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Description
This thesis explores how the characterization of mentally ill characters evolves in literature within the United States in order to understand if and how modern notions of mental illness have impacted American writers’ fictional depictions of insanity. For this reason, this project compares and contrasts American fiction from the 19th century and 21st century. More specifically, the thesis explores the two centuries to trace evolutions in the use of gothic tropes, the progression of the theme of identity, relevant paratexts, and public conversations about fictional mental illness in modern texts—all of which send specific messages about mental health and impact the ways in which the reader understands the characters with mental illness. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the evolved use of tropes, the theme of identity, paratexts, and public conversations suggest there has been a shift from othering characters with mental illness towards accepting these characters and normalizing mental illness as an ordinary and familiar part of the human experience. In short, an increased understanding of mental health accompanies literary choices that create a more sympathetic representation of mental illness overall, even when fiction writers might still rely heavily on 19th-century tropes regarding madness.
ContributorsHagerman, Rachel L (Author) / Soares, Rebecca (Thesis director) / Murphy, Patricia C. (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12
Description
As computers become a more embedded aspect of daily life, the importance of communicating ideas in computing and technology to the general public has become increasingly apparent. One such growing technology is electronic voting. The feasibility of explaining electronic voting protocols was directly investigated through the generation of a presentation based on journal articles and papers identified by the investigator. Extensive use of analogy and visual aids were used to explain various cryptographic concepts. The presentation was then given to a classroom of ASU freshmen, followed by a feedback survey. A self-evaluation on the presentation methods is conducted, and a procedure for explaining subjects in computer science is proposed based on the researcher's personal process.
ContributorsReniewicki, Peter Josef (Author) / Bazzi, Rida (Thesis director) / Childress, Nancy (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
The impact of musical theatre in the United States calls attention to its role in our cultural heritage. Art in all its forms has always been considered to be something of an ongoing history of a society's culture. Musical theatre has been very successful in synthesizing several different aspects of American culture and establishing historical markers in areas of music, drama, social issues, and even technology. The plethora of issues challenged by pieces of music theatre has created a large canon of works that contribute greatly to our culture, both artistically and socially. These works are the result of many centuries of artistic performance and the evolution that these works have gone through over time. Tracing back through vaudeville, Follies, and into the works of European opera: musical theatre has a rich and extensive background in production styles that still inform its presentation today. These styles allow for a dynamic presentation of the ideas and issues that music theatre wishes to address and challenge. When the production style and content of musical works are drawn from these past sources, the oral traditions and storytelling aspects of these works gain renewed prominence. Music theatre as a new frontier of literary study warrants further investigation into its literary merit.
ContributorsMcNay, Michael (Author) / Dreyfoos, Dale (Thesis director) / Harper, Robert (Committee member) / Yatso, Toby (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2012-12
Description
Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an increasingly important multi-modal task where models must answer textual questions based on visual image inputs. Numerous VQA datasets have been proposed to train and evaluate models. However, existing benchmarks exhibit a unilateral focus on textual distribution shifts rather than joint shifts across modalities. This is suboptimal for properly assessing model robustness and generalization. To address this gap, a novel multi-modal VQA benchmark dataset is introduced for the first time. This dataset combines both visual and textual distribution shifts across training and test sets. Using this challenging benchmark exposes vulnerabilities in existing models relying on spurious correlations and overfitting to dataset biases. The novel dataset advances the field by enabling more robust model training and rigorous evaluation of multi-modal distribution shift generalization. In addition, a new few-shot multi-modal prompt fusion model is proposed to better adapt models for downstream VQA tasks. The model incorporates a prompt encoder module and dual-path design to align and fuse image and text prompts. This represents a novel prompt learning approach tailored for multi-modal learning across vision and language. Together, the introduced benchmark dataset and prompt fusion model address key limitations around evaluating and improving VQA model robustness. The work expands the methodology for training models resilient to multi-modal distribution shifts.
ContributorsJyothi Unni, Suraj (Author) / Liu, Huan (Thesis advisor) / Davalcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Bryan, Chris (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
The thesis explores the avenues of machine learning principles in object detection using TensorFlow 2 Object Detection API Libraries for implementation. Integrating object detection capabilities into ESP-32 cameras can enhance functionality in the capstone dragster application and potential applications, such as autonomous robots. The research implements the TensorFlow 2 Object Detection API, a widely used framework for training and deploying object detection models. By leveraging the pre-trained models available in the API, the system can detect a wide range of objects with high accuracy and speed. Fine-tuning these models using a custom dataset allows us to enhance their performance in detecting specific objects of interest. Experiments to identify strengths and weaknesses of each model's implementation before and after training using similar images were evaluated The thesis also explores the potential limitations and challenges of deploying object detection on real-time ESP-32 cameras, such as limited computational resources, costs, and power constraints. The results obtained from the experiments demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of implementing object detection on ESP-32 cameras using the TensorFlow2 Object Detection API. The system achieves satisfactory accuracy and real-time processing capabilities, making it suitable for various practical applications. Overall, this thesis provides a foundation for further advancements and optimizations in the integration of object detection capabilities into small, low-power devices such as ESP-32 cameras and a crossroad to explore its applicability for other image-capturing and processing devices in industrial, automotive, and defense sectors of industry.
ContributorsMani, Vinesh (Author) / Tsakalis, Konstantinos (Thesis director) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Electrical Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2024-05
Description
Culturally responsive teaching refers to an approach to teaching and learning that facilitates the achievement of all students by including content that is relatable to all cultures, and creating a culturally-supported and learner-centered environment. The CSE 110 course at ASU would greatly benefit from the incorporation of culturally relevant learning, as it would help them thrive in their chosen field of study while being able to uphold and value cultural relevance. The incorporation of culturally relevant pedagogy would further help students from marginalized communities feel more accepted and capable to thrive in STEM education.
We began our research by first understanding the foundations of culturally responsive pedagogy, including how it is currently being used in classrooms. Concurrently, we studied the CSE 110 curriculum to see where we can implement this teaching strategy. Our research helped us develop a set of worksheets. In the second semester of our research we distributed these worksheets and a set of control worksheets. Students were randomly assigned to an experiment or control group each of the four weeks of the study. We then analyzed this information to quantitatively see how culturally responsive pedagogy affects their outcomes. To follow up we also conducted a survey to get some qualitative feedback about student experience. Our final findings consisted of an analysis on how culturally responsive pedagogy affects learning outcomes in an introductory computer science course.
ContributorsTripathi, Tejal (Author) / Mane, Rhea (Co-author) / Sathe, Isha (Co-author) / Tadayon-Navabi, Farideh (Thesis director) / Nkrumah, Tara (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2024-05
DescriptionCreating a Scheme Dialect using Modern C++.
ContributorsAl-Qassas, Feras (Author) / Osburn, Steve (Thesis director) / Chen, Yinong (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2024-05