Matching Items (4)
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- All Subjects: Amazon Web Services
- All Subjects: web design
- Creators: Balasooriya, Janaka
Description
A common challenge faced by students is that they often have questions about course material that they cannot ask during lecture time. There are many ways for students to have these questions answered, such as office hours and online discussion boards. However, office hours may be at inconvenient times or locations, and online discussion boards are difficult to navigate and may be inactive. The purpose of this project was to create an Alexa skill that allows users to ask their Alexa-equipped device a question concerning their course material and to receive an answer retrieved from discussion board data. User questions are mapped to discussion board posts by use of the cosine similarity algorithm. In this algorithm, posts from the discussion board and the user’s question are converted into mathematical vectors, with each term in the vector corresponding to a word. The values of these terms are computed based on the word’s frequency within the vector’s corresponding document, the frequency of that word within all the documents, and the length of the document. After the question and candidate posts are converted into vectors, the algorithm determines the post most similar to the user’s question by computing the angle between the vectors. With the most similar discussion board post determined, the user receives the replies to the post, if any, as their answer. Users are able to indicate to their Alexa device whether they were satisfied by the answer, and if they were unsatisfied then they are given the opportunity to either rephrase their question or to have the question sent to a database of unanswered questions. The professor can view and answer the questions in this database on a website hosted by use of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service. The Alexa skill does well at answering questions that have already been asked in the discussion board. However, the skill depends heavily on the user’s word choice. Two questions that are semantically identical but different in phrasing are often given different answers. This is because the cosine algorithm measures similarity on the basis of word overlap, not semantic meaning, and thus the application never truly “understands” what type of answer the user desires. Improving the performance of this Alexa skill will require a more advanced question answering algorithm, but the limitations of Amazon Web Services as a development platform make implementing such an algorithm difficult. Nevertheless, this project has created the basis of a question answering Alexa skill by demonstrating a feasible way that the resources offered by Amazon can be utilized in order to build such an application.
ContributorsBaker, Matthew Elias (Author) / Chen, Yinong (Thesis director) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Committee member) / Historical, Philosophical & Religious Studies (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
If friends have not read the same books as us, our options to share our thoughts about a book are limited mainly to book clubs, which limit control over which books are read, and online posts, which offer no face-to-face contact for a discussion. BookMeetups.com allows readers to find fellow readers of a book in their area and to set up an in-person meeting to exchange their thoughts on the book. This website was created with no prior coding experience using HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript.
ContributorsKnudsen, Matthew Jordan (Author) / Ahmad, Altaf (Thesis director) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Committee member) / Dong, Su (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / School of Accountancy (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
It is important for organizations and businesses to have some kind of online presence, as there are enormous benefits, including utilizing the power of web languages to provide services for people. However, creating a website is difficult, and often expensive. While successful businesses can use their profits to develop a costly website, organizations are not so lucky and can't afford to pay large amounts of money for theirs. Thus, the goal of this project was to provide a complete website to the Card Trick Quilters organization found in Show Low, Arizona. The website serves as both a learning experience, to see exactly what it takes to construct a website from the ground up, and a service project that will provide the Card Trick Quilters with a website that performs various services for its members, with functionality that is completely unique to the Arizona quilting community at large. The creation of the website required learning several different skills in regards to web design, such as databases, scripting languages, and even elements of graphic design. The uniqueness of the website comes from the creation of an online submission form for the annual quilt show hosted by the quilters, and an email reminder system where members of the community can submit their addresses and receive emails when there is an upcoming meeting. While there will no doubt be changes and improvements to the website in the future, the website is currently live and ready for the community to use.
ContributorsSchwarting, Jessa Lynn (Author) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Thesis director) / Nakamura, Mutsumi (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering (Contributor)
Created2016-05
Description
The aim of this project was to provide college applicants with the ability to apply using a video instead of an essay. These videos are analyzed automatically and their scripts are taken and submitted with the application. This was implemented through the use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and their S3 buckets along with their speech to text transcription service. This type of application process can give admissions teams the opportunity to get to know who will potentially be attending their university and allows the applicants to express themselves to admissions teams in a new and unique way.
ContributorsStephan, Meagan (Co-author) / Pratt, Devan (Co-author) / Chen, Yinong (Thesis director) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-12