Matching Items (42)
Description
Web Solutions for Scholastic Tracking is a project which aims to develop a website in order to help the scholarship committee of an Arizona State University sorority save time. Details and flaws of the former approaches to scholastic tracking for the sorority \u2014 such as scattered data, low visibility, and the need for manual calculations \u2014 are provided. Based on these flaws and the requirements of the scholarship committee, a new approach was designed and developed in order to track scholastics online in a more efficient manner. A study hours tracking website was developed utilizing Apache, PHP, and MySQL in order to create an efficient approach to tracking scholastics. The developed website allows sorority members to view their required weekly study hours and submit hours for approval online to specific proctors. The scholarship committee members can then approve or reject the submitted hours that they proctor. This approach has improved the visibility of the required and remaining weekly study hours for each sorority member while also decreasing the time it takes for proctors to approve hours. These improvements serve as examples of the various ways that this project has met its initial goal of increasing the efficiency of the sorority's scholarship program. Additional results as well as the requirements, development approach, technologies used, and testing methods are described in detail throughout this document.
ContributorsKral, Ryan David (Author) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Thesis director) / Burger, Kevin (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
This project explores how web applications can structure their User Interfaces to best accommodate their users who may not be able to use standard input devices like a mouse and keyboard, or differentiate subtle color differences in text, or who may be overwhelmed with heavy animation or auto-play videos. This project serves as a proof-of-concept of an accessible Virtual Learning Environment to be used by students of online classes, particularly at younger grade levels. It is a functional application that handles user login, lecture presentations and materials, and quizzes. The development of the front-end is done through the React JS library, an open source library from Facebook used for building UIs. This project finds that React has strong capabilities of building accessible UIs that is consistent with modern accessibility web standards. As React is one of the most popular emerging JavaScript libraries that is already being incorporated to large-scale web pages and applications, this project hopes to inform other developers on some of the tools and techniques that can make their work accessible to all users.
ContributorsTerzic, Philip Mico (Author) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Thesis director) / Tadayon-Navabi, Farideh (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
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
Charleston, South Carolina currently faces serious annual flooding issues due to tides and rainfall. These issues are expected to get significantly worse within the next few decades reaching a projected 180 days a year of flooding by 2045 (Carter et al., 2018). Several permanent solutions are in progress by the City of Charleston. However, these solutions are years away at minimum and faced with development issues. This thesis attempts to treat some of the symptoms of flooding, such as navigation, by creating an iPhone application which predicts flooding and helps people navigate around it safely. Specifically, this thesis will take into account rainfall and tide levels to display to users actively flooded areas of downtown Charleston and provide routing to a destination from a user’s location around these flooded areas whenever possible.
ContributorsSalisbury, Mason (Author) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Thesis director) / Faucon, Christophe (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Since the release of Discord in March of 2015 it has become the choice VoIP client for 25 million users, pulling in more each day from many sources including online video games with no voice chat, such as League of Legends. With such an expansive user base and many servers hosting multiple users during all times of the day, for a server admin to always be monitoring users is unreasonable. AhriBot aims to solve this problem by providing general administration through a command system to a server while it is logged onto that server. Specifically, AhriBot will be tailored for use on servers where League of Legends is primarily being played. Using commands issued to AhriBot, users can get statistics about their current game. By providing a set of features for general users, and a more specific set of features for League of Legends, AhriBot provides a greater experience and will help players to have quicker access to information about the game without having to travel to multiple outside sources.
ContributorsKoehler, Brendan Joseph (Author) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Thesis director) / Faucon, Philippe (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-12
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
CDA - short for "Career Development Application" - is an iOS application that aims to help students who may not have inside connections on Wall Street break into the notoriously hard-to-enter investment banking industry. The application does this by asking the user a few questions about his or her characteristics, classifying him or her into different categories based on his or her response, then tailoring the information displayed to him or her based on his or her classifications. The information, compiled by my thesis partner, is stored in a cloud-based database system to facilitate easy content updates without having to recompile and resubmit the application to the App Store. Because the application shows information to its users based on certain characteristics of the users, such as grade level, previous experience in the industry, and the geographical region and prestigiousness of the school he or she attends, the application is more useful than simply showing the same information to every student regardless of his or her circumstances. While the current application presents useful information in a compact, easy-to-use format, there are still many improvements that could be made. The application could be more sensitive to minor mistakes made by the user trying to answer the classification questions, and it could present information in an even easier-to-use format. Still, the application as it stands could be extremely useful for helping students who are not the traditional "Wall Street types" to enter the competitive, prestigious investment banking industry.
ContributorsBrawka, Rachel (Author) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Thesis director) / Bennett, Jack (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
CDA is a mobile application that helps students, specifically those without a mentor, break into the competitive investment banking industry. Investment banking is arguably one of the most competitive industries to break into because it is widely viewed as the premier finance career available out of undergraduate school. The industry is unique in the sense that there are many unwritten rules on how to break into the industry. The large investment banks receive tens of thousands of applications every year, but only an extremely small percentage of those applications are viewed. This is a problem for a majority of students, who believe that simply having a high GPA and a passion for finance and submitting an application is adequate to get into investment banking. Many students who successfully make it into the industry are provided with programs and mentors to teach them everything necessary to do so, but I have noticed that there are many other qualified students that are not given these resources and are, accordingly, not as successful getting into the industry. This application is designed to provide some of the custom mentorship advice necessary to get into investment banking. I will approach this project as a business venture and will develop methods to monetize the services this program provides.
ContributorsRasmussen, Parker John (Author) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Thesis director) / Bennett, Jack (Committee member) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Bank institutions employ several marketing strategies to maximize new customer acquisition as well as current customer retention. Telemarketing is one such approach taken where individual customers are contacted by bank representatives with offers. These telemarketing strategies can be improved in combination with data mining techniques that allow predictability of customer information and interests. In this thesis, bank telemarketing data from a Portuguese banking institution were analyzed to determine predictability of several client demographic and financial attributes and find most contributing factors in each. Data were preprocessed to ensure quality, and then data mining models were generated for the attributes with logistic regression, support vector machine (SVM) and random forest using Orange as the data mining tool. Results were analyzed using precision, recall and F1 score.
ContributorsEjaz, Samira (Author) / Davulcu, Hasan (Thesis advisor) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Committee member) / Candan, Kasim (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Improving accessibility to public buildings by people with special needs has been an important societal commitment that is mandated by federal laws. In the information age, accessibility can mean more than simply providing physical accommodations like ramps for wheel-chairs. Better yet, accessibility will be fundamentally improved, if a user can be made aware of important location-specific information like functions of offices near the user within a building. A smart environment may help a new person quickly get acquainted about the environment. Such features can be more critical for cases of making an indoor environment more accessible to people with visual impairment. With the intention to promote the integration of visually impaired people in society, this thesis efforts on methodologies for building smart and accessible indoor office environments with the help of Apple's Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology called iBeacon to provide location awareness and enable easy access to information about the environment to people with visual impairment. This thesis presents work done on developing an iterative based approach in improving the configuration of given number of iBeacons to gain optimal signal coverage in a given office space environment and enabling smart features such as tagging points of interest and push notifications. This work aims to exploit the idea to look at visual impairment beyond the level of disability and cash it at as an opportunity to bring about a change of style of living. This work develops a methodology by introducing an end-to-end systems that uses intelligent server side and visually-impaired-friendly client side interfaces to give a prototype of an assistive technology to help them do basic activities like getting familiarized about an office environment without the need for asking for assistance.
ContributorsLagisetty, Jashmi (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Hedgpeth, Terri (Committee member) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017