Matching Items (36)
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- All Subjects: Sustainability
- Creators: Department of Information Systems
Description
This thesis project was conducted to create a practical tool to help micro and small local food enterprises identify potential strategies and sources of finance. Currently, many of these enterprises are unable to obtain the financial capital needed to start-up or maintain operations.
Sources and strategies of finance studied and ultimately included in the tool were Loans, Equity, Membership, Crowdfunding, and Grants. The tool designed was a matrix that takes into account various criteria of the business (e.g. business lifecycle, organizational structure, business performance) and generates a financial plan based on these criteria and how they align with the selected business strategies. After strategies are found, stakeholders can search through an institutional database created in conjunction with the matrix tool to find possible institutional providers of financing that relate to the strategy or strategies found.
The tool has shown promise in identifying sources of finance for micro and small local food enterprises in practical use with hypothetical business cases, however further practical use is necessary to provide further input and revise the tool as needed. Ultimately, the tool will likely become fully user-friendly and stakeholders will not need the assistance of another expert helping them to use it. Finally, despite the promise of the tool itself, the fundamental and underlying problem that many of these businesses face (lack of infrastructure and knowledge) still exists, and while this tool can also help capacity-building efforts towards both those seeking and those providing finance, an institutional attitude adjustment towards social and alternative enterprises is necessary in order to further simplify the process of obtaining finance.
Sources and strategies of finance studied and ultimately included in the tool were Loans, Equity, Membership, Crowdfunding, and Grants. The tool designed was a matrix that takes into account various criteria of the business (e.g. business lifecycle, organizational structure, business performance) and generates a financial plan based on these criteria and how they align with the selected business strategies. After strategies are found, stakeholders can search through an institutional database created in conjunction with the matrix tool to find possible institutional providers of financing that relate to the strategy or strategies found.
The tool has shown promise in identifying sources of finance for micro and small local food enterprises in practical use with hypothetical business cases, however further practical use is necessary to provide further input and revise the tool as needed. Ultimately, the tool will likely become fully user-friendly and stakeholders will not need the assistance of another expert helping them to use it. Finally, despite the promise of the tool itself, the fundamental and underlying problem that many of these businesses face (lack of infrastructure and knowledge) still exists, and while this tool can also help capacity-building efforts towards both those seeking and those providing finance, an institutional attitude adjustment towards social and alternative enterprises is necessary in order to further simplify the process of obtaining finance.
ContributorsDwyer, Robert Francis (Author) / Wiek, Arnim (Thesis director) / Forrest, Nigel (Committee member) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (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
The modern web presents an opportunity for educators and researchers to create tools that are highly accessible. Because of the near-ubiquity of modern web browsers, developers who hope to create educational and analytical tools can reach a large au- dience by creating web applications. Using JavaScript, HTML, and other modern web development technologies, Genie was developed as a simulator to help educators in biology, genetics, and evolution classrooms teach their students about population genetics. Because Genie was designed for the modern web, it is highly accessible to both educators and students, who can access the web application using any modern web browser on virtually any device. Genie demonstrates the efficacy of web devel- opment technologies for demonstrating and simulating complex processes, and it will be a unique educational tool for educators who teach population genetics.
ContributorsRoos, Benjamin Hirsch (Author) / Cartwright, Reed (Thesis director) / Wilson Sayres, Melissa (Committee member) / Mayron, Liam (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
With the development of technology, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of machine learning programs. These complex programs make conclusions and can predict or perform actions based off of models from previous runs or input information. However, such programs require the storing of a very large amount of data. Queries allow users to extract only the information that helps for their investigation. The purpose of this thesis was to create a system with two important components, querying and visualization. Metadata was stored in Sedna as XML and time series data was stored in OpenTSDB as JSON. In order to connect the two databases, the time series ID was stored as a metric in the XML metadata. Queries should be simple, flexible, and return all data that fits the query parameters. The query language used was an extension of XQuery FLWOR that added time series parameters. Visualization should be easily understood and be organized in a way to easily find important information and details. Because of the possibility of a large amount of data being returned from a query, a multivariate heat map was used to visualize the time series results. The two programs that the system performed queries on was Energy Plus and Epidemic Simulation Data Management System. By creating such a system, it would be easier for people of the project's fields to find the relationship between metadata that leads to the desired results over time. Over the time of the thesis project, the overall software was completed, however the software must be optimized in order to take the enormous amount of data expected from the system.
ContributorsTse, Adam Yusof (Author) / Candan, Selcuk (Thesis director) / Chen, Xilun (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Music (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
The purpose of this project is to create an affordable and low-environmental impact housing model for high-density urban living. Detailed research was completed to select the Arizonan city of Tempe for the basis of this model such as author's preference and alarming demographic and economic factors. The finalized model will consist of shipping containers that will be converted into housing. These domiciles are ideal for a maximum of 1-2 occupants. The units will be stacked into communities to accomplish high density. These shipping containers will be used rather than brand new, the community landscape will consist of natural desert landscaping, a recycling program will be offered, and solar panels will be used to power the units. The decision for these features fulfills both the mission of the project and markets to the main demographic group of residents in Tempe, Millennials, who usually place sustainability in high regard. These units are meant to be purchased by the target market and other citizens to increase homeownership rates in Tempe. Their ownership rights will be analogous owning a condo, where they will own the converted shipping container itself, but not the property the unit is placed on. In addition, these units qualify for traditional loans and will appreciate similar to normal housing options. After conceptualizing the idea, various costs were analyzed for construction of the units. A critical component of the project is to receive government grants to fund the venture in order to continue the mission and keep prices of these units low. This model is expandable and could be moved to other cities within the state or potentially other states through future government grant attainment and success with the first installation. These communities will be managed by a company, Shipping Designs, which will be a limited liability company created by the author, Shauna Burgoyne.
ContributorsBurgoyne, Shauna Cheyenne (Author) / Kellso, James (Thesis director) / Dooley, Kevin (Committee member) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-12
Description
The idea of a packed promenade, crowded with busy shoppers and completely empty of cars may seem like a holdover from rustic 19th century Europe — but many present day examples can be found right here in the United States — in college towns like Madison, WI, big cities like Denver CO, and lots of places in between. In recent years, proposals to change Mill Ave. here in Tempe have been introduced to modify University Dr. to Rio Salado Pkwy. into just that type of pedestrianized shopping mall, closing it to all automobile traffic outside of emergency vehicles.
As two students who frequent the potentially affected area, we explore the feasibility of such a proposal to continue to grow the downtown Tempe economy. Our research focuses upon several different areas — exploring positive and negative cases of street pedestrianization (whether in Europe, the United States, or other countries), the impact a permanent street closure in Tempe would have both on personal traffic and on the city’s robust public transit system, potential security concerns, opinions of the business community on the proposed change, and the political feasibility of passing the proposal through the Tempe City Council.
As two students who frequent the potentially affected area, we explore the feasibility of such a proposal to continue to grow the downtown Tempe economy. Our research focuses upon several different areas — exploring positive and negative cases of street pedestrianization (whether in Europe, the United States, or other countries), the impact a permanent street closure in Tempe would have both on personal traffic and on the city’s robust public transit system, potential security concerns, opinions of the business community on the proposed change, and the political feasibility of passing the proposal through the Tempe City Council.
ContributorsBaker, Alex Anton (Co-author) / O'Malley, Jessica (Co-author) / King, David (Thesis director) / Kuby, Lauren (Committee member) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Monocular is a user engagement application that offers a website owner the opportunity to track user behavior and use the data to better understand the site's strengths and weaknesses in terms of user satisfaction and motivation. This data allows the customer to make improvements to a website, resulting in a better user experience and potential for an improved bottom line.
ContributorsHooke, Wade (Co-author) / Ortiz-Monasterio, Diego (Co-author) / Clark, Joseph (Thesis director) / Prince, Linda (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Cravingz is a web-based application that allows users to learn the maximum number of food items that they can purchase at a restaurant within a defined personal budget. We created two versions of this web-based application and asked 40 users to perform an A/B test to determine which version provides the best user experience in terms of efficiency and performance. Users who participated in this study completed a set of tasks to test these applications. Our findings demonstrate that users prefer a web application that does not require them to input data repeatedly to view combinations for multiple restaurants. Although the version which required reentry of data was more visually-pleasing, users preferred the version in which inputting data was a one-time task.
ContributorsPandarinath, Agastya (Co-author) / Jain, Ayushi (Co-author) / Atkinson, Robert (Thesis director) / Chavez-Echeagaray, Maria Elena (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
In the area of hardware, reverse engineering was traditionally focused on developing clones—duplicated components that performed the same functionality of the original component. While reverse engineering techniques have been applied to software, these techniques have instead focused on understanding high-level software designs to ease the software maintenance burden. This approach works well for traditional applications that contain source code, however, there are circumstances, particularly regarding web applications, where it would be very beneficial to clone a web application and no source code is present, e.g., for security testing of the application or for offline mock testing of a third-party web service. We call this the web application cloning problem.
This thesis presents a possible solution to the problem of web application cloning. Our approach is a novel application of inductive programming, which we call inductive reverse engineering. The goal of inductive reverse engineering is to automatically reverse engineer an abstraction of the web application’s code in a completely black-box manner. We build this approach using recent advances in inductive programming, and we solve several technical challenges to scale the inductive programming techniques to realistic-sized web applications. We target the initial version of our inductive reverse engineering tool to a subset of web applications, i.e., those that do not store state and those that do not have loops. We introduce an evaluation methodology for web application cloning techniques and evaluate our approach on several real-world web applications. The results indicate that inductive reverse engineering can effectively reverse engineer specific types of web applications. In the future, we hope to extend the power of inductive reverse engineering to web applications with state and to learn loops, while still maintaining tractability.
This thesis presents a possible solution to the problem of web application cloning. Our approach is a novel application of inductive programming, which we call inductive reverse engineering. The goal of inductive reverse engineering is to automatically reverse engineer an abstraction of the web application’s code in a completely black-box manner. We build this approach using recent advances in inductive programming, and we solve several technical challenges to scale the inductive programming techniques to realistic-sized web applications. We target the initial version of our inductive reverse engineering tool to a subset of web applications, i.e., those that do not store state and those that do not have loops. We introduce an evaluation methodology for web application cloning techniques and evaluate our approach on several real-world web applications. The results indicate that inductive reverse engineering can effectively reverse engineer specific types of web applications. In the future, we hope to extend the power of inductive reverse engineering to web applications with state and to learn loops, while still maintaining tractability.
ContributorsLiao, Kevin (Author) / Doupe, Adam (Thesis director) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Zhao, Ziming (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
This project explores how web applications can structure their User Interfaces to best accommodate their users who may not be able to use standard input devices like a mouse and keyboard, or differentiate subtle color differences in text, or who may be overwhelmed with heavy animation or auto-play videos. This project serves as a proof-of-concept of an accessible Virtual Learning Environment to be used by students of online classes, particularly at younger grade levels. It is a functional application that handles user login, lecture presentations and materials, and quizzes. The development of the front-end is done through the React JS library, an open source library from Facebook used for building UIs. This project finds that React has strong capabilities of building accessible UIs that is consistent with modern accessibility web standards. As React is one of the most popular emerging JavaScript libraries that is already being incorporated to large-scale web pages and applications, this project hopes to inform other developers on some of the tools and techniques that can make their work accessible to all users.
ContributorsTerzic, Philip Mico (Author) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Thesis director) / Tadayon-Navabi, Farideh (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05