Filtering by
- Creators: Balasooriya, Janaka
- Creators: Department of Finance
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
The market for searching for food online is exploding. According to one expert at Google, “there are over 1 billion restaurant searches on Google every month” (Kelso, 2020). To capture this market and ride the general digital trend of internet personalization (as evidenced by Google search results, ads, YouTube and social media algorithms, etc), we created Munch to be an algorithm meant to help people find food they’ll love. <br/>Munch offers the ability to search for food by restaurant or even as specific as a menu item (ex: search for the best Pad Thai). The best part? It is customized to your preferences based on a quiz you take when you open the app and from that point continuously learns from your behavior.<br/>This thesis documents the journey of the team who founded Munch, what progress we made and the reasoning behind our decisions, where this idea fits in a competitive marketplace, how much it could be worth, branding, and our recommendations for a successful app in the future.
Music streaming services have affected the music industry from both a financial and legal standpoint. Their current business model affects stakeholders such as artists, users, and investors. These services have been scrutinized recently for their imperfect royalty distribution model. Covid-19 has made these discussions even more relevant as touring income has come to a halt for musicians and the live entertainment industry. <br/>Under the current per-stream model, it is becoming exceedingly hard for artists to make a living off of streams. This forces artists to tour heavily as well as cut corners to create what is essentially “disposable art”. Rapidly releasing multiple projects a year has become the norm for many modern artists. This paper will examine the licensing framework, royalty payout issues, and propose a solution.
Song Sift is an application built using Angular that allows users to filter and sort their song library to create specific playlists using the Spotify Web API. Utilizing the audio feature data that Spotify attaches to every song in their library, users can filter their downloaded Spotify songs based on four main attributes: (1) energy (how energetic a song sounds), (2) danceability (how danceable a song is), (3) valence (how happy a song sounds), and (4) loudness (average volume of a song). Once the user has created a playlist that fits their desired genre, he/she can easily export it to their Spotify account with the click of a button.
Through Founders Lab, our group designed an innovative new way for people to track their health and wellness. We created an app that uses a 4-part circle system where users track everyday activity in the following areas: diet, exercise, development, and mental wellness. Users form small groups with friends and family members to provide support to one another. Through tracking their daily activities, users can earn redeemable tokens for relevant discounts with partnership brands. The app also hosts a variety of ways for users to be recognized for their healthy routines, such as challenge trophies, activity history, and other social features. Overall, Circle Up aims to improve the daily routines of individuals to propel them into a healthier lifestyle without the pressure of a curated social media feed.
I created a flash unit on American Ethnic Literature and delivered it in a high school classroom. The purpose was to introduce students to ethnic literature and to highlight the value of ethnic literature as a form of cultural agency and an authentic record of cultural history. I did research on the importance of ethnic literature, why it has been absent from the standard curriculum, and why it should be a part of the standard curriculum. Because of ethnic literature's importance and absence, I constructed the unit for secondary education and created a micro-unit on ethnic fiction and a micro-unit on ethnic poetry. I delivered the micro-unit on ethnic fiction at Metro Tech High School, gathered data, and reflected on the outcomes. Based on the outcomes, I revised the unit for future teaching and application.