Title

Topic

  • ‘Post-Hiroshima Democracy: How Japan Developed Civil Society From the Ground Up?’

    This opinion piece by professor of political science Daniel P. Aldrich investigates how the “US’ decision to use nuclear weapons devastated cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki [but] also, once again, opened Japan to outside influences, especially North American.”

    Learn more

    ,
  • ‘Genomic Signatures of Disease Resistance in Endangered Staghorn Corals’

    “White band disease (WBD) has caused unprecedented declines in the Caribbean Acropora corals, which are now listed as critically endangered species. Highly disease-resistant Acropora cervicornis genotypes exist, but the genetic underpinnings of disease resistance are not understood. Using transmission experiments, a newly assembled genome and whole-genome resequencing of 76 A. cervicornis genotypes from Florida and Panama, we identified 10 genomic regions and 73 single-nucleotide polymorphisms that are associated with disease resistance and that include functional protein-coding changes in four genes involved in coral immunity and pathogen detection.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Science.

    Learn more

    ,
  • Critical Assessment of Genome Interpretation workshop held at Northeastern

    ,

    “Key themes range from addressing outstanding challenges in the field to confronting ethical concerns responsibly. The meeting surveys the current state of variant impact prediction, and strategies for assessing prediction performance. We will also explore ways to optimize exploration, discovery, diagnosis and treatment. We place particular emphasis on emerging data resources and novel methodologies, such as large language models.”

    Learn more

    ,
  • Ergun elected INFORMS Fellow

    “Ozlem Ergun, College of Engineering distinguished professor in mechanical and industrial engineering, was elected a Fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) for her applications of operations research methods to humanitarian and health systems, emergency response and transportation and logistics problems; and for establishing a community of operations research professionals with interest in public programs. This honor is reserved for few select members. In 2023, only twelve members were elected Fellows.”

    Learn more

  • ‘Electric Shock Causes a Fleeing-Like Persistent Behavioral Response in the Nematode Caenorhabditis elegans’

    “Behavioral persistency reflects internal brain states, which are the foundations of multiple brain functions. However, experimental paradigms enabling genetic analyses of behavioral persistency and its associated brain functions have been limited. Here, we report novel persistent behavioral responses caused by electric stimuli in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. When the animals on bacterial food are stimulated by alternating current, their movement speed suddenly increases 2- to 3-fold, persisting for more than 1 minute even after a 5-second stimulation.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Genetics.

    Learn more

  • ‘Tuning the Default Mode Network With Behavioral Interventions To Address the Youth Mental Health Crisis’

    ” The surging demand for adolescent mental health care has been declared a crisis by the US Surgeon General, UK and European health officials and pediatric health organizations. Demand for mental health services has broadly outstripped capacity, reducing access to current gold-standard treatments, which, although lifesaving for many, are only effective for a minority of those who use them. Thus, scalable interventions — ideally deployable within and outside clinical settings — are needed to reduce suffering and improve functional outcomes for adolescents.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Nature Mental Health.

    Learn more

  • ‘Association of Post–COVID-19 Condition Symptoms and Employment Status’

    ,

    “Little is known about the functional correlates of post–COVID-19 condition (PCC), also known as long COVID, particularly the relevance of neurocognitive symptoms. … PCC was associated with a greater likelihood of unemployment and lesser likelihood of working full time in adjusted models. The presence of cognitive symptoms was associated with diminished likelihood of working full time. These results underscore the importance of developing strategies to treat and manage PCC symptoms.” Find the paper and full list of authors at JAMA Network.

    Learn more

  • ‘Sociocultural Determinants of Global Mask-Wearing Behavior’

    “Behavioral responses influence the trajectories of epidemics. During the COVID-19 pandemic, nonpharmaceutical interventions reduced pathogen transmission and mortality worldwide. However, despite the global pandemic threat, there was substantial cross-country variation in the adoption of protective behaviors that is not explained by disease prevalence alone. In particular, many countries show a pattern of slow initial mask adoption followed by sharp transitions to high acceptance rates. … We develop a game-theoretic model of mask wearing where the utility of wearing a mask depends on the perceived risk of infection, social norms and mandates from formal institutions.” Find the paper and authors list…

    Learn more

    ,
  • Khoury theory researchers receive pair of best paper awards

    ,

    “Former postdoctoral research associate Wei-Kai Lin, PhD. student Ethan Mook, and professor (and NTT research senior scientist) Daniel Wichs won the Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing. The team’s research focused on maintaining user privacy in search engines through fully homomorphic encryption and discussed how the theory could be applied in practice. Meanwhile, professor Soheil Behnezhad won Best Paper at the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, one of three flagship conferences in algorithms and theory. His research revolved around dynamic graph algorithms, optimizing processes for changing conditions and large datasets.”

    Learn more

  • ‘Lensing in the Blue. II. Estimating the Sensitivity of Stratospheric Balloons to Weak Gravitational Lensing’

    “The Superpressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) is a diffraction-limited, wide-field, 0.5 m, near-infrared to near-ultraviolet observatory designed to exploit the stratosphere’s space-like conditions. SuperBIT’s 2023 science flight will deliver deep, blue imaging of galaxy clusters for gravitational lensing analysis. … We validate our pipeline and forecast SuperBIT survey properties with simulated galaxy cluster observations in SuperBIT’s near-UV and blue bandpasses. We predict imaging depth, galaxy number (source) density and redshift distribution for observations in SuperBIT’s three bluest filters; the effect of lensing sample selections is also considered.” Find the paper and full list of authors at The Astronomical Journal.

    Learn more

  • ‘Functional Annotation of Haloacid Dehalogenase Superfamily Structural Genomics Proteins’

    ,

    “Haloacid dehalogenases (HAD) are members of a large superfamily that includes many Structural Genomics proteins with poorly characterized functionality. This superfamily consists of multiple types of enzymes that can act as sugar phosphatases, haloacid dehalogenases, phosphonoacetaldehyde hydrolases, ATPases or phosphate monoesterases. Here we report on predicted functional annotations and experimental testing by direct biochemical assay for Structural Genomics proteins from the HAD superfamily.” Find the paper and full list of authors at The Biochemical Journal.

    Learn more

    ,
  • ‘Targeting Default Mode Network Connectivity With Real-Time fMRI Neurofeedback: A Pilot Study Among Adolescents With Affective Disorder History’

    ,

    “Adolescents experience high rates of major depressive disorder (MDD), however, gold standard treatments are only effective for ∼50% of youth. There is a critical need to develop novel interventions that target neural mechanisms believed to potentiate depressive symptoms.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Biological Psychiatry.

    Learn more

  • ‘Large Depth Differences Between Target and Flankers Can Increase Crowding: Evidence From a Multi-Depth Plane Display’

    “Crowding occurs when the presence of nearby features causes highly visible objects to become unrecognizable. Although crowding has implications for many everyday tasks and the tremendous amounts of research reflect its importance, surprisingly little is known about how depth affects crowding. Most available studies show that stereoscopic disparity reduces crowding, indicating that crowding may be relatively unimportant in three-dimensional environments. … Using a novel multi-depth plane display, this study investigated how large, real differences in target-flanker depth, representative of those experienced between many objects in the real world, affect crowding.” Find the paper and full list of authors at eLife…

    Learn more

  • Northeastern professor Samina Karim receives prestigious award for career-defining paper — written 23 years ago

    Samina Karim has received a best paper prize for a study published during her Ph.D. qualifying exams — 23 years ago — about how companies reconfigure in the wake of acquisitions. Co-written with her Ph.D. adviser Will Mitchell, who passed away in 2021, the experience has been “bittersweet,” Karim says.

    Learn more

  • ‘”Always Nice and Confident, Sometimes Wrong”: Developer’s Experiences Engaging Generative AI Chatbots Versus Human-Powered Q&A Platforms’

    , ,

    “Software engineers have historically relied on human-powered Q&A platforms, like Stack Overflow (SO), as coding aids. With the rise of generative AI, developers have adopted AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, in their software development process. Recognizing the potential parallels between human-powered Q&A platforms and AI-powered question-based chatbots, we investigate and compare how developers integrate this assistance into their real-world coding experiences by conducting thematic analysis of Reddit posts. Through a comparative study of SO and ChatGPT, we identified each platform’s strengths, use cases, and barriers.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.

    Learn more

  • ‘Semantic Encapsulation Using Linking Types’

    ,

    “Interoperability pervades nearly all mainstream language implementations, as most systems leverage subcomponents written in different languages. And yet, such linking can expose a language to foreign behaviors that are internally inexpressible, which poses a serious threat to safety invariants and programmer reasoning. … In this paper, we outline an approach that encapsulates foreign code in a sound way — i.e., without disturbing the invariants promised by types of the core language.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Type-Driven Development.

    Learn more

  • ‘Linguistic Landscape in a Rural Basque Area: A Case Study in Ondarroa’

    “Basque is one of the official languages spoken in the Basque Country and although it is usually considered the minoritised language, its situation might be different in rural areas. The presence of Basque and Spanish has been previously reported in urban areas, … but their presence in rural areas remains unknown. To address this gap, the linguistic landscape (LL) of a rural town (Ondarroa, Bizkaia) is examined. … The results show that contrary to the situation of Basque in urban areas (Cenoz & Gorter, 2006), Basque is the language with the largest presence in the LL of the street in…

    Learn more

  • Why can’t scientists reproduce each other’s experiments? This researcher is developing infrastructure that ensures they can

    Assistant professor of computer science Jonathan Bell is part of a multi-university team of researchers developing “a community infrastructure” to help scientists write software that will be more reproducible, ensuring accuracy within experiments and increasing confidence in scientific results across the board.

    Learn more

    ,
  • Is air pollution putting you at risk of dementia? This researcher wants to find out

    Clinical professor and associate dean Trenton Honda is part of a multi-university study comparing incidence of metal airborne pollutants in the “olfactory bulb” with other areas of the brain to identify potential risk factors for Alzheimer’s and other dementias.

    Learn more

    ,
  • ‘Broader Lessons About Resilience From Maui’s Fires’

    “Maui’s devastating fires — … where the community has quickly rallied together — should drive home the critical importance of close ties between neighbors and residents, as they remain the true first responders on the scene of most accidents. Even in a car accident or house fire, it is those closest to the event who show up, drag survivors away from danger, administer first aid and CPR, and alert authorities of the tragedy. And when major disasters occur, neighbors — not government officials — know who lives alone and who needs help moving away from a vulnerable place.”

    Learn more

  • Patent awarded for subharmonic sensor technology

    ,

    “Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Cristian Casella, professor Matteo Rinaldi and postdoctoral research associate Hussein Hussein were awarded a patent for ‘Subharmonic Tags for Remote Continuous and Threshold Sensing.'”

    Learn more

    ,
  • ‘The Structure of Racial Identity: Comparing Non-Hispanic White and Black Americans’

    “This study focuses on the measurement and modeling of Racial Identification among non-Hispanic White and Black Americans. … We examine the underlying structure of racial identity. Here, our focus is on whether a comparable and reliable composite measure of Racial Identification (RI) can be constructed. … We then turn to an examination of how RI is distributed in the social structure, with a special focus on the effects of race. … Our results show noteworthy racial group differences both in levels of RI, and in several of its determinants.” Find this book chapter and authors’ listing in Advancing Identity Theory,…

    Learn more

  • ‘Massachusetts lags on banning plastics,’ Fitzgerald argues

    “Governor Maura Healey’s executive order banning state agencies from buying single-use plastic bottles sends a message to the Legislature that it needs to get serious about restricting plastics. The Commonwealth lags behind other states on banning plastic products,” writes professor of public policy and urban affairs Joan Fitzgerald.

    Learn more

  • ‘Unicorn, Hare or Tortoise? Using Machine Learning To Predict Working Memory Training Performance’

    , ,

    “People differ considerably in the extent to which they benefit from working memory (WM) training. … In the current study, 568 undergraduates completed one of several N-back intervention variants over the course of two weeks. … We applied machine-learning algorithms to train a binary tree model to predict individuals’ training patterns relying on several individual difference variables that have been identified as relevant in previous literature. … We found that our classification model showed good predictive power in distinguishing between high performers and relatively lower performers.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the Journal of Cognition.

    Learn more

  • Designing chips for AI-enabled spectrum perception

    “Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Francesco Restuccia — in collaboration with Arjuna Madanayake from Florida International University, Vishal Saxena from the University of Delaware and Jia Di from the University of Arkansas — was awarded a $2,000,000 NSF grant for ‘FuSe: Deep Learning and Signal Processing Using Silicon Photonics and Digital CMOS Circuits for Ultra-Wideband Spectrum Perception.'”

    Learn more

    , ,
  • Spinout company Fourier LLC to revolutionize thermal management

    “After pioneering thermoforming technical ceramic matrix composites last year, mechanical and industrial engineering associate professor Randall Erb and mechanical engineering alum Jason Hoffman-Bice, PhD’22, have created a spinout company called Fourier LLC to commercialize their groundbreaking innovation in thermal management.”

    Learn more

    ,
  • Hajjar begins service as president of Structural Engineering Institute

    “Jerome F. Hajjar, PhD, PE, F.ASCE, F.SEI, CDM Smith Professor and chair of the department of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern University, and member of the National Academy of Engineering, becomes the president of the Structural Engineering Institute (SEI) in October 2023. With over 30,000 members, SEI, one of nine Institutes within the American Society of Civil Engineers, is a premier professional organization for structural engineers nationally and internationally.”

    Learn more

  • “Electrical and computer engineering professors Josep Jornet (PI), Tommaso Melodia, principal research scientists Michele Polese, Michael Marcus and associate research scientist Vitaly Petrov, in collaboration with Steven Reising from Colorado State University, were awarded a $750,000 NSF grant for ‘DASS: Dynamically Adjustable Spectrum Sharing between Ground Communication Networks and Earth Exploration Satellite Systems Above 100 GHz.'”

    Learn more

    ,
  • ‘Assessing the Potential for the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) Mission for Constituent Flux Estimations’

    ,

    “The recently launched Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite will simultaneously measure river surface water widths, elevations, and slopes. These novel observations combined with assumptions for unobserved bathymetry and roughness enable the derivation of river discharge. … SWOT has an irregular flyover frequency, ranging from roughly 1 to 10 times per 21 days. Here, we present how best to use SWOT data when it becomes live, including consideration of how best to accommodate or utilize the irregular flyover frequency of SWOT as it intersects with river reaches.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Frontiers in Earth Science.

    Learn more

    ,
  • ‘Hierarchical Structure Formation by Crystal Growth-Front Instabilities During Ice Templating’

    ,

    “Directional solidification of aqueous solutions and slurries in a temperature gradient is widely used to produce cellular materials through a phase separation of solutes or suspended particles between growing ice lamellae. While this process has analogies to the directional solidification of metallurgical alloys, it forms very different hierarchical structures. … We show that the flat side of lamellae forms because of slow faceted ice-crystal growth along the c-axis, while weakly anisotropic fast growth in other directions, including the basal plane, is responsible for the unilateral features.” Find the paper and full list of authors at PNAS.

    Learn more