Robotic Process Automation: An Implementation Example for a Donation Project; Societal Influences on Different Transportation Systems in South Korea

Robot process automation (RPA) is the process of utilizing “virtual robots” through computer software emulation to manipulate existing software application in the same way as humans do and implement automation in an effort to increase efficiency mostly at rule-based repetitive tasks. The technical report is based on the implementation of an RPA designed to solve the problem of the donor registration process for a real donation project for the Community Chest of Korea and the First Republic of Korea Army which eventually raised over 1.3 million US dollars from multiple one-dollar donations. It gives a detailed explanations the entire design and implementation processes for the RPA including subdivision and identification of the automatable tasks, exploration and determination of suitable software technology for each task, verification and implementation of the technology, and finally the integration and testing of the RPA system as a whole. Also, the effectiveness of the RPA was analyzed and potential improvements for future work was identified and suggested. The report attempts to illustrate the strengths of RPAs and what changes and evolutions they could bring to industries of virtually all fields, especially considering that the research on the topic has only begun recently.
The STS thesis is based on an entirely different topic of societal influences on currently operating transportation system in South Korea. The paper attempts to perform detailed analysis on a number of transportation systems and the problems that are embedded in them. Through the lens of the social construction of technology, these case studies reveal how different social factors including social perspectives, government regulations, media, and infrastructure influence the development and adoption of transportation systems or technologies as well as determine the success or failure of the technology. Also, the paper identifies the causes and potential solutions for a number of problems and uses these understanding of the societal influences to propose viable approaches in dealing with newly emerging transportation technologies.

School of Engineering and Applied Science
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Technical Advisor: Briana Morrison
STS Advisor: Travis Elliott