Title
Topic
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‘Data-Driven MRI Analysis Reveals Fitness-Related Functional Change in … Cognition Following an Exercise Intervention’
“Previous research has indicated that cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) is structurally and functionally neuroprotective in older adults. However, questions remain regarding the mechanistic role of CRF on cognitive and brain health. The purposes of this study were to investigate if higher pre-intervention CRF was associated with greater change in functional brain connectivity during an exercise intervention and to determine if the magnitude of change in connectivity was related to better post-intervention cognitive performance. … Results revealed a positive correlation between pre-intervention CRF and changes in functional connectivity in the precentral gyrus.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Psychophysiology.
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‘Large Floods on the Lower Ohio River Inferred From Slackwater Deposits’
“Slackwater deposits representing past flood events provide a robust means to extend systematic gage records further back in time, place historic floods in a longer-term context, and reduce uncertainties in flood hazard analysis. The identification and application of slackwater deposits in riverine paleoflood hydrology has traditionally been limited to arid bedrock-controlled environments and periglacial environments. In this study, we utilize methods developed in humid alluvial settings and apply them to slackwater deposits, one of the first studies to do so.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment.
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‘The Skills Your Employees Need to Work Effectively With AI’
“Right now, the corporate world is in the throes of a generative AI hype cycle,” writes Nada Sanders, Distinguished Professor of supply chain management, with John D. Wood, attorney and author. “But how do [leaders] actually integrate AI with their workforce to achieve good business outcomes?” they ask. Sanders and Wood argue that the skills a workforce needs during this AI boom comes down to two categories: interpersonal skills and domain expertise.
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With NSF grant, Caracoglia will test life-size buildings against simulated tornados
“Civil and environmental engineering professor Luca Caracoglia is part of a team of researchers across nine universities who have been given a four-year, $14 million grant by the NSF to design a facility that can test tornado effects on real-life scale building models.”
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‘Evaluation of the US COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub for informing pandemic response under uncertainty’
“Our ability to forecast epidemics far into the future is constrained by the many complexities of disease systems. Realistic longer-term projections may, however, be possible under well-defined scenarios that specify the future state of critical epidemic drivers. Since December 2020, the U.S. COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub (SMH) has convened multiple modeling teams to make months ahead projections of SARS-CoV-2 burden, totaling nearly 1.8 million national and state-level projections. Here, we find SMH performance varied widely as a function of both scenario validity and model calibration.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Nature Communications.
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‘Whole genome assembly and annotation of the endangered Caribbean coral Acropora cervicornis’
“Coral species in the genus Acropora are key ecological components of coral reefs worldwide and represent the most diverse genus of scleractinian corals. While key species of Indo-Pacific Acropora have annotated genomes, no annotated genome has been published for either of the two species of Caribbean Acropora. Here we present the first fully annotated genome of the endangered Caribbean staghorn coral, Acropora cervicornis.” Find the paper and full list of authors at G3.
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‘Biochemical Activity of 17 Cancer-Associated Variants of DNA Polymerase Kappa Predicted by Electrostatic Properties’
“DNA damage and repair have been widely studied in relation to cancer and therapeutics. Y-family DNA polymerases can bypass DNA lesions … including some chemotherapy agents. Overexpression of the Y-family polymerase human pol kappa can result in tumorigenesis and drug resistance in cancer. This report describes the use of computational tools to predict the effects of single nucleotide polymorphism variants on pol kappa activity. Partial Order Optimum Likelihood (POOL), a machine learning method, … was used to identify amino acid residues most likely involved in catalytic activity.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Chemical Research in Toxicology.
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‘Chromatin Alternates Between A and B Compartments at Kilobase Scale for Subgenic Organization’
“Nuclear compartments are prominent features of 3D chromatin organization, but sequencing depth limitations have impeded investigation at ultra fine-scale. CTCF loops are generally studied at a finer scale, but the impact of looping on proximal interactions remains enigmatic. Here, we critically examine nuclear compartments and CTCF loop-proximal interactions using a combination of in situ Hi-C at unparalleled depth, algorithm development and biophysical modeling.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Nature Communications.
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‘Kinetics and mechanism of halide exchange in reactions of CpRu(PPh₃)₂Cl with alkyl halides’
“Halide exchange reactions between CpRu(PPh3)2Cl (1) and CBr4, CHBr3, CBr3CO2Et or CHBr2CO2Et yielding CpRu(PPh3)2Br (3) are facile and appear to proceed by a radical pair intermediate in a second order reaction. … Density functional theory calculations on potential intermediates suggests that a pathway leading to CpRu(PPh3)(Cl)(Br) is more likely than oxidative addition, which is preferred in reactions of 1 with bromoethane.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the Royal Society of Chemistry.
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Murthy receives patent for dendritic cell collection
“Devices, systems, and methods can be used for the automated production of dendritic cells (DC) from dendritic cell progenitors, such as monocytes obtained from peripheral blood, and the automated generation of immunotherapeutic products from those dendritic cells, all within a closed system. The invention makes it possible to obtain sufficient quantities of a subject’s own DC for use in preparing and characterizing vaccines, for activating and characterizing the activation state of the subject’s immune response, and to aid in preventing and/or treating cancer or infectious disease.”
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‘Multiconfigurational Photodynamics Simulations Reveal the Mechanism of Photodecarbonylations of Cyclopropenones’
“Gas-evolving photochemical reactions use light and mild conditions to access strained organic compounds irreversibly. Cyclopropenones are a class of light-responsive molecules used in bioorthogonal photoclick reactions; their excited-state decarbonylation reaction mechanisms are misunderstood due to their ultrafast (<100 femtosecond) lifetimes. We have combined multiconfigurational quantum mechanical (QM) calculations and non-adiabatic molecular dynamics (NAMD) simulations to uncover the excited-state mechanism of cyclopropenone and a photoprotected cyclooctyne-(COT)-precursor in gaseous and explicit aqueous environments.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the Royal Society of Chemistry.
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In every designed object, there is ‘a human being at the center’ — Lee Moreau’s new podcast explores just who design is for
Professor of the practice of design Lee Moreau’s new podcast, “Design As,” invites leaders in the field of design to discuss contemporary issues within their discipline and interrogate just who design belongs to or serves.
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Developing cutting-edge testing technology for 5G Open RAN
“Electrical and computer engineering principal research scientist Pedram Johari is leading a $2,000,000 project awarded by the Wireless Innovation Fund to develop a digital framework for testing 5G Open RAN systems called ‘DigiRAN: High-Fidelity Digital Twins for Interoperability, Security and Performance Testing of Open RAN Systems.’ DigiRAN is a digital framework that enables diverse, low-cost and automated testing of three core components for 5G Open RAN: interoperability, performance and security.”
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Ostadabbas receives NSF grant to integrate AR technologies into stroke rehabilitation
“Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Sarah Ostadabbas, in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh and Myomo, Inc., has secured a $550,000 NSF grant for their project titled ‘PFI-RP: Augmented Reality and Electroencephalography for Detecting, Assessing and Rehabilitating Visual Unilateral Neglect in Stroke Patients.’ This project aims to create a comprehensive tool for detecting, assessing and rehabilitating neglect in stroke patients. It will use augmented reality (AR) and electroencephalography (EEG) to automatically detect neglect and stimulate the affected side of the body and environment.”
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Improving the efficiency of medical device communication
“Electrical and computer engineering William Lincoln Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia was awarded a patent for ‘Ultrasonic multiplexing network for implantable medical devices.'”
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Chowdhury and Jornet made IEEE Fellows
“Electrical and computer engineering professors Kaushik Chowdhury and Josep Jornet were elevated to IEEE Fellows. Chowdhury was elevated for contributions to the development of cognitive radio networks and applied machine learning for wireless systems. Jornet was recognized for contributions in terahertz communication and nanonetworking.”
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Connecting to medical devices through ultrasonic network
“Electrical and computer engineering William Lincoln Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia was awarded a patent for ‘Internet-linked ultrasonic network for medical devices.'”
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With new industrial ecology textbook, Matthew Eckelman suggests we treat industry ‘more like nature’
Associate professor of civil and environmental engineering Matthew Eckelman has co-authored “Industrial Ecology and Sustainability,” a new edition of a seminal textbook in the field of industrial ecology, which asks, “How can we make the industrial system act more like nature?”
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Protecting wireless systems from adversarial attacks
“Electrical and computer engineering William Lincoln Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia, assistant professor Francesco Restuccia and assistant research professor Salvatore D’oro were awarded a patent for ‘Neural network for adversarial deep learning in wireless systems.'”
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‘Exploring User Perceptions of Using An LLM-Based Conversational Assistant [as a] Cooking Partner’
Large language models (LLMs) have the ability to help in daily tasks. “In this research, we chose cooking, a complex daily task, as a scenario to investigate people’s successful and unsatisfactory experiences while receiving assistance from an LLM-based CA, Mango Mango. We discovered that participants value the system’s ability to provide extensive information beyond the recipe, offer customized instructions based on context, and assist them in dynamically planning the task. However, they expect the system to be more adaptive to oral conversation and provide more suggestive responses to keep users actively involved.” Find the paper and authors list at ArXiv.
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‘Depredation Influences Anglers’ Perceptions on Soastal Shark Management and Conservation’
“Overfishing, habitat degradation, and climate change have caused declines in shark populations throughout the world’s oceans. … Reported increases in shark depredation within the last several years have begun to erode angler support for shark conservation, potentially undermining decades of previous work. To address these concerns, we implemented a GoM-wide online survey to characterize the impact of depredation on recreational reef fish anglers’ fishing satisfaction and perceptions of shark management and conservation.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Frontiers in Conservation Science.
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‘Design and Characterization of Model Systems that Promote and Disrupt Transparency of Vertebrate Crystallins In Vitro’
“Positioned within the eye, the lens supports vision by transmitting and focusing light onto the retina. As an adaptive glassy material, the lens is constituted primarily by densely-packed, polydisperse crystallin proteins that organize to resist aggregation and crystallization at high volume fractions, yet the details of how crystallins coordinate with one another to template and maintain this transparent microstructure remain unclear. The role of individual crystallin subtypes (α, β, and γ) and paired subtype compositions … is explored using combinations of spectrophotometry, hard-sphere simulations, and surface pressure measurements.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Advanced Science.
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Improving RF resonator technology
“Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Cristian Casella and electrical engineering student Xuanyi Zhao, PhD’23, were awarded a patent for ‘Two Dimensional Rod Resonator for RF Filtering.'”
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‘Behind the Scenes: Uncovering TLS and Server Certificate Practice of IoT Device Vendors in the Wild’
“IoT devices are increasingly used in consumer homes. Despite recent works in characterizing IoT TLS usage for a limited number of in-lab devices, there exists a gap in quantitatively understanding TLS behaviors from devices in the wild and server-side certificate management. To bridge this knowledge gap, we conduct a new measurement study by focusing on the practice of device vendors, through a crowdsourced dataset of network traffic. … Our study highlights potential concerns in the TLS/PKI practice by IoT device vendors.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference.