Matching Items (18)
Description
Within the last decade, there has been a lot of hype surrounding the potential medical applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies. During the same timespan, big tech companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Google have entered the healthcare market as developers of health-based AI and ML technologies. This project aims to create a comprehensive map of the existing health-AI market landscape for the standard biotech reader and to provide a critical commentary on the existing market structure.
ContributorsWehelie, Sumayah A (Author) / Frow, Emma (Thesis director) / Maynard, Andrew (Committee member) / Harrington Bioengineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
Time travel is closely associated with futuristic science fiction, but it is a concept that dates back to ancient times. Over many generations it has been developed and explored narratively and scientifically. This paper aims to document and analyze the history of the time travel concept and the important role fiction had in its development.
ContributorsElkins, Sydney (Author) / Foy, Joseph (Thesis director) / Maynard, Andrew (Committee member) / School of Earth and Space Exploration (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12
Description
Cosmic horror distinguishes itself from standard horror in large part because of the things that it finds horrifying. Cosmic horror, like any horror, attaches itself to external experience. Powerful technologies’ ability to reshape our perspective are the ideal choice for this anchor point. Beyond the Wall of Sound is a podcast that seeks to unify the existential dread and scientific imaginings inherent in cosmic horror and weird fiction, with dystopian visions of technological futures. The podcast uses the strange and horrifying mind of HP Lovecraft, as revealed through his short stories, to shed light on the horrifying, revealing and absurd imaginaries that drive and emerge unintentionally from current pursuits in science and technological innovation. In this essay, I describe the roots of horror and its relevance and therefore applicability to human experience. I then exemplarily relate the practical mode of thought that created one of the podcast’s episodes, which take’s Lovecraft’s The Thing on the Doorstep and the authors fears of the future as a lens to discuss and reflect upon the technology of body switching. The podcast is presented as an important piece of science communication in the face of increasing misinformation and a rolling technological wave. The project is affected by the strength of Lovecraft’s influences over time, and ultimately is itself a vehicle for and a deconstruction of that influence. Ultimately, the purpose of this podcast is not to horrify, but to inspire people to do good and remain educated despite the horrors of a pessimistic and uncaring existence.
ContributorsMillea, Paul (Author) / Maynard, Andrew (Thesis director) / Withycombe-Keeler, Lauren (Committee member) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / School for the Future of Innovation in Society (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Regional governments provide access to safety, health, and welfare through consistently good services. This analysis examines the underlying motives and mechanisms for achieving these goals. A current trend in governance is to outsource technology software and development to private sector efficiency. To achieve this claim and in attempt to save money the physical employee workforce is being replaced by technology. The government interaction in this philosophy is not being met with the same diversity and flexibility of the private-sector. This missed opportunity is the result of not accompanying software or governance practices with the principles of entrepreneurship including performance measures, marketing, and collaborative process design. The linkage of these three key principles provides the potential to reinvent government communication and interaction leading to successful endeavors for the public it serves and employees it aims to recruit and retain. This is an applied research thesis with foundation in a working body of regional government. The Maricopa County Planning and Development Department (MCPPD) provided the resources and project objective to discover the root causes of e-Governance challenges. The framing was constructed under recent theoretical trends of New Public Management Theory and Joined-Up Governance approaches to government administration. Extensive data collection was then performed to inform a remedy to these contemporary e-Governance issues. The premise of this thesis is to understand theory and practice of
e-Governance and apply methods to measure and propel that perspective to an operationally adaptable framework applicable to regional government.
e-Governance and apply methods to measure and propel that perspective to an operationally adaptable framework applicable to regional government.
ContributorsSchwartz, Michael (Author) / King, David (Thesis director) / Maynard, Andrew (Committee member) / School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (Contributor, Contributor, Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
This thesis advocated for a humanities-forward bioethics in order to promote more robust discussion, foster public involvement in research, and enrich scientific education. Furthermore, embracing a field founded on personal expression allows for a wider breadth of concerns to be considered, not just those that are able to be articulated in strictly technical terms. Speculative fiction liberates discussion from being constrained by what is presently feasible, and thus works to place societal and ethical deliberation ahead of scientific conception. The value of such stories is not tied to any one character or storyline, but rather it is derived from our ability as a culture with a shared understanding to superimpose our concerns and fears onto the novels and use them as a means of communication. Three famous science fiction novels- The Island of Dr. Moreau, Frankenstein, and Brave New World- were analyzed to illustrate the salience of science fiction to contend with fundamental issues in bioethics.
ContributorsVarda, Nicole Elizabeth (Author) / Hurlbut, Benjamin (Thesis director) / Stanford, Michael (Committee member) / Maynard, Andrew (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12
Description
Malaria is a disease that has plagued human populations throughout history. Malaria is cause by the parasite Plasmodium, which uses mosquitoes as a vector for transfer. Current methods for controlling malaria include issuing bed nets to citizens, spraying home with insecticides, and reactive medical care. However, using Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic repeats (CRISPR) in conjunction with the Cas9 protein found in bacteria, the genomes of mosquitoes can be edited to remove the ability of mosquitoes to host Plasmodium or to create sex bias in which the birth rate of males is increased so as to make reproduction near impossible. Using CRISPR, this genome edit can be ‘driven’ through a population by increasing the likelihood of that gene being passed onto subsequent generations until the entire population possesses that gene; a gene drive can theoretically be used to eliminate malaria around the world. This paper identifies uncertainties concerning scientific, environmental, governance, economic ,and social aspects of researching and implementing gene drives and makes recommendations concerning these areas for the emerging technology of gene drives concerning the eradication of malaria using Sub-Saharan Africa as a case study
ContributorsSacco, Elena Maria (Author) / Frow, Emma (Thesis director) / Maynard, Andrew (Committee member) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
Despite increased attention and funding from companies and governments worldwide over the past several years, cybersecurity incidents (such as data breaches or exploited vulnerabilities) remain frequent, widespread, and severe. Policymakers in the United States have generally addressed these problems discretely, treating them as individual events rather than identifying commonalities between them and forming a more effective broad-scale solution. In other words: the standard approaches to cybersecurity issues at the U.S. federal level do not provide sufficient insight into fundamental system behavior to meaningfully solve these problems. To that end, this dissertation develops a sociotechnical analogy of a classical mechanics technique, a framework named the Socio-Technical Lagrangian (STL). First, existing socio/technical/political cybersecurity systems in the United States are analyzed, and a new taxonomy is created which can be used to identify impacts of cybersecurity events at different scales. This taxonomy was created by analyzing a vetted corpus of key cybersecurity incidents, each of which was noted for its importance by multiple respected sources, with federal-level policy implications in the U.S..
The new taxonomy is leveraged to create STL, an abstraction-level framework. The original Lagrangian process, from the physical sciences, generates a new coordinate system that is customized for a specific complex mechanical system. This method replaces a conventional reference frame –one that is ill-suited for the desired analysis –with one that provides clearer insights into fundamental system behaviors. Similarly, STL replaces conventional cybersecurity analysis with a more salient lens, providing insight into the incentive structures within cybersecurity systems, revealing often hidden conflicts and their effects. The result is not a single solution, but a new framework that allows several questions to be asked and answered more effectively.
Synthesizing the findings from the taxonomy and STL framework, the third contribution involves formulating reasonable and effective recommendations for enhancing the cybersecurity system's state for multiple stakeholder groups. Leveraging the contextually appropriate taxonomy and unique STL framework, these suggestions address the reform of U.S. federal cybersecurity policy, drawing insights from various governmental sources, case law, and discussions with policy experts, culminating in analysis and recommendations around the 2023 White House Cybersecurity Strategy.
ContributorsWinterton, Jamie (Author) / Maynard, Andrew (Thesis advisor) / Bowman, Diana (Committee member) / Michael, Katina (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
ABSTRACT
Despite a recognized need for corporations to take greater social responsibility, such responsibility is often lacking in the decisions of corporate America. This lack of attention to social responsibility has numerous implications, not least for the US workforce. Additionally, the workforce itself has a potential role to play in implementing social responsibility. Workers are partly responsible for actions causing negative effects; however, organizations tend to avoid addressing the negative effects as a form of organized irresponsibility. This dissertation examines decisions and actions related to the worker, their work roles, and within their organization. It aims to understand to what extent workers can function as change agents in aligning their organizations with social responsibility as it relates to organizational missions. The methodological approach used to gather data for this dissertation is Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR), and the framework used to analyze the data is Midstream Modulation. The dissertation advances the STIR methodology in several respects as a result of studying technology startups with a focus towards organizational effects. These advances include measuring how modulations within individual workers’ decisions have outcomes at the organizational level or across multiple departments. Examples of such “organizational modulations” can be seen in two of the three studies at the core of this dissertation. Additionally, I demonstrate that multiple reflexive modulations can be involved in modulation sequences and that modulation sequences can be nested in relation to one another.
Furthermore, I present the Collaborative Change Agent Model, which may possibly be utilized to further discuss decisions and embed concepts such as social responsibility and Responsible Innovation in an individual worker’s decision-making process.
ContributorsZaveri, Shivam Rajeshbhai (Author) / Fisher, Erik (Thesis advisor) / Nadesan, Majia (Committee member) / Maynard, Andrew (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly advancing field with the potential to impact every aspect of society, including the inventive practices of science and technology. The creation of new ideas, devices, or methods, commonly known as inventions, is typically viewed as a process of combining existing knowledge. To understand how AI can transform scientific and technological inventions, it is essential to comprehend how such combinatorial inventions have emerged in the development of AI.This dissertation aims to investigate three aspects of combinatorial inventions in AI using data-driven and network analysis methods. Firstly, how knowledge is combined to generate new scientific publications in AI; secondly, how technical com- ponents are combined to create new AI patents; and thirdly, how organizations cre- ate new AI inventions by integrating knowledge within organizational and industrial boundaries. Using an AI publication dataset of nearly 300,000 AI publications and an AI patent dataset of almost 260,000 AI patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), this study found that scientific research related to AI is predominantly driven by combining existing knowledge in highly conventional ways, which also results in the most impactful publications. Similarly, incremental improvements and refinements that rely on existing knowledge rather than radically new ideas are the primary driver of AI patenting. Nonetheless, AI patents combin- ing new components tend to disrupt citation networks and hence future inventive practices more than those that involve only existing components.
To examine AI organizations’ inventive activities, an analytical framework called the Combinatorial Exploitation and Exploration (CEE) framework was developed to measure how much an organization accesses and discovers knowledge while working within organizational and industrial boundaries. With a dataset of nearly 500 AI organizations that have continuously contributed to AI technologies, the research shows that AI organizations favor exploitative over exploratory inventions. However, local exploitation tends to peak within the first five years and remain stable, while exploratory inventions grow gradually over time.
Overall, this dissertation offers empirical evidence regarding how inventions in AI have emerged and provides insights into how combinatorial characteristics relate to AI inventions’ quality. Additionally, the study offers tools to assess inventive outcomes and competence.
ContributorsWang, Jieshu (Author) / Maynard, Andrew (Thesis advisor) / Lobo, Jose (Committee member) / Michael, Katina (Committee member) / Motsch, Sebastien (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Crises at Teton Dam in 1976, Roosevelt Dam in 1980, Tempe Town Lake Dam in 2010, Oroville Dam in 2017, and the Edenville and Sanford Dams in 2020 prove the substantial and continuing threats to communities posed by major dams. Sociotechnical systems of dams encompass both social or governance characteristics as well as the technical or architectural characteristics. To reduce or overcome chances of failure, experts traditionally focus on making the architectural characteristics of dams safe from potential modes of failure. However, governance characteristics such as laws, building codes, and emergency actions plans also affect the ability of systems of dams that include downstream communities to sustainably adapt to crises. Increasingly, emerging threats such as climate change, earthquakes, terrorism, cyberattacks, or wildfires worsen known modes of failure such as overtopping.Considering these emerging threats, my research assesses whether the architectural and governance characteristics of the aging population of systems of dams in the United States can sustainably adapt to challenges posed by emerging threats. First, by analyzing architectural characteristics of dams, my research provides a useful definition of infrastructures of dams. Next, to assess the governance characteristics of dams, I review institutional documents to heuristically outline seven sociotechnical imaginaries and assess whether an eighth based on resilience is appearing. Further, by analyzing interview transcripts and professional conference presentations, and by conducting case studies, my research reveals ways that experts and stakeholders assess the safety and resilience of systems of dams.
The combined findings of these studies suggest that experts and stakeholders are not sufficiently informed about or focused upon important aspects of the resilience of dams. Therefore, they may not be able to sustainably adapt to crises caused or worsened by emerging threats such as climate change, earthquakes, terrorism, cyberattacks, or wildfires. I offer explanations of why this is so and formulate recommendations.
ContributorsDwyer, Kevin Thomas (Author) / Fisher, Erik (Thesis advisor) / Maynard, Andrew (Committee member) / Allenby, Braden (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022