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Description
Gathering and managing software requirements, known as Requirement Engineering (RE), is a significant and basic step during the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Any error or defect during the RE step will propagate to further steps of SDLC and resolving it will be more costly than any defect in other

Gathering and managing software requirements, known as Requirement Engineering (RE), is a significant and basic step during the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Any error or defect during the RE step will propagate to further steps of SDLC and resolving it will be more costly than any defect in other steps. In order to produce better quality software, the requirements have to be free of any defects. Verification and Validation (V&V;) of requirements are performed to improve their quality, by performing the V&V; process on the Software Requirement Specification (SRS) document. V&V; of the software requirements focused to a specific domain helps in improving quality. A large database of software requirements from software projects of different domains is created. Software requirements from commercial applications are focus of this project; other domains embedded, mobile, E-commerce, etc. can be the focus of future efforts. The V&V; is done to inspect the requirements and improve the quality. Inspections are done to detect defects in the requirements and three approaches for inspection of software requirements are discussed; ad-hoc techniques, checklists, and scenario-based techniques. A more systematic domain-specific technique is presented for performing V&V; of requirements.
ContributorsChughtai, Rehman (Author) / Ghazarian, Arbi (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Ajay (Committee member) / Millard, Bruce (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Polar ice masses can be valuable indicators of trends in global climate. In an effort to better understand the dynamics of Arctic ice, this project analyzes sea ice concentration anomaly data collected over gridded regions (cells) and builds graphs based upon high correlations between cells. These graphs offer the opportunity

Polar ice masses can be valuable indicators of trends in global climate. In an effort to better understand the dynamics of Arctic ice, this project analyzes sea ice concentration anomaly data collected over gridded regions (cells) and builds graphs based upon high correlations between cells. These graphs offer the opportunity to use metrics such as clustering coefficients and connected components to isolate representative trends in ice masses. Based upon this analysis, the structure of sea ice graphs differs at a statistically significant level from random graphs, and several regions show erratically decreasing trends in sea ice concentration.
ContributorsWallace-Patterson, Chloe Rae (Author) / Syrotiuk, Violet (Thesis director) / Colbourn, Charles (Committee member) / Montgomery, Douglas (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2013-05
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Description
The widespread use of statistical analysis in sports-particularly Baseball- has made it increasingly necessary for small and mid-market teams to find ways to maintain their analytical advantages over large market clubs. In baseball, an opportunity for exists for teams with limited financial resources to sign players under team control to

The widespread use of statistical analysis in sports-particularly Baseball- has made it increasingly necessary for small and mid-market teams to find ways to maintain their analytical advantages over large market clubs. In baseball, an opportunity for exists for teams with limited financial resources to sign players under team control to long-term contracts before other teams can bid for their services in free agency. If small and mid-market clubs can successfully identify talented players early, clubs can save money, achieve cost certainty and remain competitive for longer periods of time. These deals are also advantageous to players since they receive job security and greater financial dividends earlier in their career. The objective of this paper is to develop a regression-based predictive model that teams can use to forecast the performance of young baseball players with limited Major League experience. There were several tasks conducted to achieve this goal: (1) Data was obtained from Major League Baseball and Lahman's Baseball Database and sorted using Excel macros for easier analysis. (2) Players were separated into three positional groups depending on similar fielding requirements and offensive profiles: Group I was comprised of first and third basemen, Group II contains second basemen, shortstops, and center fielders and Group III contains left and right fielders. (3) Based on the context of baseball and the nature of offensive performance metrics, only players who achieve greater than 200 plate appearances within the first two years of their major league debut are included in this analysis. (4) The statistical software package JMP was used to create regression models of each group and analyze the residuals for any irregularities or normality violations. Once the models were developed, slight adjustments were made to improve the accuracy of the forecasts and identify opportunities for future work. It was discovered that Group I and Group III were the easiest player groupings to forecast while Group II required several attempts to improve the model.
ContributorsJack, Nathan Scott (Author) / Shunk, Dan (Thesis director) / Montgomery, Douglas (Committee member) / Borror, Connie (Committee member) / Industrial, Systems (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2013-05
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Description
Social media is used by people every day to discuss the nuances of their lives. Major League Baseball (MLB) is a popular sport in the United States, and as such has generated a great deal of activity on Twitter. As fantasy baseball continues to grow in popularity, so does the

Social media is used by people every day to discuss the nuances of their lives. Major League Baseball (MLB) is a popular sport in the United States, and as such has generated a great deal of activity on Twitter. As fantasy baseball continues to grow in popularity, so does the research into better algorithms for picking players. Most of the research done in this area focuses on improving the prediction of a player's individual performance. However, the crowd-sourcing power afforded by social media may enable more informed predictions about players' performances. Players are chosen by popularity and personal preferences by most amateur gamblers. While some of these trends (particularly the long-term ones) are captured by ranking systems, this research was focused on predicting the daily spikes in popularity (and therefore price or draft order) by comparing the number of mentions that the player received on Twitter compared to their previous mentions. In doing so, it was demonstrated that improved fantasy baseball predictions can be made through leveraging social media data.
ContributorsRuskin, Lewis John (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis director) / Montgomery, Douglas (Committee member) / Morstatter, Fred (Committee member) / Industrial, Systems (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
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Description
One persisting problem in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is the issue of student dropout from these courses. The prediction of student dropout from MOOC courses can identify the factors responsible for such an event and it can further initiate intervention before such an event to increase student success in

One persisting problem in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is the issue of student dropout from these courses. The prediction of student dropout from MOOC courses can identify the factors responsible for such an event and it can further initiate intervention before such an event to increase student success in MOOC. There are different approaches and various features available for the prediction of student’s dropout in MOOC courses.In this research, the data derived from the self-paced math course ‘College Algebra and Problem Solving’ offered on the MOOC platform Open edX offered by Arizona State University (ASU) from 2016 to 2020 was considered. This research aims to predict the dropout of students from a MOOC course given a set of features engineered from the learning of students in a day. Machine Learning (ML) model used is Random Forest (RF) and this model is evaluated using the validation metrics like accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score, Area Under the Curve (AUC), Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve. The average rate of student learning progress was found to have more impact than other features. The model developed can predict the dropout or continuation of students on any given day in the MOOC course with an accuracy of 87.5%, AUC of 94.5%, precision of 88%, recall of 87.5%, and F1-score of 87.5% respectively. The contributing features and interactions were explained using Shapely values for the prediction of the model. The features engineered in this research are predictive of student dropout and could be used for similar courses to predict student dropout from the course. This model can also help in making interventions at a critical time to help students succeed in this MOOC course.
ContributorsDominic Ravichandran, Sheran Dass (Author) / Gary, Kevin (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Ajay (Committee member) / Cunningham, James (Committee member) / Sannier, Adrian (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
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Description
A significant proportion of medical errors exist in crucial medical information, and most stem from misinterpreting non-standardized clinical notes. Clinical Skills exam offered by the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) was put in place to certify patient note-taking skills before medical students joined professional practices, offering the first line

A significant proportion of medical errors exist in crucial medical information, and most stem from misinterpreting non-standardized clinical notes. Clinical Skills exam offered by the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) was put in place to certify patient note-taking skills before medical students joined professional practices, offering the first line of defense in protecting patients from medical errors. Nonetheless, the exams were discontinued in 2021 following high costs and resource usage in scoring the exams. This thesis compares four transformer-based models, namely BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) Base Uncased, Emilyalsentzer Bio_ClinicalBERT, RoBERTa (Robustly Optimized BERT Pre-Training Approach), and DeBERTa (Decoding-enhanced BERT with disentangled attention), with the goal to map free text in patient notes to clinical concepts present in the exam rubric. The impact of context-specific embeddings on BERT was also studied to determine the need for a clinical BERT in Clinical Skills exam. This thesis proposes the use of DeBERTa as a backbone model in patient note scoring for the USMLE Clinical Skills exam after comparing it with three other transformer models. Disentangled attention and enhanced mask decoder integrated into DeBERTa were credited for the high performance of DeBERTa as compared to the other models. Besides, the effect of meta pseudo labeling was also investigated in this thesis, which in turn, further enhanced DeBERTa’s performance.
ContributorsGanesh, Jay (Author) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Mehlhase, Alexandra (Committee member) / Findler, Michael (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
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Description
Open Information Extraction (OIE) is a subset of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that constitutes the processing of natural language into structured and machine-readable data. This thesis uses data in Resource Description Framework (RDF) triple format that comprises of a subject, predicate, and object. The extraction of RDF triples from

Open Information Extraction (OIE) is a subset of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that constitutes the processing of natural language into structured and machine-readable data. This thesis uses data in Resource Description Framework (RDF) triple format that comprises of a subject, predicate, and object. The extraction of RDF triples from natural language is an essential step towards importing data into web ontologies as part of the linked open data cloud on the Semantic web. There have been a number of related techniques for extraction of triples from plain natural language text including but not limited to ClausIE, OLLIE, Reverb, and DeepEx. This proposed study aims to reduce the dependency on conventional machine learning models since they require training datasets, and the models are not easily customizable or explainable. By leveraging a context-free grammar (CFG) based model, this thesis aims to address some of these issues while minimizing the trade-offs on performance and accuracy. Furthermore, a deep-dive is conducted to analyze the strengths and limitations of the proposed approach.
ContributorsSingh, Varun (Author) / Bansal, Srividya (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Ajay (Committee member) / Mehlhase, Alexandra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
In 2015, a new way to track baseball games was introduced to MLB, marking the beginning of the Statcast Revolution. This new way to track the game brought about a number of new statistics, including the use of expected statistics. Expected statistics provide an estimate of what a player’s statistics

In 2015, a new way to track baseball games was introduced to MLB, marking the beginning of the Statcast Revolution. This new way to track the game brought about a number of new statistics, including the use of expected statistics. Expected statistics provide an estimate of what a player’s statistics should be on average with their same actions. This will be explored more in the upcoming paper. While expected statistics are not intended to predict the future performance of players, I theorized that there may be some relation, particularly on younger players. There is not any research on this topic yet, and if there does exist a correlation between expected statistics and future performance, it would allow teams to have a new way to predict data on their players. Research to find a correlation between the two was carried out by taking predictive accuracies of expected batting average and slugging of 12 MLB players throughout their rookie to 8th year seasons and combining them together to find an interval in which I could be confident the correlation lay. Overall, I found that I could not be certain that there was a correlation between the predictive accuracy of expected statistics and the length of time a player has played in MLB. While this conclusion does not offer any insights of how to better predict a player’s future performance, the methodology and findings still present opportunities to gain a better understanding of the predictive measures of expected statistics.
ContributorsEdmiston, Alexander (Author) / Pavlic, Theodore (Thesis director) / Montgomery, Douglas (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Industrial, Systems & Operations Engineering Prgm (Contributor)
Created2024-05
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Description
SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) is a problem that has existed for a long time in robotics and autonomous navigation. The objective of SLAM is for a robot to simultaneously figure out its position in space and map its environment. SLAM is especially useful and mandatory for robots that want

SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) is a problem that has existed for a long time in robotics and autonomous navigation. The objective of SLAM is for a robot to simultaneously figure out its position in space and map its environment. SLAM is especially useful and mandatory for robots that want to navigate autonomously. The description might make it seem like a chicken and egg problem, but numerous methods have been proposed to tackle SLAM. Before the rise in the popularity of deep learning and AI (Artificial Intelligence), most existing algorithms involved traditional hard-coded algorithms that would receive and process sensor information and convert it into some solvable sensor-agnostic problem. The challenge for these sorts of methods is having to tackle dynamic environments. The more variety in the environment, the poorer the results. Also due to the increase in computational power and the capability of deep learning-based image processing, visual SLAM has become extremely viable and maybe even preferable to traditional SLAM algorithms. In this research, a deep learning-based solution to the SLAM problem is proposed, specifically monocular visual SLAM which is solving the problem of SLAM purely with a singular camera as the input, and the model is tested on the KITTI (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology & Toyota Technological Institute) odometry dataset.
ContributorsRupaakula, Krishna Sandeep (Author) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Baron, Tyler (Committee member) / Acuna, Ruben (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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Description
Since the early 2000s the Rubik’s Cube has seen growing usage at speedsolving competitions and as an effective tool to teach Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) topics at hundreds of schools and universities across the world. Recently, cube manufacturers have begun embedding sensors to enable digital face tracking. The live

Since the early 2000s the Rubik’s Cube has seen growing usage at speedsolving competitions and as an effective tool to teach Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) topics at hundreds of schools and universities across the world. Recently, cube manufacturers have begun embedding sensors to enable digital face tracking. The live feedback from these so called “smartcubes” enables a new wave of immersive solution tutorials and interactive educational games using the cube as a controller. Existing smartcube software has several limitations. Manufacturers’ applications support only a narrow set of puzzle form factors and application platforms, fragmenting the ecosystem. Most apps require an active internet connection for key features, limiting where users can practice with a smartcube. Finally, existing applications focus on a single 3x3x3connection, losing opportunities afforded by new form factors. This research demonstrates an open-source smartcube application which mitigates these limitations. Particular attention is given to creating an Application Programming Interface (API) for smartcube communication and building representative solve analysis tools. These innovations have included successful negotiations to re-license existing open-source Rubik’sCube software projects to support deployment on multiple platforms, particularly iOS. The resulting application supports smartcubes from three manufacturers, runs on two platforms (Android and iOS), functions entirely offline after an initial download of remote assets, demonstrates concurrent connections with up to six smartcubes, and supports all current and anticipated smartcube form factors. These foundational elements can accelerate future efforts to build smartcube applications, including automated performance feedback systems and personalized gamification of learning experiences. Such advances will hopefully enhance the Rubik’s Cube’s value both as a competitive toy and as a pedagogical tool in educational institutions worldwide.
ContributorsHale, Joseph (Author) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Heinrichs, Robert (Committee member) / Gary, Kevin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023