“Small and medium-size business typically have fewer resources (e.g., money as well as knowledgeable people) to secure their IT infrastructure as well as maintain a good backup strategy,” Engin Kirda, professor of computer science at Northeastern University, told TechRepublic. “Hence, whenever a ransomware attack happens, they often end up having to pay the ransom to […]

Social media cannot fill the gap created by the declining local news coverage, she and others involved in this type of research argued. “With Twitter … you are picking up a signal, but that signal might not be precise,” said Alessandro Vespignani, a professor at Northeastern University whose research focuses on modeling of epidemics. And […]

Leo Beletsky, an associate professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University, spoke with Morning Edition Tuesday about President Trump’s “get tough” approach on combating the opioid epidemic.

“You have to proceed on the assumption that this information has been extracted from you,” Woodrow Hartzog, author of Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies, told me on the phone. “Cambridge Analytica used an information extraction technique that was well-known to technologists for years. The implications of this debacle is […]

Northeastern University economist John Kwoka documents the drop-off in U.S. merger enforcement.

Such in-store engagement is what differentiates this chain from other struggling retailers, said Bruce Clark, associate professor at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University.

Alan Mislove, a professor of computer science at Northeastern University and one of the study’s co-authors, said that he gave Facebook credit for having the feature at all, noting that it is one of the only examples of a company offering any kind of explanation of how an algorithm actually works. But the findings do […]

But the strategies that educators are recommending to build that self-control — a reliance on willpower and executive function to suppress emotions and desires for immediate pleasures — are precisely the wrong ones. Besides having a poor long-term success rate in general, the effectiveness of willpower drops precipitously when people are feeling tired, anxious, or stressed. And, […]

“The idea that we can ratchet up punishment and penalties of various sorts to address the supply is based on exactly zero evidence of the probability that this will work,” said Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University.

New bridges are designed so precisely and under such scrutiny by teams of engineers that it would be rare for an error to result in such a deadly outcome, said Ming Wang, a distinguished professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern University in Boston.

Cornell’s research is backed up by work done by criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University on mass murders, defined as those with four or more victims not including the shooter. Mass murders occur 20 to 30 times per year, but only one of those cases on average takes place at a school. “There is […]

“It’s basically saying to immigrants: ‘Stay away from the courthouse,’ ” said Rachel Rosenbloom, co-director of the Northeastern University School of Law Immigrant Justice Clinic.