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- Creators: Arizona State University
- Creators: Electrical Engineering Program
Description
Online programming communities are widely used by programmers for troubleshooting or various problem solving tasks. Large and ever increasing volume of posts on these communities demands more efforts to read and comprehend thus making it harder to find relevant information. In my thesis; I designed and studied an alternate approach by using interactive network visualization to represent relevant search results for online programming discussion forums.
I conducted user study to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach. Results show that users were able to identify relevant information more precisely via visual interface as compared to traditional list based approach. Network visualization demonstrated effective search-result navigation support to facilitate user’s tasks and improved query quality for successive queries. Subjective evaluation also showed that visualizing search results conveys more semantic information in efficient manner and makes searching more effective.
I conducted user study to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach. Results show that users were able to identify relevant information more precisely via visual interface as compared to traditional list based approach. Network visualization demonstrated effective search-result navigation support to facilitate user’s tasks and improved query quality for successive queries. Subjective evaluation also showed that visualizing search results conveys more semantic information in efficient manner and makes searching more effective.
ContributorsMehta, Vishal Vimal (Author) / Hsiao, Ihan (Thesis advisor) / Walker, Erin (Committee member) / Sarwat, Mohamed (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Correctional officers are increasingly being trained in evidence-based practices and the willingness of officers to implement what they have learned is crucial for organizational reform. Most of the literature in this area has examined officer attitudes about rehabilitation and punitiveness. Left out are additional characteristics, such as self-control, that may affect an officer’s receptivity to learn and implement new techniques. The present study examines officer receptiveness to motivational interviewing using 280 surveys administered to correctional officers tasked with both delivering and supervising program delivery to inmates within the Arizona Department of Corrections. Three broad questions are asked: 1) Are officer attitudes about punishment associated with receptivity toward implementing rehabilitative techniques? 2) Are officer levels of self-control associated with receptivity toward implementing rehabilitative techniques? and 3) Is the association between officer attitudes toward punishment and receptivity toward implementing rehabilitation techniques moderated by officer self-control? The results suggest that punitiveness and self-control both have statistically significant direct effects on correctional officer receptivity to training and that self-control does not moderate the relationship between punitiveness and receptivity to training. However, these findings could be due to limitations in the present study’s sampling and statistical methods. Policy implications and future research are discussed.
ContributorsSmith, Wesley Thomas (Author) / Wright, Kevin A. (Thesis advisor) / Young, Jacob T.N. (Committee member) / Telep, Cody W. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This action research study took a mixed methods approach to examine junior and senior student engagement at the honors college in the downtown campus of Arizona State University. The purpose of the study was to better understand the lack of engagement with junior and senior students within the college. The study sought to examine the usage of year specific programs and the possibility of influence on the target populations’ engagement. In addition, the study focused on understanding the usage of such programs and its ability to influence student perception of coping with transitions. The growth of honors education and the value of student engagement lead the study. Life Hacks is a series of programs designed to engage the target population by addressing an anticipated transition. This study focused on exploring junior and senior honors student engagement and the utilization of programs to address the student’s ability to cope with transitions. The program was divided into six workshops that spanned the semester and were taught by college partners who were deemed a resource on the subject matter. Two surveys were deployed: one at the beginning of the semester and the other at the end of the semester. Participants were selected based on their academic status as a junior or senior within the honors college on campus and their age rage. All participants traditionally matriculated from high school and were between the ages of 18-25. Two focus groups, with a total of eight participants (4 juniors and 4 seniors), were conducted at the end of the semester to gather qualitative data. Findings indicated that participants allowed their emotions to influence their ability to cope with transitions. Relationships with peers and staff were important to decision making processes and network building for junior and senior participants. Students within the study set expectations for the college and themselves that influence how they relate to college and their relation to adulthood. The implications of practice that resulted from the study involved improving student access to information and assisting students with understanding the need for the resource and how to apply it to their current and future challenges.
ContributorsGatewood, Kira Kevanah (Author) / Harris, Lauren (Thesis advisor) / Aska, Cassandra (Committee member) / Weatherly, Kimberly (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
The main objective of this thesis is to describe and analyze Clippr, an ASU startup founded by four students: Adam Lynch, Eric Gottfried, Ty Sivley, and Thomas Carpaneto. This paper will describe the formation of Clippr as a business, analyze the work and reasoning for dissolving the business, and suggest three pivots that could increase the chances of success for the future of Clippr. These three pivots are: mini salons, a concierge service, and an online resource. The idea for Clippr came from Sam, the team's friend's experience within the cosmetology industry. Sam graduated from cosmetology school in Phoenix and started his career as an assistant, which is the most common entry level position within the industry. Assistants do not get to work with clients and primarily do chores around the salon so he was not gaining any valuable experience. Eventually Sam found a position at a salon in Flagstaff. Unfortunately, he was not scheduled enough hours to pay his rent which forced him to travel back to Phoenix to cut his friend's and family's hair to make ends meet. Sam is not alone experiencing these issues within the industry, they are a common trend throughout the cosmetology field. It was found that there is a clear problem that affects every stylist: they struggle to reap the benefits of their self-employment. Most stylists become independent contractors where they are constrained by the salon's management. They are generally forced to work during the salon's hours of operations, promote specific products, adhere to a dress code, and forfeit their clients information. On the other hand, freelance workers outside of salons do enjoy greater freedoms within their work but with significant hurdles to overcome. They have a much harder time building a client base and face prohibitive start-up costs that make it harder to break into the industry.
ContributorsGottfried, Eric (Co-author) / Lynch, Adam (Co-author) / Sebold, Brent (Thesis director) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-12
Description
With the advent of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) educators have the opportunity to collect data from students and use it to derive insightful information about the students. Specifically, for programming based courses the ability to identify the specific areas or topics that need more attention from the students can be of immense help. But the majority of traditional, non-virtual classes lack the ability to uncover such information that can serve as a feedback to the effectiveness of teaching. In majority of the schools paper exams and assignments provide the only form of assessment to measure the success of the students in achieving the course objectives. The overall grade obtained in paper exams and assignments need not present a complete picture of a student’s strengths and weaknesses. In part, this can be addressed by incorporating research-based technology into the classrooms to obtain real-time updates on students' progress. But introducing technology to provide real-time, class-wide engagement involves a considerable investment both academically and financially. This prevents the adoption of such technology thereby preventing the ideal, technology-enabled classrooms. With increasing class sizes, it is becoming impossible for teachers to keep a persistent track of their students progress and to provide personalized feedback. What if we can we provide technology support without adding more burden to the existing pedagogical approach? How can we enable semantic enrichment of exams that can translate to students' understanding of the topics taught in the class? Can we provide feedback to students that goes beyond only numbers and reveal areas that need their focus. In this research I focus on bringing the capability of conducting insightful analysis to paper exams with a less intrusive learning analytics approach that taps into the generic classrooms with minimum technology introduction. Specifically, the work focuses on automatic indexing of programming exam questions with ontological semantics. The thesis also focuses on designing and evaluating a novel semantic visual analytics suite for in-depth course monitoring. By visualizing the semantic information to illustrate the areas that need a student’s focus and enable teachers to visualize class level progress, the system provides a richer feedback to both sides for improvement.
ContributorsPandhalkudi Govindarajan, Sesha Kumar (Author) / Hsiao, I-Han (Thesis advisor) / Nelson, Brian (Committee member) / Walker, Erin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Online discussion forums have become an integral part of education and are large repositories of valuable information. They facilitate exploratory learning by allowing users to review and respond to the work of others and approach learning in diverse ways. This research investigates the different comment semantic features and the effect they have on the quality of a post in a large-scale discussion forum. We survey the relevant literature and employ the key content quality identification features. We then construct comment semantics features and build several regression models to explore the value of comment semantics dynamics. The results reconfirm the usefulness of several essential quality predictors, including time, reputation, length, and editorship. We also found that comment semantics are valuable to shape the answer quality. Specifically, the diversity of comments significantly contributes to the answer quality. In addition, when searching for good quality answers, it is important to look for global semantics dynamics (diversity), rather than observe local differences (disputable content). Finally, the presence of comments shepherd the community to revise the posts by attracting attentions to the posts and eventually facilitate the editing process.
ContributorsAggarwal, Adithya (Author) / Hsiao, Ihan (Thesis advisor) / Lopez, Claudia (Committee member) / Walker, Erin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Computational thinking, the fundamental way of thinking in computer science, including information sourcing and problem solving behind programming, is considered vital to children who live in a digital era. Most of current educational games designed to teach children about coding either rely on external curricular materials or are too complicated to work well with young children. In this thesis project, Guardy, an iOS tower defense game, was developed to help children over 8 years old learn about and practice using basic concepts in programming. The game is built with the SpriteKit, a graphics rendering and animation infrastructure in Apple’s integrated development environment Xcode. It simplifies switching among different game scenes and animating game sprites in the development. In a typical game, a sequence of operations is arranged by players to destroy incoming enemy minions. Basic coding concepts like looping, sequencing, conditionals, and classification are integrated in different levels. In later levels, players are required to type in commands and put them in an order to keep playing the game. To reduce the difficulty of the usability testing, a method combining questionnaires and observation was conducted with two groups of college students who either have no programming experience or are familiar with coding. The results show that Guardy has the potential to help children learn programming and practice computational thinking.
ContributorsWang, Xiaoxiao (Author) / Nelson, Brian C. (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Walker, Erin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
This creative project is an extension of the work being done as part of Senior Design in<br/>developing the See-Through Car Pillar, a system designed to render the forward car pillars in a car<br/>invisible to the driver so they can have an unobstructed view utilizing displays, sensors, and a<br/>computer. The first half of the paper provides the motivation, design and progress of the project, <br/>while the latter half provides a literature survey on current automobile trends, the viability of the<br/>See-Through Car Pillar as a product in the market through case studies, and alternative designs and <br/>technologies that also might address the problem statement.
ContributorsRoy, Delwyn J (Author) / Thornton, Trevor (Thesis director) / Kozicki, Michael (Committee member) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
Lossy compression is a form of compression that slightly degrades a signal in ways that are ideally not detectable to the human ear. This is opposite to lossless compression, in which the sample is not degraded at all. While lossless compression may seem like the best option, lossy compression, which is used in most audio and video, reduces transmission time and results in much smaller file sizes. However, this compression can affect quality if it goes too far. The more compression there is on a waveform, the more degradation there is, and once a file is lossy compressed, this process is not reversible. This project will observe the degradation of an audio signal after the application of Singular Value Decomposition compression, a lossy compression that eliminates singular values from a signal’s matrix.
ContributorsHirte, Amanda (Author) / Kosut, Oliver (Thesis director) / Bliss, Daniel (Committee member) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
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 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.
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