Matching Items (26)
Description
Prenatal care is a widely administered preventative care service, and its adequate use has been shown to decrease poor infant and maternal health outcomes. Today however, in the United States, preterm birth rates remain among the highest in the industrialized world, with low socioeconomic women having the highest risk of preterm births. This group of women also face the greatest barriers to access adequate prenatal care in the United States. This paper explores the viability of short message service to help bridge gaps in prenatal care for low socioeconomic women in the United States and provides areas for further research.
ContributorsMiles, Kelly Nicole (Author) / Ketcham, Jonathan (Thesis director) / Santanam, Raghu (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Department of Marketing (Contributor) / Department of Finance (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
The recent changes in the software markets gave users an unprecedented number
of alternatives for any given task. In such a competitive environment, it is imperative
to understand what drives user behavior. To that end, the research presented in
this dissertation, tries to uncover the impact of business strategies often used in the
software markets.
The dissertation is organized into three distinct studies into user choice and post
choice use of software. First using social judgment theory as foundation, zero price
strategies effects on user choice is investigated, with respect to product features,
consumer characteristics, and context effects. Second, role of social features in
moderating network effects on user choice is studied. And finally, the role of social
features on the effectiveness of add-on content strategy on continued user engagement
is investigated.
The findings of this dissertation highlight the alignments between popular business
strategies and broad software context. The dissertation contributes to the litera-
ture by uncovering hitherto overlooked complementarities between business strategy
and product features: (1) zero price strategy enhances utilitarian features but not
non-utilitarian features in software choice, (2) social features only enhance network
externalities but not social influence in user choice, (3) social features enhance the
effect of add-on content strategy in extending software engagement.
of alternatives for any given task. In such a competitive environment, it is imperative
to understand what drives user behavior. To that end, the research presented in
this dissertation, tries to uncover the impact of business strategies often used in the
software markets.
The dissertation is organized into three distinct studies into user choice and post
choice use of software. First using social judgment theory as foundation, zero price
strategies effects on user choice is investigated, with respect to product features,
consumer characteristics, and context effects. Second, role of social features in
moderating network effects on user choice is studied. And finally, the role of social
features on the effectiveness of add-on content strategy on continued user engagement
is investigated.
The findings of this dissertation highlight the alignments between popular business
strategies and broad software context. The dissertation contributes to the litera-
ture by uncovering hitherto overlooked complementarities between business strategy
and product features: (1) zero price strategy enhances utilitarian features but not
non-utilitarian features in software choice, (2) social features only enhance network
externalities but not social influence in user choice, (3) social features enhance the
effect of add-on content strategy in extending software engagement.
ContributorsKanat, Irfan (Author) / Santanam, Raghu (Thesis advisor) / Vinze, Ajay (Thesis advisor) / Gu, Bin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Access control has been historically recognized as an effective technique for ensuring that computer systems preserve important security properties. Recently, attribute-based
access control (ABAC) has emerged as a new paradigm to provide access mediation
by leveraging the concept of attributes: observable properties that become relevant under a certain security context and are exhibited by the entities normally involved in the mediation process, namely, end-users and protected resources. Also recently, independently-run organizations from the private and public sectors have recognized the benefits of engaging in multi-disciplinary research collaborations that involve sharing sensitive proprietary resources such as scientific data, networking capabilities and computation time and have recognized ABAC as the paradigm that suits their needs for restricting the way such resources are to be shared with each other. In such a setting, a robust yet flexible access mediation scheme is crucial to guarantee participants are granted access to such resources in a safe and secure manner.
However, no consensus exists either in the literature with respect to a formal model that clearly defines the way the components depicted in ABAC should interact with each other, so that the rigorous study of security properties to be effectively pursued. This dissertation proposes an approach tailored to provide a well-defined and formal definition of ABAC, including a description on how attributes exhibited by different independent organizations are to be leveraged for mediating access to shared resources, by allowing for collaborating parties to engage in federations for the specification, discovery, evaluation and communication of attributes, policies, and access mediation decisions. In addition, a software assurance framework is introduced to support the correct construction of enforcement mechanisms implementing our approach by leveraging validation and verification techniques based on software assertions, namely, design by contract (DBC) and behavioral interface specification languages (BISL). Finally, this dissertation also proposes a distributed trust framework that allows for exchanging recommendations on the perceived reputations of members of our proposed federations, in such a way that the level of trust of previously-unknown participants can be properly assessed for the purposes of access mediation.
access control (ABAC) has emerged as a new paradigm to provide access mediation
by leveraging the concept of attributes: observable properties that become relevant under a certain security context and are exhibited by the entities normally involved in the mediation process, namely, end-users and protected resources. Also recently, independently-run organizations from the private and public sectors have recognized the benefits of engaging in multi-disciplinary research collaborations that involve sharing sensitive proprietary resources such as scientific data, networking capabilities and computation time and have recognized ABAC as the paradigm that suits their needs for restricting the way such resources are to be shared with each other. In such a setting, a robust yet flexible access mediation scheme is crucial to guarantee participants are granted access to such resources in a safe and secure manner.
However, no consensus exists either in the literature with respect to a formal model that clearly defines the way the components depicted in ABAC should interact with each other, so that the rigorous study of security properties to be effectively pursued. This dissertation proposes an approach tailored to provide a well-defined and formal definition of ABAC, including a description on how attributes exhibited by different independent organizations are to be leveraged for mediating access to shared resources, by allowing for collaborating parties to engage in federations for the specification, discovery, evaluation and communication of attributes, policies, and access mediation decisions. In addition, a software assurance framework is introduced to support the correct construction of enforcement mechanisms implementing our approach by leveraging validation and verification techniques based on software assertions, namely, design by contract (DBC) and behavioral interface specification languages (BISL). Finally, this dissertation also proposes a distributed trust framework that allows for exchanging recommendations on the perceived reputations of members of our proposed federations, in such a way that the level of trust of previously-unknown participants can be properly assessed for the purposes of access mediation.
ContributorsRubio Medrano, Carlos Ernesto (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Zhao, Ziming (Committee member) / Santanam, Raghu (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Service based software (SBS) systems are software systems consisting of services based on the service oriented architecture (SOA). Each service in SBS systems provides partial functionalities and collaborates with other services as workflows to provide the functionalities required by the systems. These services may be developed and/or owned by different entities and physically distributed across the Internet. Compared with traditional software system components which are usually specifically designed for the target systems and bound tightly, the interfaces of services and their communication protocols are standardized, which allow SBS systems to support late binding, provide better interoperability, better flexibility in dynamic business logics, and higher fault tolerance. The development process of SBS systems can be divided to three major phases: 1) SBS specification, 2) service discovery and matching, and 3) service composition and workflow execution. This dissertation focuses on the second phase, and presents a privacy preserving service discovery and ranking approach for multiple user QoS requirements. This approach helps service providers to register services and service users to search services through public, but untrusted service directories with the protection of their privacy against the service directories. The service directories can match the registered services with service requests, but do not learn any information about them. Our approach also enforces access control on services during the matching process, which prevents unauthorized users from discovering services. After the service directories match a set of services that satisfy the service users' functionality requirements, the service discovery approach presented in this dissertation further considers service users' QoS requirements in two steps. First, this approach optimizes services' QoS by making tradeoff among various QoS aspects with users' QoS requirements and preferences. Second, this approach ranks services based on how well they satisfy users' QoS requirements to help service users select the most suitable service to develop their SBSs.
ContributorsYin, Yin (Author) / Yau, Stephen S. (Thesis advisor) / Candan, Kasim (Committee member) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Santanam, Raghu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Cyber-weapons and the rapid progression of utilizing cyberspace in conflict poses several risks to states and their ability to maintain control of their respective technological infrastructures. Susceptibility to these weapons extend to virtually all existing nations, and indicates a critical need for transnational organizations and their members to establish collective strategies for governing cyber-arms. In this paper, the United Nations, as a prime example of an influential transnational organization, is utilized as a case study for a framework that seeks to define and establish guidelines for arms control policy as it relates to cyber-weapons. Presented is a strategy that seeks to define cyber-warfare and cyber-weapons, distinguish it from other existing forms of weapons and warfare, and outline recommended actions for the United Nations and its affiliates, including the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs and United Nations Security Council.
ContributorsSidhu, Arman Singh (Author) / Berliner, Daniel (Thesis director) / Santanam, Raghu (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor)
Created2015-12
Description
Sports analytics is a growing field that attempts to showcase interesting aspects of a sport with the use of modern technology and machine learning techniques. This thesis will demonstrate how the NBA has progressed in the past decade by comparing the performance have five teams (SAS, OKC, PHO, MIN, and SAC). It will also provide key insight on what an NBA team should focus on to build an optimized NBA team composition, which will better their performance in the league, which will improve their chances of making into the playoffs. These teams were chosen after conducting extensive analysis on all NBA teams. These five teams were chosen because of the variability in performance (two successful and three less successful teams). Two successful teams, SAS and OKC, and three less successful teams, PHO, MIN, and SAC, were chosen to exemplify the different approaches of teams in the NBA and to distinguish what an NBA team should consider build an optimized team composition to better their performance in the league stage.
ContributorsJegadesan, Sai (Author) / Shin, Donghyuk (Thesis director) / Benjamin, Victor (Committee member) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor) / WPC Graduate Programs (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
Narrative generation is an important field due to the high demand for stories in video game design and also in stories used in learning tools in the classroom. As these stories should contain depth, it is desired for these stories to ideally be more descriptive. There are tools that help with the creation of these stories, such as planning, which requires a domain as input, or GPT-3, which requires an input prompt to generate the stories. However, other aspects to consider are the coherence and variation of stories. To save time and effort and create multiple possible stories, we combined both planning and the Large Language Model (LLM) GPT-3 similar to how they were used in TattleTale to generate such stories while examining whether descriptive input prompts to GPT-3 affect the outputted stories. The stories generated are readable to the general public and overall, the prompts do not consistently affect descriptiveness of outputs across all stories tested. For this work, three stories with three variants each were created and tested for descriptiveness. To do so, adjectives, adverbs, prepositional phrases, and suboordinating conjunctions were counted using Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool spaCy for Part Of Speech (POS) tagging. This work has shown that descriptiveness is highly correlated with the amount of words in the story in general, so running GPT-3 to obtain longer stories is a feasible option to consider in order to obtain more descriptive stories. The limitations of GPT-3 have an impact on the descriptiveness of resulting stories due to GPT-3’s inconsistency and transformer architecture, and other methods of narrative generation such as simple planning could be more useful.
ContributorsDozier, Courtney (Author) / Chavez-Echeagary, Maria Elena (Thesis director) / Benjamin, Victor (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2022-12
Description
The growth in online job boards has made it easier than ever to find and apply for roles online. Unfortunately, since said job boards are, mainly, designed for hiring companies and not job applicants, the applicant interface is high friction and frustrating. With each company (and often each job) that a job-seeker applies for, they need to fill out an application form asking for the same information they have already provided countless times. This thesis explores the effectiveness of FuseApply, a web application and accompanying Chrome extension that reduces the friction involved in filling out these forms by automatically filling out a portion of job applications for users.
Results from user experience testing with eleven Arizona State University (ASU) School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence students on real-world job applications demonstrated significant time savings and thus added value for users. On average, FuseApply saved users 33.09 seconds in time completing online job application forms, compared with manually filling them out. A one-tail T-test confirmed that this difference is statistically significant. Users also showed noticeable reduction in frustration with FuseApply. 72.7% of applicants said that they would use FuseApply in the future when applying for jobs, and comments were also positive. Business viability is less clear, as 63.6% of applicants said they would not pay for the software. Results demonstrate that FuseApply is useful and valuable software, but cast doubt on monetization plans.
ContributorsO'Scannlain-Miller, Henry (Author) / Elena Chavez-Echeagaray, Maria (Thesis director) / Benjamin, Victor (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2022-12
Description
Digital media refers to any form of media which depends on electronic devices for its creation, distribution, view, and storage. Digital media analytics involves qualitative and quantitative analysis from the business to understand users’ behaviors. This technique brings disruptive changes to many industries and its path of economic disruption is getting wider and wider. Under the context of the increasingly popular digital media market, this dissertation investigates what are the best content delivery strategy and the new cultural phenomenon: Internet Water Army. The first essay proposes a theory-guided computational approach that consolidates distinct data sources spanning unstructured text, image, and video data, systematically measures modes of persuasion, and unveils the multimedia content design strategies for crowdfunding projects. The second essay studies whether using the Internet Water Army helps sales and under what conditions it helps. This study finds that the Internet water army helps product sales at both post-level and fans-level. The effect is largely reflected by changing the number of emotional fans. Furthermore, the earlier to purchase the water armies, more haters, likers, and neutral fans it can attract. The last essay builds a game model to study the trade- off between honestly promoting the product according to their evaluation and catering to the consumer’s prior belief on the product quality to stay on the market as long as possible. It provides insights on the optimum usage of promotion on social media and demonstrate how conventional wisdom about negative reviews will hurt business may be misleading in the presence of social media. These three studies jointly contribute to the crowdfunding and social media studies literature by elucidating the content delivery strategy, and the impact and purchasing strategy of the Internet Water Army.
ContributorsYIN, XUEYAN (Author) / Chen, Pei-Yu (Thesis advisor) / Gu, Bin (Committee member) / Shi, Zhan (Committee member) / Benjamin, Victor (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Various activities move online in the era of the digital economy. Platform design and policy can heavily affect online user activities and result in many expected and unexpected consequences. In this dissertation, I conduct empirical studies on three types of online platforms to investigate the influence of their platform policy on their user engagement and associated outcomes. Specifically, in Study 1, I focus on goal-directed platforms and study how the introduction of the mobile channel affects users’ goal pursuit engagement and persistence. In Study 2, I focus on social media and online communities. I study the introduction of machine-powered platform regulation and its impacts on volunteer moderators’ engagement. In Study 3, I focus on online political discourse forums and examine the role of identity declaration in user participation and polarization in the subsequent political discourse. Overall, my results highlight how various platform policies shape user behavior. Implications on multi-channel adoption, human-machine collaborative platform governance, and online political polarization research are discussed.
ContributorsHe, Qinglai (Author) / Santanam, Raghu (Thesis advisor) / Hong, Yili (Thesis advisor) / Burtch, Gordon (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021