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Graph theory is a critical component of computer science and software engineering, with algorithms concerning graph traversal and comprehension powering much of the largest problems in both industry and research. Engineers and researchers often have an accurate view of their target graph, however they struggle to implement a correct, and

Graph theory is a critical component of computer science and software engineering, with algorithms concerning graph traversal and comprehension powering much of the largest problems in both industry and research. Engineers and researchers often have an accurate view of their target graph, however they struggle to implement a correct, and efficient, search over that graph.

To facilitate rapid, correct, efficient, and intuitive development of graph based solutions we propose a new programming language construct - the search statement. Given a supra-root node, a procedure which determines the children of a given parent node, and optional definitions of the fail-fast acceptance or rejection of a solution, the search statement can conduct a search over any graph or network. Structurally, this statement is modelled after the common switch statement and is put into a largely imperative/procedural context to allow for immediate and intuitive development by most programmers. The Go programming language has been used as a foundation and proof-of-concept of the search statement. A Go compiler is provided which implements this construct.
ContributorsHenderson, Christopher (Author) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Lindquist, Timothy (Committee member) / Acuna, Ruben (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
Plagiarism is a huge problem in a learning environment. In programming classes especially, plagiarism can be hard to detect as source codes' appearance can be easily modified without changing the intent through simple formatting changes or refactoring. There are a number of plagiarism detection tools that attempt to encode knowledge

Plagiarism is a huge problem in a learning environment. In programming classes especially, plagiarism can be hard to detect as source codes' appearance can be easily modified without changing the intent through simple formatting changes or refactoring. There are a number of plagiarism detection tools that attempt to encode knowledge about the programming languages they support in order to better detect obscured duplicates. Many such tools do not support a large number of languages because doing so requires too much code and therefore too much maintenance. It is also difficult to add support for new languages because each language is vastly different syntactically. Tools that are more extensible often do so by reducing the features of a language that are encoded and end up closer to text comparison tools than structurally-aware program analysis tools.

Kitsune attempts to remedy these issues by tying itself to Antlr, a pre-existing language recognition tool with over 200 currently supported languages. In addition, it provides an interface through which generic manipulations can be applied to the parse tree generated by Antlr. As Kitsune relies on language-agnostic structure modifications, it can be adapted with minimal effort to provide plagiarism detection for new languages. Kitsune has been evaluated for 10 of the languages in the Antlr grammar repository with success and could easily be extended to support all of the grammars currently developed by Antlr or future grammars which are developed as new languages are written.
ContributorsMonroe, Zachary Lynn (Author) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Lindquist, Timothy (Committee member) / Acuna, Ruben (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Description
Calculus as a math course is important subject students need to succeed in, in order to venture into STEM majors. This thesis focuses on the early detection of at-risk students in a calculus course which can provide the proper intervention that might help them succeed in the course. Calculus has

Calculus as a math course is important subject students need to succeed in, in order to venture into STEM majors. This thesis focuses on the early detection of at-risk students in a calculus course which can provide the proper intervention that might help them succeed in the course. Calculus has high failure rates which corroborates with the data collected from Arizona State University that shows that 40% of the 3266 students whose data were used failed in their calculus course.This thesis proposes to utilize educational big data to detect students at high risk of failure and their eventual early detection and subsequent intervention can be useful. Some existing studies similar to this thesis make use of open-scale data that are lower in data count and perform predictions on low-impact Massive Open Online Courses(MOOC) based courses. In this thesis, an automatic detection method of academically at-risk students by using learning management systems(LMS) activity data along with the student information system(SIS) data from Arizona State University(ASU) for the course calculus for engineers I (MAT 265) is developed. The method will detect students at risk by employing machine learning to identify key features that contribute to the success of a student. This thesis also proposes a new technique to convert this button click data into a button click sequence which can be used as inputs to classifiers. In addition, the advancements in Natural Language Processing field can be used by adopting methods such as part-of-speech (POS) tagging and tools such as Facebook Fasttext word embeddings to convert these button click sequences into numeric vectors before feeding them into the classifiers. The thesis proposes two preprocessing techniques and evaluates them on 3 different machine learning ensembles to determine their performance across the two modalities of the class.
ContributorsDileep, Akshay Kumar (Author) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Cunningham, James (Committee member) / Acuna, Ruben (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021