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Despite the wealth of folk music traditions in Portugal and the importance of the clarinet in the music of bandas filarmonicas, it is uncommon to find works featuring the clarinet using Portuguese folk music elements. In the interest of expanding this type of repertoire, three new works were commissioned from

Despite the wealth of folk music traditions in Portugal and the importance of the clarinet in the music of bandas filarmonicas, it is uncommon to find works featuring the clarinet using Portuguese folk music elements. In the interest of expanding this type of repertoire, three new works were commissioned from three different composers. The resulting works are Seres Imaginarios 3 by Luis Cardoso; Delirio Barroco by Tiago Derrica; and Memória by Pedro Faria Gomes. In an effort to submit these new works for inclusion into mainstream performance literature, the author has recorded these works on compact disc. This document includes interview transcripts with each composer, providing first-person discussion of each composition, as well as detailed biographical information on each composer. To provide context, the author has included a brief discussion on Portuguese folk music, and in particular, the role that the clarinet plays in Portuguese folk music culture.
ContributorsFerreira, Wesley (Contributor) / Spring, Robert S (Thesis advisor) / Bailey, Wayne (Committee member) / Gardner, Joshua (Committee member) / Hill, Gary (Committee member) / Schuring, Martin (Committee member) / Solis, Theodore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
Software has a great impact on the energy efficiency of any computing system--it can manage the components of a system efficiently or inefficiently. The impact of software is amplified in the context of a wearable computing system used for activity recognition. The design space this platform opens up is immense

Software has a great impact on the energy efficiency of any computing system--it can manage the components of a system efficiently or inefficiently. The impact of software is amplified in the context of a wearable computing system used for activity recognition. The design space this platform opens up is immense and encompasses sensors, feature calculations, activity classification algorithms, sleep schedules, and transmission protocols. Design choices in each of these areas impact energy use, overall accuracy, and usefulness of the system. This thesis explores methods software can influence the trade-off between energy consumption and system accuracy. In general the more energy a system consumes the more accurate will be. We explore how finding the transitions between human activities is able to reduce the energy consumption of such systems without reducing much accuracy. We introduce the Log-likelihood Ratio Test as a method to detect transitions, and explore how choices of sensor, feature calculations, and parameters concerning time segmentation affect the accuracy of this method. We discovered an approximate 5X increase in energy efficiency could be achieved with only a 5% decrease in accuracy. We also address how a system's sleep mode, in which the processor enters a low-power state and sensors are turned off, affects a wearable computing platform that does activity recognition. We discuss the energy trade-offs in each stage of the activity recognition process. We find that careful analysis of these parameters can result in great increases in energy efficiency if small compromises in overall accuracy can be tolerated. We call this the ``Great Compromise.'' We found a 6X increase in efficiency with a 7% decrease in accuracy. We then consider how wireless transmission of data affects the overall energy efficiency of a wearable computing platform. We find that design decisions such as feature calculations and grouping size have a great impact on the energy consumption of the system because of the amount of data that is stored and transmitted. For example, storing and transmitting vector-based features such as FFT or DCT do not compress the signal and would use more energy than storing and transmitting the raw signal. The effect of grouping size on energy consumption depends on the feature. For scalar features energy consumption is proportional in the inverse of grouping size, so it's reduced as grouping size goes up. For features that depend on the grouping size, such as FFT, energy increases with the logarithm of grouping size, so energy consumption increases slowly as grouping size increases. We find that compressing data through activity classification and transition detection significantly reduces energy consumption and that the energy consumed for the classification overhead is negligible compared to the energy savings from data compression. We provide mathematical models of energy usage and data generation, and test our ideas using a mobile computing platform, the Texas Instruments Chronos watch.
ContributorsBoyd, Jeffrey Michael (Author) / Sundaram, Hari (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Shrivastava, Aviral (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is the product of volunteers collaborating to build software in an open, public manner. The large number of FLOSS projects, combined with the data that is inherently archived with this online process, make studying this phenomenon attractive. Some FLOSS projects are very functional, well-known, and

Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) is the product of volunteers collaborating to build software in an open, public manner. The large number of FLOSS projects, combined with the data that is inherently archived with this online process, make studying this phenomenon attractive. Some FLOSS projects are very functional, well-known, and successful, such as Linux, the Apache Web Server, and Firefox. However, for every successful FLOSS project there are 100's of projects that are unsuccessful. These projects fail to attract sufficient interest from developers and users and become inactive or abandoned before useful functionality is achieved. The goal of this research is to better understand the open source development process and gain insight into why some FLOSS projects succeed while others fail. This dissertation presents an agent-based model of the FLOSS development process. The model is built around the concept that projects must manage to attract contributions from a limited pool of participants in order to progress. In the model developer and user agents select from a landscape of competing FLOSS projects based on perceived utility. Via the selections that are made and subsequent contributions, some projects are propelled to success while others remain stagnant and inactive. Findings from a diverse set of empirical studies of FLOSS projects are used to formulate the model, which is then calibrated on empirical data from multiple sources of public FLOSS data. The model is able to reproduce key characteristics observed in the FLOSS domain and is capable of making accurate predictions. The model is used to gain a better understanding of the FLOSS development process, including what it means for FLOSS projects to be successful and what conditions increase the probability of project success. It is shown that FLOSS is a producer-driven process, and project factors that are important for developers selecting projects are identified. In addition, it is shown that projects are sensitive to when core developers make contributions, and the exhibited bandwagon effects mean that some projects will be successful regardless of competing projects. Recommendations for improving software engineering in general based on the positive characteristics of FLOSS are also presented.
ContributorsRadtke, Nicholas Patrick (Author) / Collofello, James S. (Thesis advisor) / Janssen, Marco A (Thesis advisor) / Sarjoughian, Hessam S. (Committee member) / Sundaram, Hari (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
ContributorsBurton, Charlotte (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2018-04-08
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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
ContributorsDruesedow, Elizabeth (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2018-04-07
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Description
In this project, the use of deep neural networks for the process of selecting actions to execute within an environment to achieve a goal is explored. Scenarios like this are common in crafting based games such as Terraria or Minecraft. Goals in these environments have recursive sub-goal dependencies which form

In this project, the use of deep neural networks for the process of selecting actions to execute within an environment to achieve a goal is explored. Scenarios like this are common in crafting based games such as Terraria or Minecraft. Goals in these environments have recursive sub-goal dependencies which form a dependency tree. An agent operating within these environments have access to low amounts of data about the environment before interacting with it, so it is crucial that this agent is able to effectively utilize a tree of dependencies and its environmental surroundings to make judgements about which sub-goals are most efficient to pursue at any point in time. A successful agent aims to minimizes cost when completing a given goal. A deep neural network in combination with Q-learning techniques was employed to act as the agent in this environment. This agent consistently performed better than agents using alternate models (models that used dependency tree heuristics or human-like approaches to make sub-goal oriented choices), with an average performance advantage of 33.86% (with a standard deviation of 14.69%) over the best alternate agent. This shows that machine learning techniques can be consistently employed to make goal-oriented choices within an environment with recursive sub-goal dependencies and low amounts of pre-known information.
ContributorsKoleber, Derek (Author) / Acuna, Ruben (Thesis director) / Bansal, Ajay (Committee member) / W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Software Engineering (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
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Description
The purpose of the Oculus Exercise research project we conducted was to find a way to entice individuals to attend a gym more often and for longer periods of time. We have found that many activities are being augmented by the increasingly popular virtual reality technology, and within that space

The purpose of the Oculus Exercise research project we conducted was to find a way to entice individuals to attend a gym more often and for longer periods of time. We have found that many activities are being augmented by the increasingly popular virtual reality technology, and within that space "gamifying" the activity seems to attract more users. Given the idea of making activities more entertaining to users through "gamification", we decided to incorporate virtual reality, using the Oculus Rift, to immerse users within a simulated environment to potentially drive the factors previously identified in respect to gym utilization. To start, we surveyed potential users to gauge potential interest in virtual reality and its usage in physical exercise. Based on the initial responses, we saw that there was a definite interest in "gamifying" physical exercises using virtual reality, and proceeded to design a prototype using Unreal Engine 4 -- which is an engine for creating high quality video games with support for virtual reality -- to experiment how it would affect a standard workout routine. After considering several options, we decided to move forward with designing our prototype to augment a spin machine with virtual reality due to its common usage within a gym, and the consistent cardiovascular exercise it entails, as well as the safety intrinsic to it being a mostly stationary device. By analyzing the results of a survey after experimenting upon a user test group, we can begin to correlate the benefits and the drawbacks of using virtual reality in physical exercise, and the feasibility of doing so.
ContributorsCarney, Nicholas (Co-author) / West, Andrew (Co-author) / Dobkins, Jacob (Co-author) / Amresh, Ashish (Thesis director) / Gray, Robert (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
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Description
As technology's influence pushes every industry to change, healthcare professionals must move to a more connected model. The nearly ubiquitous presence of smartphones presents a unique opportunity for physicians to collect and process data from their patients more frequently. The Mayo Clinic, in partnership with the Barrett Honors College, has

As technology's influence pushes every industry to change, healthcare professionals must move to a more connected model. The nearly ubiquitous presence of smartphones presents a unique opportunity for physicians to collect and process data from their patients more frequently. The Mayo Clinic, in partnership with the Barrett Honors College, has designed and developed a prototype smartphone application targeting palliative care patients. The application collects symptom data from the patients and presents it to the doctors. This development project serves as a proof-of-concept for the application, and shows how such an application might look and function. Additionally, the project has revealed significant possibilities for the future of the application.
ContributorsGaney, David Howard (Author) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Thesis director) / Lipinski, Christopher (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2015-05
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Description
This undergraduate thesis explores the efficacy of developing a translator generator in the Prolog programming language using Lexical Functional Grammars. A bidirectional machine translator between English and Hungarian, developed as a proof-of-concept case study, is discussed and assessed. The benefits and drawbacks of this approach as generalized to Machine Translation

This undergraduate thesis explores the efficacy of developing a translator generator in the Prolog programming language using Lexical Functional Grammars. A bidirectional machine translator between English and Hungarian, developed as a proof-of-concept case study, is discussed and assessed. The benefits and drawbacks of this approach as generalized to Machine Translation systems are also discussed, along with possible areas of future work.
ContributorsLane, Ryan Andrew (Author) / Bansal, Ajay (Thesis director) / Bansal, Srividya (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2015-05