentrated on the theoretical texts produced on transnational/global/postcolonial feminisms. This inquiry also focuses on some unpublished, uncirculated archival materials that trace the history of academic feminisms and their transnationalization. The phenomenological side focuses on interview and survey data on transnational feminism, gathered from feminist practitioners working in the U.S. and India, as well as being "transmigrant," or "traveling scholars." Digital/institutional ethnography is used to ground the findings in operational spaces of knowledge-making, including cyberspace. This research shows that the global logic of circulation and visibility organize the flow of knowledge as data, narratives and reports from the global south, which are analyzed, clarified and theorized in the global north. Perhaps responding to many critiques on "speaking of" and "speaking for" the "other," the trend to represent third world women as perpetual victims has given way to newer representations and accounts of resistance, collaboration, and activism. However, this creates a fresh "theory-here-activism-there" model of transnational feminism that preserves unequal feminist division of labor. This comparative and critical study focuses not just on feminist discourses in two countries but also their relationships, suggests some viable models of transnational feminism that can preserve epistemic justice, and aims to contribute to the theoretical corpus of transnational feminism.
ContributorsChakravarty, Debjani (Author) / Kitch, Sally L (Thesis advisor) / Fonow, Mary M (Committee member) / Koblitz, Ann H (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
With increasing transistor volume and reducing feature size, it has become a major design constraint to reduce power consumption also. This has given rise to aggressive architectural changes for on-chip power management and rapid development to energy efficient hardware accelerators. Accordingly, the objective of this research work is to facilitate software developers to leverage these hardware techniques and improve energy efficiency of the system. To achieve this, I propose two solutions for Linux kernel: Optimal use of these architectural enhancements to achieve greater energy efficiency requires accurate modeling of processor power consumption. Though there are many models available in literature to model processor power consumption, there is a lack of such models to capture power consumption at the task-level. Task-level energy models are a requirement for an operating system (OS) to perform real-time power management as OS time multiplexes tasks to enable sharing of hardware resources. I propose a detailed design methodology for constructing an architecture agnostic task-level power model and incorporating it into a modern operating system to build an online task-level power profiler. The profiler is implemented inside the latest Linux kernel and validated for Intel Sandy Bridge processor. It has a negligible overhead of less than 1\% hardware resource consumption. The profiler power prediction was demonstrated for various application benchmarks from SPEC to PARSEC with less than 4\% error. I also demonstrate the importance of the proposed profiler for emerging architectural techniques through use case scenarios, which include heterogeneous computing and fine grained per-core DVFS. Along with architectural enhancement in general purpose processors to improve energy efficiency, hardware accelerators like Coarse Grain reconfigurable architecture (CGRA) are gaining popularity. Unlike vector processors, which rely on data parallelism, CGRA can provide greater flexibility and compiler level control making it more suitable for present SoC environment. To provide streamline development environment for CGRA, I propose a flexible framework in Linux to do design space exploration for CGRA. With accurate and flexible hardware models, fine grained integration with accurate architectural simulator, and Linux memory management and DMA support, a user can carry out limitless experiments on CGRA in full system environment.
ContributorsDesai, Digant Pareshkumar (Author) / Vrudhula, Sarma (Thesis advisor) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Wu, Carole-Jean (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Smart home system (SHS) is a kind of information system aiming at realizing home automation. The SHS can connect with almost any kind of electronic/electric device used in a home so that they can be controlled and monitored centrally. Today's technology also allows the home owners to control and monitor the SHS installed in their homes remotely. This is typically realized by giving the SHS network access ability. Although the SHS's network access ability brings a lot of conveniences to the home owners, it also makes the SHS facing more security threats than ever before. As a result, when designing a SHS, the security threats it might face should be given careful considerations. System security threats can be solved properly by understanding them and knowing the parts in the system that should be protected against them first. This leads to the idea of solving the security threats a SHS might face from the requirements engineering level. Following this idea, this paper proposes a systematic approach to generate the security requirements specifications for the SHS. It can be viewed as the first step toward the complete SHS security requirements engineering process.
ContributorsXu, Rongcao (Author) / Ghazarian, Arbi (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Ajay (Committee member) / Lindquist, Timothy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Multicore processors have proliferated in nearly all forms of computing, from servers, desktop, to smartphones. The primary reason for this large adoption of multicore processors is due to its ability to overcome the power-wall by providing higher performance at a lower power consumption rate. With multi-cores, there is increased need for dynamic energy management (DEM), much more than for single-core processors, as DEM for multi-cores is no more a mechanism just to ensure that a processor is kept under specified temperature limits, but also a set of techniques that manage various processor controls like dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), task migration, fan speed, etc. to achieve a stated objective. The objectives span a wide range from maximizing throughput, minimizing power consumption, reducing peak temperature, maximizing energy efficiency, maximizing processor reliability, and so on, along with much more wider constraints of temperature, power, timing, and reliability constraints. Thus DEM can be very complex and challenging to achieve. Since often times many DEMs operate together on a single processor, there is a need to unify various DEM techniques. This dissertation address such a need. In this work, a framework for DEM is proposed that provides a unifying processor model that includes processor power, thermal, timing, and reliability models, supports various DEM control mechanisms, many different objective functions along with equally diverse constraint specifications. Using the framework, a range of novel solutions is derived for instances of DEM problems, that include maximizing processor performance, energy efficiency, or minimizing power consumption, peak temperature under constraints of maximum temperature, memory reliability and task deadlines. Finally, a robust closed-loop controller to implement the above solutions on a real processor platform with a very low operational overhead is proposed. Along with the controller design, a model identification methodology for obtaining the required power and thermal models for the controller is also discussed. The controller is architecture independent and hence easily portable across many platforms. The controller has been successfully deployed on Intel Sandy Bridge processor and the use of the controller has increased the energy efficiency of the processor by over 30%
ContributorsHanumaiah, Vinay (Author) / Vrudhula, Sarma (Thesis advisor) / Chatha, Karamvir (Committee member) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Rodriguez, Armando (Committee member) / Askin, Ronald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This dissertation provides a critical analysis of public administration's understanding of the relationship between rational thought and action in its discourse on ethics. It argues that rationalist ethics assume a particular relationship between thought and action: that good knowledge leads to good, proper action. While there have been many critiques of rationalist administrative ethics, scholars have not examined the way in which rationalism persists in the way in which the teaching of ethics is conducted. The use of the case study figures prominently in this. Thus, the dissertation explores the historical and theoretical intersection of rationalism, ethics, and teaching through the lens of the case study. It begins with a history of the pedagogical use of the case study and the institutional transformations of the university. While conventional accounts of the field locate its founding in the United States in the municipal reform movement, here the founding of the field of public administration is recast through connections to reforms in the university including changes in epistemic assumptions, pedagogical methods, and curricular changes in ethics in which the case study is central and remains so as the field develops. The dissertation then considers scholarship in public administration that raises questions about rationalist ethics. Three critical approaches are explored: recognition of the uncertainty and complexity of administrative practice, critique as unmasking of power relationships, and the shift of ethics from an epistemological to an ontological inquiry. The dissertation builds on the work in this third approach and shows how it attempts to articulate a non-rationalist, or immanent, ethics. This ethics is concerned with exploring the conditions that make possible mutually beneficial relationships and meaningful lives from which categorical norms of the good life could emerge. Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, it is argued that the distinction Deleuze and Guattari make between "arborescent" and "rhizomatic" knowledge gets to the root of the tension between thought and action and offers an innovative and useful way to advance an immanent, non-rational ethics. The challenge digital technologies and the information society present to the field is considered to illustrate the need to rethink administrative ethics and also the particular usefulness of Deleuze and Guattari in doing so. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of pedagogical practices and classroom examples that encourage a rhizomatic understanding of the theory and practice of public administration.
ContributorsCallen, Jeffrey Craig (Author) / Catlaw, Thomas J (Thesis advisor) / Corley, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Kim, Yushim (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Motion capture using cost-effective sensing technology is challenging and the huge success of Microsoft Kinect has been attracting researchers to uncover the potential of using this technology into computer vision applications. In this thesis, an upper-body motion analysis in a home-based system for stroke rehabilitation using novel RGB-D camera - Kinect is presented. We address this problem by first conducting a systematic analysis of the usability of Kinect for motion analysis in stroke rehabilitation. Then a hybrid upper body tracking approach is proposed which combines off-the-shelf skeleton tracking with a novel depth-fused mean shift tracking method. We proposed several kinematic features reliably extracted from the proposed inexpensive and portable motion capture system and classifiers that correlate torso movement to clinical measures of unimpaired and impaired. Experiment results show that the proposed sensing and analysis works reliably on measuring torso movement quality and is promising for end-point tracking. The system is currently being deployed for large-scale evaluations.
ContributorsDu, Tingfang (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Rikakis, Thanassis (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This thesis introduces the Model-Based Development of Multi-iRobot Toolbox (MBDMIRT), a Simulink-based toolbox designed to provide the means to acquire and practice the Model-Based Development (MBD) skills necessary to design real-time embedded system. The toolbox was developed in the Cyber-Physical System Laboratory at Arizona State University. The MBDMIRT toolbox runs under MATLAB/Simulink to simulate the movements of multiple iRobots and to control, after verification by simulation, multiple physical iRobots accordingly. It adopts the Simulink/Stateflow, which exemplifies an approach to MBD, to program the behaviors of the iRobots. The MBDMIRT toolbox reuses and augments the open-source MATLAB-Based Simulator for the iRobot Create from Cornell University to run the simulation. Regarding the mechanism of iRobot control, the MBDMIRT toolbox applies the MATLAB Toolbox for the iRobot Create (MTIC) from United States Naval Academy to command the physical iRobots. The MBDMIRT toolbox supports a timer in both the simulation and the control, which is based on the local clock of the PC running the toolbox. In addition to the build-in sensors of an iRobot, the toolbox can simulate four user-added sensors, which are overhead localization system (OLS), sonar sensors, a camera, and Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR). While controlling a physical iRobot, the toolbox supports the StarGazer OLS manufactured by HAGISONIC, Inc.
ContributorsSu, Shih-Kai (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios E (Thesis advisor) / Sarjoughian, Hessam S. (Committee member) / Artemiadis, Panagiotis K (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012