The future of driving is largely headed towards autonomous vehicles, and this is clear with companies such as Tesla, Waymo, and even tech giant Apple. Many professionals predict that autonomous vehicles will likely be commercially available and legal to use in some places by the late 2020s [15]. There are some benefits to the rapid development of autonomous vehicle controllers, such as more independence for those who can’t drive due to impairments, the potential for reduced traffic, as well as possibly decreasing the number of accidents. Though these are promising prospects, there are ethical concerns regarding the implementation of such technology. The goal of this thesis is to provide an introductory literature review that discusses the history of autonomous vehicles, different levels of autonomy, ethical considerations in autonomous systems, and prior work on characterizing human driving behaviors and implementing these behaviors with autonomous vehicle controllers. Finally, recommendations are proposed for data collection on human driving behaviors in an ongoing NSF-funded project at Arizona State University, “Embodiment of Human Values Profiles in Autonomous Vehicles via Psychomimetic Controller Design.”

A significant sub-market within student affairs has been long ignored and broken: Student housing success. Research shows that strong relationships between students that live together are crucial to the well-being and academic success of that student. The problem is that universities have not figured out a standard way to group students effectively with some universities opting to market this inefficiency as a normal part of the college experience. For our thesis as a part of Founders Lab, we created our company, RiZing, to tackle this inefficiency. RiZing addresses the student-housing gap and proves that the lack of effective matching can be solved with the right people and of course, video games. Both students and higher education institutions are desperately trying to solve this problem. General event service vendors are racing just as quickly to serve this collegiate market and are extremely motivated to work with anyone who does. As the world today is becoming increasingly digitized, the founders of RiZing believe that the solution to building and maintaining strong connections with peers is possible through leveraging technology such as video games to create strong personal bonds.

Since the early 2010s, there seems to be a shift from the dominant Eurocentric beauty ideal to a new beauty standard that embodies more ethnic features, reflected in the growing number of women who want to enhance or adopt ethnic features through cosmetic procedures. As more white women adopt this new beauty standard, research into how perceptions of race are shifting is warranted and thus I explore the following question: What can we learn from white women who have undergone cosmetic procedures to appear less white and how are contemporary beauty standards changing perceptions of race?

Lunar meteorites are created when an asteroid impacts the Moon. In such events, the lunar surface, known as regolith, can experience extreme pressures and temperature conditions. Some of this regolith material can be ejected from the Moon and enter interplanetary space where it can be captured by Earth's gravity. Even after falling to Earth, the minerals of lunar meteorites preserve the history and conditions of lunar impact processes. One such mineral that has gained attention recently is tissintite due to its relatively specific temperature and pressure formation conditions. The lunar meteorite NWA 13967 and its mineral assemblage provided an opportunity for comparison to other lunar meteorites (Zhang et al. 2021). Based on its mineralogy and petrography, NWA 13967 likely experienced peak pressures of 18 to 24 GPa and peak temperatures above 2000℃, as indicated by the presence of intergranular melt, vesicles, and corundum. The occurrence of tissintite-II and coesite suggest crystallization during cooling and decompression, while other high pressure minerals likely back-transformed to lower pressure polymorphs.

There has been a recent push to examine the materials that nature is able to synthesize and consider whether the materials that humans have invented are geomimetic in nature, and whether designing nature-inspired materials is economically and environmentally beneficial. Mesoporous silica represents a class of materials with pore sizes of 2-50 nm and has been studied in catalysis, separations, and drug delivery. It has generally been made using organosilicon precursors, but in this work, we demonstrate for the first time the successful synthesis of mesoporous silica with uniform mesoporosity of 10 nm using the mineral forsterite (Mg2SiO4) as a silica source, providing a potentially cheaper and more Earth-friendly route to making this technologically important material. Forsterite was synthesized by a solid-state chemistry route and underwent dissolution-reprecipitation in an aqueous acid solution containing the soft template surfactant, Pluronic P123. The formation of forsterite was confirmed with X-ray diffraction (XRD), the successful templating of surfactant was demonstrated with thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), the surface area was determined through Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) analysis, and pore size and distribution were demonstrated with Barrett-Joyner-Halenda (BJH) analysis. The synthesized mesoporous silica at optimal conditions has surface area of 740 m2/g and pore volume of 1.4 mL/g.