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Bioscience High School, a small magnet high school located in Downtown Phoenix and a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math) focused school, has been pushing to establish a computer science curriculum for all of their students from freshman to senior year. The school's Mision (Mission and Vision) is to: "..provide

Bioscience High School, a small magnet high school located in Downtown Phoenix and a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Math) focused school, has been pushing to establish a computer science curriculum for all of their students from freshman to senior year. The school's Mision (Mission and Vision) is to: "..provide a rigorous, collaborative, and relevant academic program emphasizing an innovative, problem-based curriculum that develops literacy in the sciences, mathematics, and the arts, thus cultivating critical thinkers, creative problem-solvers, and compassionate citizens, who are able to thrive in our increasingly complex and technological communities." Computational thinking is an important part in developing a future problem solver Bioscience High School is looking to produce. Bioscience High School is unique in the fact that every student has a computer available for him or her to use. Therefore, it makes complete sense for the school to add computer science to their curriculum because one of the school's goals is to be able to utilize their resources to their full potential. However, the school's attempt at computer science integration falls short due to the lack of expertise amongst the math and science teachers. The lack of training and support has postponed the development of the program and they are desperately in need of someone with expertise in the field to help reboot the program. As a result, I've decided to create a course that is focused on teaching students the concepts of computational thinking and its application through Scratch and Arduino programming.
ContributorsLiu, Deming (Author) / Meuth, Ryan (Thesis director) / Nakamura, Mutsumi (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
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Description
Students learn in various ways \u2014 visualization, auditory, memorizing, or making analogies. Traditional lecturing in engineering courses and the learning styles of engineering students are inharmonious causing students to be at a disadvantage based on their learning style (Felder & Silverman, 1988). My study analyzes the traditional approach to learning

Students learn in various ways \u2014 visualization, auditory, memorizing, or making analogies. Traditional lecturing in engineering courses and the learning styles of engineering students are inharmonious causing students to be at a disadvantage based on their learning style (Felder & Silverman, 1988). My study analyzes the traditional approach to learning coding skills which is unnatural to engineering students with no previous exposure and examining if visual learning enhances introductory computer science education. Visual and text-based learning are evaluated to determine how students learn introductory coding skills and associated problem solving skills. My study was conducted to observe how the two types of learning aid the students in learning how to problem solve as well as how much knowledge can be obtained in a short period of time. The application used for visual learning was Scratch and Repl.it was used for text-based learning. Two exams were made to measure the progress made by each student. The topics covered by the exam were initialization, variable reassignment, output, if statements, if else statements, nested if statements, logical operators, arrays/lists, while loop, type casting, functions, object orientation, and sorting. Analysis of the data collected in the study allow us to observe whether the traditional method of teaching programming or block-based programming is more beneficial and in what topics of introductory computer science concepts.
ContributorsVidaure, Destiny Vanessa (Author) / Meuth, Ryan (Thesis director) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
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Description
Electromyography (EMG) and Electroencephalography (EEG) are techniques used to detect electrical activity produced by the human body. EMG detects electrical activity in the skeletal muscles, while EEG detects electrical activity from the scalp. The purpose of this study is to capture different types of EMG and EEG signals and to

Electromyography (EMG) and Electroencephalography (EEG) are techniques used to detect electrical activity produced by the human body. EMG detects electrical activity in the skeletal muscles, while EEG detects electrical activity from the scalp. The purpose of this study is to capture different types of EMG and EEG signals and to determine if the signals can be distinguished between each other and processed into output signals to trigger events in prosthetics. Results from the study suggest that the PSD estimates can be used to compare signals that have significant differences such as the wrist, scalp, and fingers, but it cannot fully distinguish between signals that are closely related, such as two different fingers. The signals that were identified were able to be translated into the physical output simulated on the Arduino circuit.
ContributorsJanis, William Edward (Author) / LaBelle, Jeffrey (Thesis director) / Santello, Marco (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2013-12
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Description

Currently, autonomous vehicles are being evaluated by how well they interact with humans without evaluating how well humans interact with them. Since people are not going to unanimously switch over to using autonomous vehicles, attention must be given to how well these new vehicles signal intent to human drivers from

Currently, autonomous vehicles are being evaluated by how well they interact with humans without evaluating how well humans interact with them. Since people are not going to unanimously switch over to using autonomous vehicles, attention must be given to how well these new vehicles signal intent to human drivers from the driver’s point of view. Ineffective communication will lead to unnecessary discomfort among drivers caused by an underlying uncertainty about what an autonomous vehicle is or isn’t about to do. Recent studies suggest that humans tend to fixate on areas of higher uncertainty so scenarios that have a higher number of vehicle fixations can be reasoned to be more uncertain. We provide a framework for measuring human uncertainty and use the framework to measure the effect of empathetic vs non-empathetic agents. We used a simulated driving environment to create recorded scenarios and manipulate the autonomous vehicle to include either an empathetic or non-empathetic agent. The driving interaction is composed of two vehicles approaching an uncontrolled intersection. These scenarios were played to twelve participants while their gaze was recorded to track what the participants were fixating on. The overall intent was to provide an analytical framework as a tool for evaluating autonomous driving features; and in this case, we choose to evaluate how effective it was for vehicles to have empathetic behaviors included in the autonomous vehicle decision making. A t-test analysis of the gaze indicated that empathy did not in fact reduce uncertainty although additional testing of this hypothesis will be needed due to the small sample size.

ContributorsGreenhagen, Tanner Patrick (Author) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis director) / Jammula, Varun C (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
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Description
To date, there is not a standardized method for consistently quantifying the performance of an automated driving system (ADS)-equipped vehicle (AV). The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to a framework for such an approach referred to throughout as the operational safety assessment (OSA) methodology. Through this research, safety

To date, there is not a standardized method for consistently quantifying the performance of an automated driving system (ADS)-equipped vehicle (AV). The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to a framework for such an approach referred to throughout as the operational safety assessment (OSA) methodology. Through this research, safety metrics are identified, researched, and analyzed to capture aspects of the operational safety of AVs, interacting with other salient objects. This dissertation outlines the approach for developing this methodology through a series of key steps including: (1) comprehensive literature review; (2) research and refinement of OSA metrics; (3) generation of MATLAB script for metric calculations; (4) generation of simulated events for analysis; (5) collection of real-world data for analysis; (6) review of OSA methodology results; and (7) discussion of future work to expand complexity, fidelity, and relevance aspects of the OSA methodology. The detailed literature review includes the identification of metrics historically used in both traditional and more recent evaluations of vehicle performance. Subsequently, the metric formulations are refined, and robust severity evaluations are proposed. A MATLAB script is then presented which was generated to calculate the metrics from any given source assuming proper formatting of the data. To further refine the formulations and the MATLAB script, a variety of simulated scenarios are discussed including car-following, intersection, and lane change situations. Additionally, a data collection activity is presented, leveraging the SMARTDRIVE testbed operated by Maricopa County Department of Transportation in Anthem, AZ to collect real-world data from an active intersection. Lastly, the efficacy of the OSA methodology with respect to the evaluation of vehicle performance for a set of scenarios is evaluated utilizing both simulated and real-world data. This assessment provides a demonstration of the ability and robustness of this methodology to evaluate vehicle performance for a given scenario. At the conclusion of this dissertation, additional factors including fidelity, complexity, and relevance are explored to contribute to a more comprehensive evaluation.
ContributorsComo, Steven Gerard (Author) / Wishart, Jeffrey (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis advisor) / Chen, Yan (Committee member) / Favaro, Francesca (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
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Description
Feature embeddings differ from raw features in the sense that the former obey certain properties like notion of similarity/dissimilarity in it's embedding space. word2vec is a preeminent example in this direction, where the similarity in the embedding space is measured in terms of the cosine similarity. Such language embedding models

Feature embeddings differ from raw features in the sense that the former obey certain properties like notion of similarity/dissimilarity in it's embedding space. word2vec is a preeminent example in this direction, where the similarity in the embedding space is measured in terms of the cosine similarity. Such language embedding models have seen numerous applications in both language and vision community as they capture the information in the modality (English language) efficiently. Inspired by these language models, this work focuses on learning embedding spaces for two visual computing tasks, 1. Image Hashing 2. Zero Shot Learning. The training set was used to learn embedding spaces over which similarity/dissimilarity is measured using several distance metrics like hamming / euclidean / cosine distances. While the above-mentioned language models learn generic word embeddings, in this work task specific embeddings were learnt which can be used for Image Retrieval and Classification separately.

Image Hashing is the task of mapping images to binary codes such that some notion of user-defined similarity is preserved. The first part of this work focuses on designing a new framework that uses the hash-tags associated with web images to learn the binary codes. Such codes can be used in several applications like Image Retrieval and Image Classification. Further, this framework requires no labelled data, leaving it very inexpensive. Results show that the proposed approach surpasses the state-of-art approaches by a significant margin.

Zero-shot classification is the task of classifying the test sample into a new class which was not seen during training. This is possible by establishing a relationship between the training and the testing classes using auxiliary information. In the second part of this thesis, a framework is designed that trains using the handcrafted attribute vectors and word vectors but doesn’t require the expensive attribute vectors during test time. More specifically, an intermediate space is learnt between the word vector space and the image feature space using the hand-crafted attribute vectors. Preliminary results on two zero-shot classification datasets show that this is a promising direction to explore.
ContributorsGattupalli, Jaya Vijetha (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Venkateswara, Hemanth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
The need for incorporating game engines into robotics tools becomes increasingly crucial as their graphics continue to become more photorealistic. This thesis presents a simulation framework, referred to as OpenUAV, that addresses cloud simulation and photorealism challenges in academic and research goals. In this work, OpenUAV is used to create

The need for incorporating game engines into robotics tools becomes increasingly crucial as their graphics continue to become more photorealistic. This thesis presents a simulation framework, referred to as OpenUAV, that addresses cloud simulation and photorealism challenges in academic and research goals. In this work, OpenUAV is used to create a simulation of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) closely following a moving autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) in an underwater coral reef environment. It incorporates the Unity3D game engine and the robotics software Gazebo to take advantage of Unity3D's perception and Gazebo's physics simulation. The software is developed as a containerized solution that is deployable on cloud and on-premise systems.

This method of utilizing Gazebo's physics and Unity3D perception is evaluated for a team of marine vehicles (an AUV and an ASV) in a coral reef environment. A coordinated navigation and localization module is presented that allows the AUV to follow the path of the ASV. A fiducial marker underneath the ASV facilitates pose estimation of the AUV, and the pose estimates are filtered using the known dynamical system model of both vehicles for better localization. This thesis also investigates different fiducial markers and their detection rates in this Unity3D underwater environment. The limitations and capabilities of this Unity3D perception and Gazebo physics approach are examined.
ContributorsAnand, Harish (Author) / Das, Jnaneshwar (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Berman, Spring M (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Description
In videos that contain actions performed unintentionally, agents do not achieve their desired goals. In such videos, it is challenging for computer vision systems to understand high-level concepts such as goal-directed behavior. On the other hand, from a very early age, humans are able to understand the relation between an

In videos that contain actions performed unintentionally, agents do not achieve their desired goals. In such videos, it is challenging for computer vision systems to understand high-level concepts such as goal-directed behavior. On the other hand, from a very early age, humans are able to understand the relation between an agent and their ultimate goal even if the action gets disrupted or unintentional effects occur. Inculcating this ability in artificially intelligent agents would make them better social learners by not just learning from their own mistakes, i.e, reinforcement learning, but also learning from other's mistakes. For example, this could greatly reduce the search space for artificially intelligent agents for finding the correct action sequence when trying to achieve a new goal, since they would be able to learn from others what not to do as well as how/when actions result in undesired outcomes.To validate this ability of deep learning models to perform this task, the Weakly Augmented Oops (W-Oops) dataset is proposed, built upon the Oops dataset. W-Oops consists of 2,100 unintentional human action videos, with 44 goal-directed and 33 unintentional video-level activity labels collected through human annotations. Inspired by previous methods on tasks such as weakly supervised action localization which show promise for achieving good localization results without ground truth segment annotations, this paper proposes a weakly supervised algorithm for localizing the goal-directed as well as the unintentional temporal region of a video using only video-level labels. In particular, an attention mechanism based strategy is employed that predicts the temporal regions which contributes the most to a classification task, leveraging solely video-level labels. Meanwhile, our designed overlap regularization allows the model to focus on distinct portions of the video for inferring the goal-directed and unintentional activity, while guaranteeing their temporal ordering. Extensive quantitative experiments verify the validity of our localization method.
ContributorsChakravarthy, Arnav (Author) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Pavlic, Theodore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021