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- Genre: Academic theses
- Creators: Bansal, Ajay
Description
There exists extensive research on the use of twisty puzzles, such as the Rubik's Cube, in educational contexts to assist in developing critical thinking skills and in teaching abstract concepts, such as group theory. However, the existing research does not consider the use of twisty puzzles in developing language proficiency. Furthermore, there remain methodological issues in integrating standard twisty puzzles into a class curriculum due to the ease with which erroneous cube twists occur, leading to a puzzle scramble that deviates from the intended teaching goal. To address these issues, an extensive examination of the "smart cube" market took place in order to determine whether a device that virtualizes twisty puzzles while maintaining the intuitive tactility of manipulating such puzzles can be employed both to fill the language education void and to mitigate the potential frustration experienced by students who unintentionally scramble a puzzle due to executing the wrong moves. This examination revealed the presence of Bluetooth smart cubes, which are capable of interfacing with a companion web or mobile application that visualizes and reacts to puzzle manipulations. This examination also revealed the presence of a device called the WOWCube, which is a 2x2x2 smart cube entertainment system that has 24 Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) screens, one for each face's square, enabling better integration of the application with the puzzle hardware. Developing applications both for the Bluetooth smart cube using React Native and for the WOWCube demonstrated the higher feasibility of developing with the WOWCube due to its streamlined development kit as well as its ability to tie the application to the device hardware, enhancing the tactile immersion of the players with the application itself. Using the WOWCube, a word puzzle game featuring three game modes was implemented to assist in teaching players English vocabulary. Due to its incorporation of features that enable dynamic puzzle generation and resetting, players who participated in a user survey found that the game was compelling and that it exercised their critical thinking skills. This demonstrates the feasibility of smart cube applications in both critical thinking and language skills.
ContributorsHreshchyshyn, Jacob (Author) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Mehlhase, Alexandra (Committee member) / Baron, Tyler (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
UVLabel was created to enable radio astronomers to view and annotate their own data such that they could then expand their future research paths. It simplifies their data rendering process by providing a simple user interface to better access sections of their data. Furthermore, it provides an interface to track trends in their data through a labelling feature.
The tool was developed following the incremental development process in order to quickly create a functional and testable tool. The incremental process also allowed for feedback from radio astronomers to help guide the project's development.
UVLabel provides both a functional product, and a modifiable and scalable code base for radio astronomer developers. This enables astronomers studying various astronomical interferometric data labelling capabilities. The tool can then be used to improve their filtering methods, pursue machine learning solutions, and discover new trends. Finally, UVLabel will be open source to put customization, scalability, and adaptability in the hands of these researchers.
The tool was developed following the incremental development process in order to quickly create a functional and testable tool. The incremental process also allowed for feedback from radio astronomers to help guide the project's development.
UVLabel provides both a functional product, and a modifiable and scalable code base for radio astronomer developers. This enables astronomers studying various astronomical interferometric data labelling capabilities. The tool can then be used to improve their filtering methods, pursue machine learning solutions, and discover new trends. Finally, UVLabel will be open source to put customization, scalability, and adaptability in the hands of these researchers.
ContributorsLa Place, Cecilia (Author) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Jacobs, Daniel (Thesis advisor) / Acuna, Ruben (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Since the advent of the internet and even more after social media platforms, the explosive growth of textual data and its availability has made analysis a tedious task. Information extraction systems are available but are generally too specific and often only extract certain kinds of information they deem necessary and extraction worthy. Using data visualization theory and fast, interactive querying methods, leaving out information might not really be necessary. This thesis explores textual data visualization techniques, intuitive querying, and a novel approach to all-purpose textual information extraction to encode large text corpus to improve human understanding of the information present in textual data.
This thesis presents a modified traversal algorithm on dependency parse output of text to extract all subject predicate object pairs from text while ensuring that no information is missed out. To support full scale, all-purpose information extraction from large text corpuses, a data preprocessing pipeline is recommended to be used before the extraction is run. The output format is designed specifically to fit on a node-edge-node model and form the building blocks of a network which makes understanding of the text and querying of information from corpus quick and intuitive. It attempts to reduce reading time and enhancing understanding of the text using interactive graph and timeline.
This thesis presents a modified traversal algorithm on dependency parse output of text to extract all subject predicate object pairs from text while ensuring that no information is missed out. To support full scale, all-purpose information extraction from large text corpuses, a data preprocessing pipeline is recommended to be used before the extraction is run. The output format is designed specifically to fit on a node-edge-node model and form the building blocks of a network which makes understanding of the text and querying of information from corpus quick and intuitive. It attempts to reduce reading time and enhancing understanding of the text using interactive graph and timeline.
ContributorsHashmi, Syed Usama (Author) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Srividya (Committee member) / Gonzalez Sanchez, Javier (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Feedback represents a vital component of the learning process and is especially important for Computer Science students. With class sizes that are often large, it can be challenging to provide individualized feedback to students. Consistent, constructive, supportive feedback through a tutoring companion can scaffold the learning process for students.
This work contributes to the construction of a tutoring companion designed to provide this feedback to students. It aims to bridge the gap between the messages the compiler delivers, and the support required for a novice student to understand the problem and fix their code. Particularly, it provides support for students learning about recursion in a beginning university Java programming course. Besides also providing affective support, a tutoring companion could be more effective when it is embedded into the environment that the student is already using, instead of an additional tool for the student to learn. The proposed Tutoring Companion is embedded into the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
This thesis focuses on the reasoning model for the Tutoring Companion and is developed using the techniques of a neural network. While a student uses the IDE, the Tutoring Companion collects 16 data points, including the presence of certain key words, cyclomatic complexity, and error messages from the compiler, every time it detects an event, such as a run attempt, debug attempt, or a request for help, in the IDE. This data is used as inputs to the neural network. The neural network produces a correlating single output code for the feedback to be provided to the student, which is displayed in the IDE.
The effectiveness of the approach is examined among 38 Computer Science students who solve a programming assignment while the Tutoring Companion assists them. Data is collected from these interactions, including all inputs and outputs for the neural network, and students are surveyed regarding their experience. Results suggest that students feel supported while working with the Companion and promising potential for using a neural network with an embedded companion in the future. Challenges in developing an embedded companion are discussed, as well as opportunities for future work.
This work contributes to the construction of a tutoring companion designed to provide this feedback to students. It aims to bridge the gap between the messages the compiler delivers, and the support required for a novice student to understand the problem and fix their code. Particularly, it provides support for students learning about recursion in a beginning university Java programming course. Besides also providing affective support, a tutoring companion could be more effective when it is embedded into the environment that the student is already using, instead of an additional tool for the student to learn. The proposed Tutoring Companion is embedded into the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
This thesis focuses on the reasoning model for the Tutoring Companion and is developed using the techniques of a neural network. While a student uses the IDE, the Tutoring Companion collects 16 data points, including the presence of certain key words, cyclomatic complexity, and error messages from the compiler, every time it detects an event, such as a run attempt, debug attempt, or a request for help, in the IDE. This data is used as inputs to the neural network. The neural network produces a correlating single output code for the feedback to be provided to the student, which is displayed in the IDE.
The effectiveness of the approach is examined among 38 Computer Science students who solve a programming assignment while the Tutoring Companion assists them. Data is collected from these interactions, including all inputs and outputs for the neural network, and students are surveyed regarding their experience. Results suggest that students feel supported while working with the Companion and promising potential for using a neural network with an embedded companion in the future. Challenges in developing an embedded companion are discussed, as well as opportunities for future work.
ContributorsDay, Melissa (Author) / Gonzalez-Sanchez, Javier (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Ajay (Committee member) / Mehlhase, Alexandra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Semantic web is the web of data that provides a common framework and technologies for sharing and reusing data in various applications. In semantic web terminology, linked data is the term used to describe a method of exposing and connecting data on the web from different sources. The purpose of linked data and semantic web is to publish data in an open and standard format and to link this data with existing data on the Linked Open Data Cloud. The goal of this thesis to come up with a semantic framework for integrating and publishing linked data on the web. Traditionally integrating data from multiple sources usually involves an Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) framework to generate datasets for analytics and visualization. The thesis proposes introducing a semantic component in the ETL framework to semi-automate the generation and publishing of linked data. In this thesis, various existing ETL tools and data integration techniques have been analyzed and deficiencies have been identified. This thesis proposes a set of requirements for the semantic ETL framework by conducting a manual process to integrate data from various sources such as weather, holidays, airports, flight arrival, departure and delays. The research questions that are addressed are: (i) to what extent can the integration, generation, and publishing of linked data to the cloud using a semantic ETL framework be automated; (ii) does use of semantic technologies produce a richer data model and integrated data. Details of the methodology, data collection, and application that uses the linked data generated are presented. Evaluation is done by comparing traditional data integration approach with semantic ETL approach in terms of effort involved in integration, data model generated and querying the data generated.
ContributorsPadki, Aparna (Author) / Bansal, Srividya (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Ajay (Committee member) / Lindquist, Timothy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The concept of Linked Data is gaining widespread popularity and importance. The method of publishing and linking structured data on the web is called Linked Data. Emergence of Linked Data has made it possible to make sense of huge data, which is scattered all over the web, and link multiple heterogeneous sources. This leads to the challenge of maintaining the quality of Linked Data, i.e., ensuring outdated data is removed and new data is included. The focus of this thesis is devising strategies to effectively integrate data from multiple sources, publish it as Linked Data, and maintain the quality of Linked Data. The domain used in the study is online education. With so many online courses offered by Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), it is becoming increasingly difficult for an end user to gauge which course best fits his/her needs.
Users are spoilt for choices. It would be very helpful for them to make a choice if there is a single place where they can visually compare the offerings of various MOOC providers for the course they are interested in. Previous work has been done in this area through the MOOCLink project that involved integrating data from Coursera, EdX, and Udacity and generation of linked data, i.e. Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples.
The research objective of this thesis is to determine a methodology by which the quality
of data available through the MOOCLink application is maintained, as there are lots of new courses being constantly added and old courses being removed by data providers. This thesis presents the integration of data from various MOOC providers and algorithms for incrementally updating linked data to maintain their quality and compare it against a naïve approach in order to constantly keep the users engaged with up-to-date data. A master threshold value was determined through experiments and analysis that quantifies one algorithm being better than the other in terms of time efficiency. An evaluation of the tool shows the effectiveness of the algorithms presented in this thesis.
Users are spoilt for choices. It would be very helpful for them to make a choice if there is a single place where they can visually compare the offerings of various MOOC providers for the course they are interested in. Previous work has been done in this area through the MOOCLink project that involved integrating data from Coursera, EdX, and Udacity and generation of linked data, i.e. Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples.
The research objective of this thesis is to determine a methodology by which the quality
of data available through the MOOCLink application is maintained, as there are lots of new courses being constantly added and old courses being removed by data providers. This thesis presents the integration of data from various MOOC providers and algorithms for incrementally updating linked data to maintain their quality and compare it against a naïve approach in order to constantly keep the users engaged with up-to-date data. A master threshold value was determined through experiments and analysis that quantifies one algorithm being better than the other in terms of time efficiency. An evaluation of the tool shows the effectiveness of the algorithms presented in this thesis.
ContributorsDhekne, Chinmay (Author) / Bansal, Srividya (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Ajay (Committee member) / Sohoni, Sohum (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
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.
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
Description
Smart home assistants are becoming a norm due to their ease-of-use. They employ spoken language as an interface, facilitating easy interaction with their users. Even with their obvious advantages, natural-language based interfaces are not prevalent outside the domain of home assistants. It is hard to adopt them for computer-controlled systems due to the numerous complexities involved with their implementation in varying fields. The main challenge is the grounding of natural language base terms into the underlying system's primitives. The existing systems that do use natural language interfaces are specific to one problem domain only.
In this thesis, a domain-agnostic framework that creates natural language interfaces for computer-controlled systems has been developed by making the mapping between the language constructs and the system primitives customizable. The framework employs ontologies built using OWL (Web Ontology Language) for knowledge representation purposes and machine learning models for language processing tasks. It has been evaluated within a simulation environment consisting of objects and a robot. This environment has been deployed as a web application, providing anonymous user testing for evaluation, and generating training data for machine learning components. Performance evaluation has been done on metrics such as time taken for a task or the number of instructions given by the user to the robot to accomplish a task. Additionally, the framework has been used to create a natural language interface for a database system to demonstrate its domain independence.
In this thesis, a domain-agnostic framework that creates natural language interfaces for computer-controlled systems has been developed by making the mapping between the language constructs and the system primitives customizable. The framework employs ontologies built using OWL (Web Ontology Language) for knowledge representation purposes and machine learning models for language processing tasks. It has been evaluated within a simulation environment consisting of objects and a robot. This environment has been deployed as a web application, providing anonymous user testing for evaluation, and generating training data for machine learning components. Performance evaluation has been done on metrics such as time taken for a task or the number of instructions given by the user to the robot to accomplish a task. Additionally, the framework has been used to create a natural language interface for a database system to demonstrate its domain independence.
ContributorsTiwari, Sarthak (Author) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Mehlhase, Alexandra (Committee member) / Acuna, Ruben (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
TolTEC is a three-color millimeter wavelength camera currently being developed for the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) in Mexico. Synthesizing data from previous astronomy cameras as well as knowledge of atmospheric physics, I have developed a simulation of the data collection of TolTEC on the LMT. The simulation was built off smaller sub-projects that informed the development with an understanding of the detector array, the time streams for astronomical mapping, and the science behind Lumped Element Kinetic Inductance Detectors (LEKIDs). Additionally, key aspects of software development processes were integrated into the scientific development process to streamline collaboration across multiple universities and plan for integration on the servers at LMT. The work I have done benefits the data reduction pipeline team by enabling them to efficiently develop their software and test it on simulated data.
ContributorsHorton, Paul (Author) / Mauskopf, Philip (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Sandy, Douglas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Serious or educational games have been a subject of research for a long time. They usually have game mechanics, game content, and content assessment all tied together to make a specialized game intended to impart learning of the associated content to its players. While this approach is good for developing games for teaching highly specific topics, it consumes a lot of time and money. Being able to re-use the same mechanics and assessment for creating games that teach different contents would lead to a lot of savings in terms of time and money. The Content Agnostic Game Engineering (CAGE) Architecture mitigates the problem by disengaging the content from game mechanics. Moreover, the content assessment in games is often quite explicit in the way that it disturbs the flow of the players and thus hampers the learning process, as it is not integrated into the game flow. Stealth assessment helps to alleviate this problem by keeping the player engagement intact while assessing them at the same time. Integrating stealth assessment into the CAGE framework in a content-agnostic way will increase its usability and further decrease in game and assessment development time and cost. This research presents an evaluation of the learning outcomes in content-agnostic game-based assessment developed using the CAGE framework.
ContributorsVerma, Vipin (Author) / Craig, Scotty D (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Amresh, Ashish (Committee member) / Baron, Tyler (Committee member) / Levy, Roy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021