Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2
Filtering by
- Creators: Turaga, Pavan
Description
Computational thinking, the fundamental way of thinking in computer science, including information sourcing and problem solving behind programming, is considered vital to children who live in a digital era. Most of current educational games designed to teach children about coding either rely on external curricular materials or are too complicated to work well with young children. In this thesis project, Guardy, an iOS tower defense game, was developed to help children over 8 years old learn about and practice using basic concepts in programming. The game is built with the SpriteKit, a graphics rendering and animation infrastructure in Apple’s integrated development environment Xcode. It simplifies switching among different game scenes and animating game sprites in the development. In a typical game, a sequence of operations is arranged by players to destroy incoming enemy minions. Basic coding concepts like looping, sequencing, conditionals, and classification are integrated in different levels. In later levels, players are required to type in commands and put them in an order to keep playing the game. To reduce the difficulty of the usability testing, a method combining questionnaires and observation was conducted with two groups of college students who either have no programming experience or are familiar with coding. The results show that Guardy has the potential to help children learn programming and practice computational thinking.
ContributorsWang, Xiaoxiao (Author) / Nelson, Brian C. (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Walker, Erin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Recursive Bayesian Estimation on Projective Spaces: Theoretical Foundations and Practical Algorithms
Description
This thesis develops geometrically and statistically rigorous foundations for multivariate analysis and bayesian inference posed on grassmannian manifolds. Requisite to the development of key elements of statistical theory in a geometric realm are closed-form, analytic expressions for many differential geometric objects, e.g., tangent vectors, metrics, geodesics, volume forms. The first part of this thesis is devoted to a mathematical exposition of these. In particular, it leverages the classical work of Alan James to derive the exterior calculus of differential forms on special grassmannians for invariant measures with respect to which integration is permissible. Motivated by various multi-sensor remote sensing applications, the second part of this thesis describes the problem of recursively estimating the state of a dynamical system propagating on the Grassmann manifold. Fundamental to the bayesian treatment of this problem is the choice of a suitable probability distribution to a priori model the state. Using the Method of Maximum Entropy, a derivation of maximum-entropy probability distributions on the state space that uses the developed geometric theory is characterized. Statistical analyses of these distributions, including parameter estimation, are also presented. These probability distributions and the statistical analysis thereof are original contributions. Using the bayesian framework, two recursive estimation algorithms, both of which rely on noisy measurements on (special cases of) the Grassmann manifold, are the devised and implemented numerically. The first is applied to an idealized scenario, the second to a more practically motivated scenario. The novelty of both of these algorithms lies in the use of thederived maximumentropy probability measures as models for the priors. Numerical simulations demonstrate that, under mild assumptions, both estimation algorithms produce accurate and statistically meaningful outputs. This thesis aims to chart the interface between differential geometry and statistical signal processing. It is my deepest hope that the geometric-statistical approach underlying this work facilitates and encourages the development of new theories and new computational methods in geometry. Application of these, in turn, will bring new insights and bettersolutions to a number of extant and emerging problems in signal processing.
ContributorsCrider, Lauren N (Author) / Cochran, Douglas (Thesis advisor) / Kotschwar, Brett (Committee member) / Scharf, Louis (Committee member) / Taylor, Thomas (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021