Title
Topic
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‘McMini: A Programmable DPOR-Based Model Checker for Multithreaded Programs’
“Current model checkers hardwire the behavior of common thread operations, and do not recognize application-dependent thread paradigms or functions using simpler primitive operations. This introduces additional operations, causing current model checkers to be excessively slow. In addition, there is no mechanism to model the semantics of the actual thread wakeup policies implemented in the underlying thread library or operating system. Eliminating these constraints can make model checkers faster. … McMini is an extensible model checker based on DPOR (Dynamic Partial Order Reduction).” Find the paper and full list of authors at Programming Journal.
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‘Type Prediction With Program Decomposition and Fill-in-the-Type Training’
“TypeScript and Python are two programming languages that support optional type annotations, which are useful but tedious to introduce and maintain. This has motivated automated type prediction: given an untyped program, produce a well-typed output program. Large language models (LLMs) are promising for type prediction, but there are challenges. … We address these challenges [with] OpenTau, a search-based approach for type prediction that leverages large language models. We propose a new metric for type prediction quality, give a tree-based program decomposition that searches a space of generated types and present fill-in-the-type fine-tuning.” Find the paper and full list of authors…
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‘HVA_CPS Proposal: A Process for Hazardous Vulnerability Analysis in Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems’
“Society is increasingly dependent upon the use of distributed cyber-physical systems (CPSs), such as energy networks, chemical processing plants and transport systems. Such CPSs typically have multiple layers of protection to prevent harm to people or the CPS. However, if both the control and protection systems are vulnerable to cyber-attacks, an attack may cause CPS damage or breaches of safety. … This article identifies the attributes that a rigorous hazardous vulnerability analysis (HVA) process would require and compares them against related works. None fully meet the requirements for rigour.” Find the paper and full list of authors at PeerJ Computer Science.
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‘Companion: A Pilot Randomized Clinical Trial … for Detecting and Modifying Daily Inactivity Among Adults >60 Years — Design and Protocol’
“Supervised personal training is most effective in improving the health effects of exercise in older adults. … Strategies to extend the effect of trainer contact outside of supervision and that integrate meaningful and intelligent two-way communication to provide complex and interactive problem solving may motivate older adults to “move more and sit less” and sustain positive behaviors to further improve health. This paper describes … a technology-based behavior-aware text-based virtual “Companion” … to deliver behavior change strategies using socially engaging, contextually salient, and tailored text message conversations in near-real-time.” Find the paper and full list of authors at MDPI Sensors.
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‘SECDA-TFLite: A Toolkit for Efficient Development of FPGA-Based DNN Accelerators for Edge Inference’
“In this paper we propose SECDA-TFLite, a new open source toolkit for developing DNN hardware accelerators integrated within the TFLite framework. The toolkit leverages the principles of SECDA, a hardware/software co-design methodology, to reduce the design time of optimized DNN inference accelerators on edge devices with FPGAs. With SECDA-TFLite, we reduce the initial setup costs associated with integrating a new accelerator design within a target DNN framework, allowing developers to focus on the design.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing.
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‘A Study of Multi-Factor and Risk-Based Authentication Availability’
“Password-based authentication (PBA) remains the most popular form of user authentication on the web despite its long-understood insecurity. Given the deficiencies of PBA, many online services support multi-factor authentication (MFA) and/or risk-based authentication (RBA) to better secure user accounts. … In this paper, we present a study of 208 popular sites in the Tranco top 5K that support account creation to understand the availability of MFA and RBA on the web … and how logging into sites through more secure SSO providers changes the landscape of user authentication security.” Find the paper and full list of authors at USENIX Security…
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‘Wrapped in Story: The Affordances of Narrative for Citizen Science Games’
“Citizen science games enable public participation in scientific research, yet these games often struggle to engage wide audiences. As a potential solution, some game developers look to narrative as an experience-enhancing feature. … We investigated the effects of wrapping a story around the tutorial puzzles of the citizen science game Foldit. We found that the narrative increased the time players spent engaging with the game’s tutorial and its scientific puzzles but did not substantially affect their progress through the tutorial.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 18th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games proceedings.
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‘Iterative Soft Shrinkage Learning for Efficient Image Super-Resolution’
“Image super-resolution (SR) has witnessed extensive neural network designs from CNN to transformer architectures. However, prevailing SR models suffer from prohibitive memory footprint and intensive computations, which limits further deployment on edge devices. This work investigates the potential of network pruning for super-resolution to take advantage of off-the-shelf network designs and reduce the underlying computational overhead. … We adopt unstructured pruning with sparse models directly trained from scratch.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘UniControl: A Unified Diffusion Model for Controllable Visual Generation in the Wild’
“Achieving machine autonomy and human control often represent divergent objectives in the design of interactive AI systems. Visual generative foundation models such as Stable Diffusion show promise in navigating these goals, especially when prompted with arbitrary languages. However, they often fall short in generating images with spatial, structural or geometric controls. … In response, we introduce UniControl, a new generative foundation model that consolidates a wide array of controllable condition-to-image (C2I) tasks within a singular framework, while still allowing for arbitrary language prompts.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘Linearity of Relation Decoding in Transformer Language Models’
“Much of the knowledge encoded in transformer language models (LMs) may be expressed in terms of relations: relations between words and their synonyms, entities and their attributes, etc. We show that, for a subset of relations, this computation is well-approximated by a single linear transformation on the subject representation. Linear relation representations may be obtained by constructing a first-order approximation to the LM from a single prompt, and they exist for a variety of factual, commonsense, and linguistic relations.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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At the world’s largest conference of management scholars, Northeastern pulls out all the stops
Northeastern University faculty members presented research, won awards and hosted a reception for some of the 8,000 attendees who visited Boston for the 2023 Academy of Management Conference.
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Academy of Management 2023 Publication Awards
Northeastern faculty and post-docs were the recipients of numerous awards at the 2023 Academy of Management Conference.
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‘Action Research’ can empower higher education administrators toward better problem solving
In “Faculty Development: Achieving Change Through Action Research,” three professors from the Northeastern University College of Professional Studies want to “empower all administrators in higher education to engage more effectively in resolving challenges in colleges and universities,” the publisher’s webpage states. This empowerment comes through “”Action Research… a powerful, localized methodology for impacting difficult and complex issues embedded in organizations.”
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Department of Civil and Environmental Engineerign hosts 2023 FUNWAVE Workshop
“The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern, alongside partners from The Center for Applied Coastal Research, University of Delaware and the US Army Engineer and Development Center hosted the fifth FUNWAVE-TVD Training Workshop.” As an open-source modeling program, FUNWAVE meant the workshop could cover “a variety of topics, ranging from wave theory to numerical modeling to coastal engineering applications, and included hands-on trainings and seminars on modeling development and case studies.” During the conference, “professor Qin Jim Chen gave a seminar on predicting hazardous rip currents using FUNWAVE-TVD.”
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Enhancing antenna defense using smart metamaterials: A patent
“Vincent Harris, University Distinguished and William Lincoln Smith Professor of electrical and computer engineering, was awarded a patent for ‘Magnetodielectric Metamaterials and Articles Including Magnetodielectric Metamaterials.'”
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Maheswaran speaks at ATINER2023 Round Table on ‘The Future of Science and Engineering Education’
Teaching professor in electrical and computer engineering, Bala Maheswaran presented “at the ATINER2023 Round Table Discussion on ‘The Future of Science and Engineering Education.’ This event took place on July 17-18 at the Athens Institute for Education and Research (ATINER) in Athens, Greece. During the roundtable discussion, Maheswaran spoke on the topic of ‘Sustainability in Engineering Education’ and shared the stage with presenters from various countries. The event fostered a diverse and dynamic exchange of ideas, shaping the future trajectory of science and engineering education.”
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Ratilal-Makris selected to serve on Ocean Research Advisory Panel
“Electrical and computer engineering professor Purnima Ratilal-Makris is one of eighteen members selected for the newly formed Ocean Research Advisory Panel, who will serve as advisors to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the interagency Ocean Policy Committee. It is expected that the Panel will help carry out the administration’s goals regarding the Blue economy, resilience, ecosystem health and renewable ocean energy.”
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More efficient deep neural networks for edge devices
“Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Yanzhi Wang, in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh, was awarded a $600,000 NSF grant for ‘Expediting Continual Online Learning on Edge Platforms Through Software-Hardware Co-designs.'”
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Developing secure next generation cellular networks
“Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Francesco Restuccia, William Lincoln Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia, and Khoury College of Computer science associate professor Alina Oprea were awarded a $900,000 NSF grant for ‘Resilient-by-Design Data-Driven NextG Open Radio Access Networks.'”
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‘TikTok as Algorithmically Mediated Biographical Illumination: Autism, Self-Discovery and Platformed Diagnosis on #Autisktok’
“Scholarship in the sociology of medicine has tended to characterize diagnosis as disruptive to one’s self-concept. This categorization, though, requires reconsideration in light of public conversations about mental health and community building around neurocognitive conditions, particularly among youth online. … We explored the shifting nature of [‘biographical illumination’] through the case of TikTok. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, we argue that TikTok serves as a space to discuss diagnosis and refine one’s sense of self as a result of diagnosis.” Find the paper and full list of authors at New Media & Society.
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Ries receives NOAA grant to study future effects of CO2 climate change in the ocean
“Professor Justin Ries was funded to collect and analyze sediments from the western Atlantic shelf (Maine to Maryland) as part NOAA’s third East Coast Ocean Acidification (ECOA-3) cruise aboard the NOAAS Ronald H. Brown — NOAA’s only scientific ship for global scale oceanographic survey. The objective of Ries’ specific project is to characterize the distribution and composition of calcium carbonate sediments deposited within shelf sediments of the western Atlantic shelf. Characterizing the distribution and composition of shelf carbonates will improve our understanding of future CO2-induced climate and ocean change.”
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Sherbo receives Catalyst Grant to study coral reef resilience
“This work, in collaboration with a biophysicist, will explore the resilience of soft corals to rising ocean temperatures by understanding two main adaptations: the coral microbiota, and the morphology and growth patterns.”
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NIH funds Shansky research studying pain processing centers between the sexes
“Traumatic experiences create powerful memories by linking information about the trauma itself with environmental cues associated with the event. Our lab has found evidence that males and females may form these memories using different brain regions, and this grant will allow us to probe this question more deeply by recording neural activity in real time as animals are learning.”
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Lee-Parsons receives NSF grant to enhance drug production from the periwinkle plant
“Plants produce a wide array of valuable, biologically active natural products we use as medicines. This grant will enable engineering for enhanced drug production from the medical plant, C. roseus,” also called periwinkle. The full project title is, “PlantSynBio: A Novel CRISPR SynBio Tool for Investigating and Reprogramming the Regulation of Alkaloid Biosynthesis in Catharanthus roseus.”
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Department of Energy grant to fund center for solar energy harvesting
“The mission of the BioLEC Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) is to combine light harvesting and advances in solar photochemistry to enable more powerful editing, building, and transforming of abundant materials to produce energy-rich feedstock chemicals. As part of the BioLEC EFRC, we will develop new supercharged light-powered catalysts and reactions an deepen our understanding of existing ones, through which valuable products can be generated from plentiful molecules such as those extracted from waste and renewal resources.”
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NIH grant to support research of chemotherapy alternative, ‘photomedicine’
“Photomedicine avoids traditional side effects of systemic chemotherapy, yet effective outcomes are dependent on direct irradiation from an external light source that limits the scope and the types of cancers that may be treated. This proposal develops a precision photomedicine platform that exploits natural disease-homing properties of the immune system to mediate bioluminescence-activated phototherapy in combination with established technology to deliver photoactive therapeutic agents selectively to tumor cells. Successful, proof-of-concept studies will establish a new paradigm of systemic, whole-body phototherapy by enabling immune cell-based light delivery to deep and diffuse metastatic disease.”
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Fernandez receives NOAA grant to study relation between oyster growing methods and their parasites
“We will be collaborating with local oyster farmers to investigate how growing methods (on the bottom vs. Floating) and water quality affect the prevalence and intensity of common oyster parasites. The knowledge developed through this work will be shared with various stakeholders through workshops and aquaculture professional associations.”
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Whitfield-Gabrieli receives NIH grant to study adolescent depression with ‘real-time fMRI neurofeedback’
“Adolescents experience alarmingly high rates of major depressive disorder (MDD), and these episodes are highly recurrent and increase suicide risk. … Rumination (i.e., repetitive, negative patterns of thinking typically focused on the self) contributes to MDD onset, maintenance, and recurrence as well as predicts treatment non-response and relapse. Mindfulness meditation has been shown to suppress the default mode network (DMN), a set of brain regions that are overactive in depression. … We are launching a large scale, clinical trial to do a mindfulness based real-time fMRI neurofeedback intervention in adolescents with MDD in order to quiet the DMN and mitigate…
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Eskew awarded NSF grant to study response time in human vision
“The project will use variations on a classic method called response time (RT) measurement, which has human participants respond as quickly as possible to the presentation of carefully-controlled visual patterns. One goal is to demonstrate that the fastest RTs are triggered by the very early responses in the photoreceptors of the retina of the eye. Two parallel pathways in the visual system called ON and OFF pathways, generate opposite-polarity responses. A second goal is to test the hypothesis that these two pathways can be measured and studied separately using these speeded behavioral responses.”