Graduation Year

2019

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Mathematics

Second Department

Computer Science

Reader 1

Professor Winston Ou

Reader 2

Professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2019 Madison S Hobbs

Abstract

This thesis is grounded in my work done through the Harvey Mudd College Clinic Program as Project Manager of the PilotCity Clinic Team. PilotCity is a startup whose mission is to transform small to mid-sized cities into centers of innovation by introducing employer partnerships and work-based learning to high school classrooms. The team was tasked with developing software and algorithms to automate PilotCity's programming and to extract educational insights from unstructured data sources like websites, syllabi, resumes, and more. The team helped engineer a web application to expand and facilitate PilotCity's usership, designed a recommender system to automate the process of matching employers to high school classrooms, and packaged a topic modeling module to extract educational priorities from more complex data such as syllabi, course handbooks, or other educational text data. Finally, the team explored automatically generating supplementary course resources using insights from topic models. This thesis will detail the team's process from beginning to final deliverables including the methods, implementation, results, challenges, future directions, and impact of the project.

This thesis is restricted to the Claremont Colleges current faculty, students, and staff.

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