Consider Steven Cryos’ words, “When disaster strikes, the time to prepare has passed.” Witnessing domestic water insecurity in events such as Hurricane Katrina, the instability in Flint, Michigan, and most recently the winter storms affecting millions across Texas, we decided to take action. The period between a water supply’s disruption and restoration is filled with anxiety, uncertainty, and distress -- particularly since there is no clear indication of when, exactly, restoration comes. It is for this reason that Water Works now exists. As a team of students from diverse backgrounds, what started as an honors project with the Founders Lab at Arizona State University became the seed that will continue to mature into an economically sustainable business model supporting the optimistic visions and tenants of humanitarianism. By having conversations with community members, conducting market research, competing for funding and fostering progress amid the COVID-19 pandemic, our team’s problem-solving traverses the disciplines. The purpose of this paper is to educate our readers about a unique solution to emerging issues of water insecurity that are nested across and within systems who could benefit from the introduction of a personal water reclamation system, showcase our team’s entrepreneurial journey, and propose future directions that will this once pedagogical exercise to continue fulfilling its mission: To heal, to hydrate and to help bring safe water to everyone.

The Electoral College, the current electoral system in the U.S., operates on a Winner-Take-All or First Past the Post (FPTP) principle, where the candidate with the most votes wins. Despite the Electoral College being the current system, it is problematic. According to Lani Guinier in Tyranny of the Majority, “the winner-take-all principle invariably wastes some votes” (121). This means that the majority group gets all of the power in an election while the votes of the minority groups are completely wasted and hold little to no significance. Additionally, FPTP systems reinforce a two-party system in which neither candidate could satisfy the majority of the electorate’s needs and issues, yet forces them to choose between the two dominant parties. Moreover, voting for a third party candidate only hurts the voter since it takes votes away from the party they might otherwise support and gives the victory to the party they prefer the least, ensuring that the two party system is inescapable. Therefore, a winner-take-all system does not provide the electorate with fair or proportional representation and creates voter disenfranchisement: it offers them very few choices that appeal to their needs and forces them to choose a candidate they dislike. There are, however, alternative voting systems that remedy these issues, such as a Ranked voting system, in which voters can rank their candidate choices in the order they prefer them, or a Proportional voting system, in which a political party acquires a number of seats based on the proportion of votes they receive from the voter base. Given these alternatives, we will implement a software simulation of one of these systems to demonstrate how they work in contrast to FPTP systems, and therefore provide evidence of how these alternative systems could work in practice and in place of the current electoral system.

System and software verification is a vital component in the development and reliability of cyber-physical systems - especially in critical domains where the margin of error is minimal. In the case of autonomous driving systems (ADS), the vision perception subsystem is a necessity to ensure correct maneuvering of the environment and identification of objects. The challenge posed in perception systems involves verifying the accuracy and rigidity of detections. The use of Spatio-Temporal Perception Logic (STPL) enables the user to express requirements for the perception system to verify, validate, and ensure its behavior; however, a drawback to STPL involves its accessibility. It is limited to individuals with an expert or higher-level knowledge of temporal and spatial logics, and the formal-written requirements become quite verbose with more restrictions imposed. In this thesis, I propose a domain-specific language (DSL) catered to Spatio-Temporal Perception Logic to enable non-expert users the ability to capture requirements for perception subsystems while reducing the necessity to have an experienced background in said logic. The domain-specific language for the Spatio-Temporal Perception Logic is built upon the formal language with two abstractions. The main abstraction captures simple programming statements that are translated to a lower-level STPL expression accepted by the testing monitor. The STPL DSL provides a seamless interface to writing formal expressions while maintaining the power and expressiveness of STPL. These translated equivalent expressions are capable of directing a standard for perception systems to ensure the safety and reduce the risks involved in ill-formed detections.

This thesis identifies and explains two main problems students face during their internships. The first problem relates to feeling bored at internships due to the simplicity of projects or lack of work. From the interviews conducted, several strategies to avoid this boredom were created, including having employers design education plans for interns to further their knowledge in programs such as excel during their downtime. The second problem with internships discovered focuses on the gap between what is taught in schools versus what is expected of interns in practice. This thesis identifies several opportunities for improvement in education and strategies on how to handle feeling overwhelmed on intern projects due to lack of knowledge.

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/><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/><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.

The purpose of this study is to create and establish an efficient and cost-effective solution to decrease the effects of sedentarism in pregnant women. Our team was given a propelling question, from which we had to narrow down our scope and conduct primary and secondary research to determine our ideal customers. The design of our study intends to imitate the development of a startup where ideas are created from scratch and the final deliverable is a business model plan that shows some sort of traction. Our first major finding is that a sedentary lifestyle can be treated without major challenges in low risk pregnancies. We determined that uncertainty and lack of concise and clear information is one of the main causes of an increased level of sedentary behavior in low risk pregnancies. A significant driver for women to do some sort of activity or exercise stems from feeling supported, which doesn’t necessarily come from their partner or couple, but instead from other women that are going to a similar process as them. There are apps in the market that intend to serve pregnant women; however, there is not one that incorporates a social aspect to achieve their goal. In conclusion, there is opportunity in the market for a socially integrated pregnancy fitness app. The Gleam concept has been consciously developed to decrease sedentary behavior through concise, clear, and reliable information and by encouraging women through a socialization platform.

When examining the average college campus, it becomes obvious that students feel rushed from one place to another as they try to participate in class, clubs, and extracurricular activities. One way that students can feel more comfortable and relaxed around campus is to introduce the aspect of gaming. Studies show that “Moderate videogame play has been found to contribute to emotional stability” (Jones, 2014). This demonstrates that the stress of college can be mitigated by introducing the ability to interact with video games. This same concept has been applied in the workplace, where studies have shown that “Gaming principles such as challenges, competition, rewards and personalization keep employees engaged and learning” (Clark, 2020). This means that if we manage to gamify the college experience, students will be more engaged which will increase and stabilize the retention rate of colleges which utilize this type of experience. Gaming allows students to connect with their peers in a casual environment while also allowing them to find resources around campus and find new places to eat and relax. We plan to gamify the college experience by introducing augmented reality in the form of an app. Augmented reality is “. . . a technology that combines virtual information with the real world” (Chen, 2019). College students will be able to utilize the resources and amenities available to them on campus while completing quests that help them within the application. This demonstrates the ability for video games to engage students using artificial tasks but real actions and experiences which help them feel more connected to campus. Our Founders Lab team has developed and tested an AR application that can be used to connect students with their campus and the resources available to them.

CubeSats can encounter a myriad of difficulties in space like cosmic rays, temperature<br/>issues, and loss of control. By creating better, more reliable software, these problems can be<br/>mitigated and increase the chance of success for the mission. This research sets out to answer the<br/>question: how do we create reliable flight software for CubeSats? by providing a concentrated<br/>list of the best flight software development practices. The CubeSat used in this research is the<br/>Deployable Optical Receiver Aperture (DORA) CubeSat, which is a 3U CubeSat that seeks to<br/>demonstrate optical communication data rates of 1 Gbps over long distances. We present an<br/>analysis over many of the flight software development practices currently in use in the industry,<br/>from industry leads NASA, and identify three key flight software development areas of focus:<br/>memory, concurrency, and error handling. Within each of these areas, the best practices were<br/>defined for how to approach the area. These practices were also developed using experience<br/>from the creation of flight software for the DORA CubeSat in order to drive the design and<br/>testing of the system. We analyze DORA’s effectiveness in the three areas of focus, as well as<br/>discuss how following the best practices identified helped to create a more reliable flight<br/>software system for the DORA CubeSat.

"No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth." These were the words of former Facebook Vice President Chamath Palihapitiya who publicly expressed his regret in a 2017 interview over his role in co-creating Facebook. Palihapitiya shared that social media is ripping apart the social fabric of society and he also sounded the alarm regarding social media’s unavoidable global impact. He is only one of social media’s countless critics. The more disturbing issue resides in the empirical evidence supporting such notions. At least 95% of adolescents own a smartphone and spend an average time of two to four hours a day on social media. Moreover, 91% of 16-24-year-olds use social media, yet youth rate Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter as the worst social media platforms. However, the social, clinical, and neurodevelopment ramifications of using social media regularly are only beginning to emerge in research. Early research findings show that social media platforms trigger anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and other negative mental health effects. These negative mental health symptoms are commonly reported by individuals from of 18-25-years old, a unique period of human development known as emerging adulthood. Although emerging adulthood is characterized by identity exploration, unbounded optimism, and freedom from most responsibilities, it also serves as a high-risk period for the onset of most psychological disorders. Despite social media’s adverse impacts, it retains its utility as it facilitates identity exploration and virtual socialization for emerging adults. Investigating the “user-centered” design and neuroscience underlying social media platforms can help reveal, and potentially mitigate, the onset of negative mental health consequences among emerging adults. Effectively deconstructing the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (i.e., hereafter referred to as “The Big Three”) will require an extensive analysis into common features across platforms. A few examples of these design features include: like and reaction counters, perpetual news feeds, and omnipresent banners and notifications surrounding the user’s viewport. Such social media features are inherently designed to stimulate specific neurotransmitters and hormones such as dopamine, serotonin, and cortisol. Identifying such predacious social media features that unknowingly manipulate and highjack emerging adults’ brain chemistry will serve as a first step in mitigating the negative mental health effects of today’s social media platforms. A second concrete step will involve altering or eliminating said features by creating a social media platform that supports and even enhances mental well-being.

Over the years, advances in research have continued to decrease the size of computers from the size of<br/>a room to a small device that could fit in one’s palm. However, if an application does not require extensive<br/>computation power nor accessories such as a screen, the corresponding machine could be microscopic,<br/>only a few nanometers big. Researchers at MIT have successfully created Syncells, which are micro-<br/>scale robots with limited computation power and memory that can communicate locally to achieve<br/>complex collective tasks. In order to control these Syncells for a desired outcome, they must each run a<br/>simple distributed algorithm. As they are only capable of local communication, Syncells cannot receive<br/>commands from a control center, so their algorithms cannot be centralized. In this work, we created a<br/>distributed algorithm that each Syncell can execute so that the system of Syncells is able to find and<br/>converge to a specific target within the environment. The most direct applications of this problem are in<br/>medicine. Such a system could be used as a safer alternative to invasive surgery or could be used to treat<br/>internal bleeding or tumors. We tested and analyzed our algorithm through simulation and visualization<br/>in Python. Overall, our algorithm successfully caused the system of particles to converge on a specific<br/>target present within the environment.