Filtering by
- All Subjects: Education
- All Subjects: deep learning
- Creators: School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
As we count down the years remaining before a global climate catastrophe, ever increases the importance of teaching environmental history and fostering environmental stewardship from a young age. In the age of globalization, nothing exists in a vacuum, yet our traditional education system often fails to reflect the abundant connections between content areas that are prevalent outside of schools. In fact, many of the flaws of the field of education have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and a forced transition to online schooling, with many educators reverting to outdated practices in a desperate attempt to get students through the year. The aim of this project was to design a unit curriculum with these issues in mind. This month-long environmental history unit engages students through the use of hands-on activities and promotes interdisciplinary connections. The unit can be taught in a physical, online, or hybrid American history class, and will hopefully inspire and motivate students to become environmental stewards as they look toward their futures on this planet.
This study estimates the effect of district wealth on Arizona Empowerment Scholarship Account program participation using data from the Arizona Department of Education. We find that students from poor districts are not more likely to participate as school performance decreases.Conversely, those from wealthy districts do increase participation as school performance decreases. We briefly try to explain the observed heterogeneity through survey results and commenting on the program design.
(LC-MS/MS) is used to identify and quantify peptides and proteins. LC-MS/MS produces mass spectra, which must be searched by one or more engines, which employ
algorithms to match spectra to theoretical spectra derived from a reference database.
These engines identify and characterize proteins and their component peptides. By
training a convolutional neural network on a dataset of over 6 million MS/MS spectra
derived from human proteins, we aim to create a tool that can quickly and effectively
identify spectra as peptides prior to database searching. This can significantly reduce search space and thus run time for database searches, thereby accelerating LCMS/MS-based proteomics data acquisition. Additionally, by training neural networks
on labels derived from the search results of three different database search engines, we
aim to examine and compare which features are best identified by individual search
engines, a neural network, or a combination of these.
Chandler Unified School District (CUSD), a large school system in Arizona that serves 45,000 students from preschool through high school, has been unable to escape similar structural and frictional inequities within its schools. One instance of a racially charged student performance at Santan Middle School motivated CUSD to take a more immediate look at equity in the district. It is during this response that our team of New Venture Group consultants engaged with Matt Strom, Assistant Superintendent of CUSD, in analyzing the important question of “how CUSD can take steps towards closing equity gaps within the district?”
CUSD defines an equity gap as any difference in student opportunity, achievement, discipline, attendance, etc. contributable to a student’s ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic status. Currently, certain student populations in CUSD perform vastly different academically and receive different opportunities within schools, but as was our problem statement, CUSD is aiming to reduce (and eventually close) these gaps.
Our team approached this problem in three phases: (1) diagnosis, (2) solution creation, and (3) prevention. In phase one, we created a dashboard to help principals easily and visually identify gaps by toggling parameters on the dashboard. Phase two focused on the generation of recommendations for closing gaps. To achieve this goal, a knowledge of successful gap-closing strategies will be paired with the dashboard. In our final phase, the team of consultants created a principal scorecard to ensure equity remains a priority for principals.
This thesis is part of a collaboration between ASU’s Interactive Robotics Laboratory and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In this thesis, the training pipeline from Sharma’s paper “Pose Estimation for Non-Cooperative Spacecraft Rendezvous Using Convolutional Neural Networks” was modified to perform pose estimation on a complex object - specifically, a segment of a hollow truss. After initial attempts to replicate the architecture used in the paper and train solely on synthetic images, a combination of synthetic dataset generation and transfer learning on an ImageNet-pretrained AlexNet model was implemented to mitigate the difficulty of gathering large amounts of real-world data. Experimentation with pose estimation accuracy and hyperparameters of the model resulted in gradual test accuracy improvement, and future work is suggested to improve pose estimation for complex objects with some form of rotational symmetry.