Title
Topic
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Enhancing security for brain-inspired computing
“Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Xiaolin Xu, in collaboration with Shaolei Ren from the University of California-Riverside, was awarded a $600,000 NSF grant for ‘Securing Brain-inspired Hyperdimensional Computing against Design-time and Run-time Attacks for Edge Devices.'”
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Eco-friendly passive cooling with recycled packaging plastics
“Mechanical and industrial engineering associate professor Yi Zheng’s research group Nano Energy Laboratory published their research on ‘Oil-paper-umbrella-inspired passive radiative cooling using recycled packaging foam’ in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A and ‘Eco-friendly passive radiative cooling using recycled packaging plastics’ in Materials Today Sustainability. In both works, they studied eco-friendly passive cooling materials made of recycled packaging plastics for a greener and cleaner community. The low material cost and ease of fabrication provide a path for effective passive cooling, which requires zero external energy consumption (e.g., air conditioners), especially in less developed areas.”
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‘Information Transfer in Multitask Learning, Data Augmentation and Beyond’
“A hallmark of human intelligence is that we continue to learn new information and then extrapolate the learned information onto new tasks and domains (see, e.g., Thrun and Pratt (1998)). While this is a fairly intuitive observation, formulating such ideas has proved to be a challenging research problem and continues to inspire new studies. Recently, there has been increasing interest in AI/ML about building models that generalize across tasks, even when they have some form of distribution shifts. How can we ground this research in a solid framework to develop principled methods for better practice?”
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‘Universal Amplification of KDM Security: From 1-Key Circular to Multi-Key KDM’
“An encryption scheme is Key Dependent Message (KDM) secure if it is safe to encrypt messages that can arbitrarily depend on the secret keys themselves. In this work, we show how to upgrade essentially the weakest form of KDM security into the strongest one. In particular, we assume the existence of a symmetric-key bit-encryption that is circular-secure in the 1-key setting, meaning that it maintains security even if one can encrypt individual bits of a single secret key under itself.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Cryptology E-Print Archive.
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‘Leveraging Large Language Models for Mental Health Prediction via Online Text Data’
“The recent technology boost of large language models (LLMs) has empowered a variety of applications. However, there is very little research on understanding and improving LLMs’ capability for the mental health domain. In this work, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of multiple LLMs … on various mental health prediction tasks via online text data. We conduct a wide range of experiments, covering zero-shot prompting, few-shot prompting, and instruction finetuning. The results indicate the promising yet limited performance of LLMs with zero-shot and few-shot prompt designs for mental health tasks.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘On-Robot Bayesian Reinforcement Learning for POMDPs’
“Robot learning is often difficult due to the expense of gathering data. The need for large amounts of data can, and should, be tackled with effective algorithms and leveraging expert information on robot dynamics. Bayesian reinforcement learning (BRL), thanks to its sample efficiency and ability to exploit prior knowledge, is uniquely positioned as such a solution method. Unfortunately, the application of BRL has been limited due to the difficulties of representing expert knowledge. … This paper advances BRL for robotics by proposing a specialized framework for physical systems.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘A Guessing Entropy-Based Framework for Deep Learning-Assisted Side-Channel Analysis’
‘Recently deep-learning (DL) techniques have been widely adopted in side-channel power analysis. A DL-assisted SCA generally consists of two phases: a deep neural network (DNN) training phase and a follow-on attack phase using the trained DNN. However, currently the two phases are not well aligned, as there is no conclusion on what metric used in the training can result in the most effective attack in the second phase. … We propose to conduct DNN training directly with a common SCA effectiveness metric, Guessing Entropy (GE).’ Find the paper and full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and…
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‘DRIP: Domain Refinement Iteration With Polytopes for Backward Reachability Analysis of Neural Feedback Loops’
“Safety certification of data-driven control techniques remains a major open problem. This letter investigates backward reachability as a framework for providing collision avoidance guarantees for systems controlled by neural network (NN) policies. … Existing methods conservatively assume a domain over which to relax the NN, which causes loose over-approximations of the set of states that could lead the system into the obstacle. … To address this issue, we introduce DRIP, an algorithm with a refinement loop on the relaxation domain, which substantially tightens the BP set bounds.” Find the paper and full list of authors at IEEE Control Systems Letters.
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‘Using Sequences of Life-Events to Predict Human Lives’
“Machine learning has revolutionized computers’ ability to analyze text through flexible computational models. Due to their structural similarity to written language, transformer-based architectures have also shown promise as tools to make sense of a range of multi-variate sequences. … We can also represent human lives in a way that shares this structural similarity to language. From one perspective, lives are simply sequences of events. … Here, we exploit this similarity to adapt innovations from natural language processing to examine the evolution and predictability of human lives based on detailed event sequences.” Find the paper and full list of authors at…
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‘Defense Against Shortest Path Attacks’
“Identifying shortest paths between nodes in a network is an important task in applications involving routing of resources. Recent work has shown that a malicious actor can manipulate a graph to make traffic between two nodes of interest follow their target path. In this paper, we develop a defense against such attacks by modifying the weights of the graph that users observe. … In this context, we also consider a zero-sum version of the game, in which the defender’s goal is to minimize cost while achieving the minimum possible attack probability.” Find the paper and full list of authors at…
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‘On Regularity Lemma and Barriers in Streaming and Dynamic Matching’
“We present a new approach for finding matchings in dense graphs by building on Szemerédi’s celebrated Regularity Lemma. This allows us to obtain non-trivial albeit slight improvements over longstanding bounds for matchings in streaming and dynamic graphs.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the 55th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing.
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‘Jointly Extracting Interventions, Outcomes and Findings From RCT Reports With LLMs’
“Results from Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) establish the comparative effectiveness of interventions, and are in turn critical inputs for evidence-based care. However, results from RCTs are presented in (often unstructured) natural language articles describing the design, execution, and outcomes of trials; clinicians must manually extract findings pertaining to interventions and outcomes of interest from such articles. … We propose and evaluate a text-to-text model built on instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) to jointly extract Interventions, Outcomes, and Comparators (ICO elements) from clinical abstracts, and infer the associated results reported.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘Revisiting Relation Extraction in the Era of Large Language Models’
“Relation extraction (RE) is the core NLP task of inferring semantic relationships between entities from text. Standard supervised RE techniques entail training modules to tag tokens comprising entity spans and then predict the relationship between them. Recent work has instead treated the problem as a sequence-to-sequence task, linearizing relations between entities as target strings to be generated conditioned on the input. Here we … [use] larger language models (GPT-3 and Flan-T5 large) than considered in prior work and evaluat[e] their performance on standard RE tasks under varying levels of supervision.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘RedHOT: A Corpus of Annotated Medical Questions, Experiences and Claims on Social Media’
“We present Reddit Health Online Talk (RedHOT), a corpus of 22,000 richly annotated social media posts from Reddit spanning 24 health conditions. … We collect additional granular annotations on identified claims.Specifically, we mark snippets that describe patient Populations, Interventions, and Outcomes (PIO elements) within these. Using this corpus, we introduce the task of retrieving trustworthy evidence relevant to a given claim made on social media. We propose a new method to automatically derive (noisy) supervision for this task which we use to train a dense retrieval model.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ACL Anthology.
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‘SemEval-2023 Task 8: Causal Medical Claim Identification and Related PIO Frame Extraction From Social Media Posts’
“Identification of medical claims from user-generated text data is an onerous but essential step for various tasks including content moderation, and hypothesis generation. SemEval-2023 Task 8 is an effort towards building those capabilities and motivating further research in this direction. This paper summarizes the details and results of shared task 8 at SemEval-2023 which involved identifying causal medical claims and extracting related Populations, Interventions, and Outcomes (“PIO”) frames from social media (Reddit) text.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ACL Anthology.
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‘Speak Much, Remember Little: Cryptography in the Bounded Storage Model, Revisited’
“The goal of the bounded storage model (BSM) is to construct unconditionally secure cryptographic protocols, by only restricting the storage capacity of the adversary, but otherwise giving it unbounded computational power. Here, we consider a streaming variant of the BSM, where honest parties can stream huge amounts of data to each other so as to overwhelm the adversary’s storage, even while their own storage capacity is significantly smaller than that of the adversary.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Advances in Cryptology—EUROCRYPT 2023.
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‘Exploring the Role of Audio in Video Captioning’
“Recent focus in video captioning has been on designing architectures that can consume both video and text modalities, and using large-scale video datasets with text transcripts for pre-training, such as HowTo100M. … In this work, we present an audio-visual framework, which aims to fully exploit the potential of the audio modality for captioning. Instead of relying on text transcripts extracted via automatic speech recognition (ASR), we argue that learning with raw audio signals can be more beneficial, as audio has additional information including acoustic events, speaker identity, etc.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘Semi-Quantitative Detection of Pseudouridine Modifications and Type I/II Hypermodifications in Human mRNAs … Direct Long-Read Sequencing’
“Here, we develop and apply a semi-quantitative method for the high-confidence identification of pseudouridylated sites on mammalian mRNAs via direct long-read nanopore sequencing. A comparative analysis of a modification-free transcriptome reveals that the depth of coverage and specific k-mer sequences are critical parameters for accurate basecalling. By adjusting these parameters for high-confidence U-to-C basecalling errors, we identify many known sites of pseudouridylation and uncover previously unreported uridine-modified sites, many of which fall in k-mers that are known targets of pseudouridine synthases.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Communications.
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‘Pulcherrimin Protects Bacillus subtilis Against Oxidative Stress During Biofilm Development’
“Pulcherrimin is an iron-binding reddish pigment produced by various bacterial and yeast species. In the soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis, this pigment is synthesized intracellularly as the colorless pulcherriminic acid by using two molecules of tRNA-charged leucine as the substrate; pulcherriminic acid molecules are then secreted and bind to ferric iron extracellularly to form the red- colored pigment pulcherrimin. … In this study, we identified that pulcherrimin is primarily produced under biofilm conditions and provides protection to cells in the biofilm against oxidative stress.” Find the paper and full list of authors in NPJ Biofilms and Microbes.
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‘Dynamic Structure of T4 Gene 32 Protein Filaments Facilitates Rapid Noncooperative Protein Dissociation’
“Bacteriophage T4 gene 32 protein (gp32) is a model single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) binding protein, essential for DNA replication. … Detailed understanding of gp32 filament structure and organization remains incomplete. … Moreover, it is unclear how these tightly-bound filaments dissociate from ssDNA during complementary strand synthesis. We use optical tweezers and atomic force microscopy to probe the structure and binding dynamics of gp32 on long (∼8 knt) ssDNA substrates. … Cooperative binding of gp32 rigidifies ssDNA while also reducing its contour length, consistent with the ssDNA helically winding around the gp32 filament.” Find the paper and full list of authors at…
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‘Infinite Neural Network Quantum States: Entanglement and Training Dynamics’
“We study infinite limits of neural network quantum states (-NNQS), which exhibit representation power through ensemble statistics, and also tractable gradient descent dynamics. Ensemble averages of entanglement entropies are expressed in terms of neural network correlators, and architectures that exhibit volume-law entanglement are presented. The analytic calculations of entanglement entropy bound are tractable because the ensemble statistics are simplified in the Gaussian process limit.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Machine Learning: Science and Technology.
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Ramdin presents research on intergenerational families for improved health outcomes at ABNF
Valeria Ramdin, associate clinical professor and director of global health nursing, presented a talk on “Creating Intergenerational Family PODs for Improved Health Outcomes: Lessons Learned” at the 35th Annual Meeting & Scientific Conference for the Association of Black Nursing Faculty.
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‘Mentoring Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) Nursing Faculty toward Leadership Excellence’
“Although the importance of mentoring is emphasized across healthcare professions and among diverse disciplines and situations, the success of nursing faculty who are BIPOC, termed as Black, Indigenous, and Nursing Faculty of Color (BINFOC), is heavily influenced by the mentoring received early in their academic career. … The analysis [aims] to present a model case using a novel strategy of integrating historical research, present attributes that have been influential in legacy building for more than 30 years, and elucidate the unique situation of mentoring BINFOC toward leadership excellence.” Find the paper and full list of authors in ABNFF Journal.
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Dewan publishes chapter on growing importance of nurse anesthetists in global health context
Assistant clinical professor Janet A. Dewan, with co-author Aaron K. Sonah of Phebe Ester Bacon College of Health Science, has published a book chapter titled, “Universal Health Coverage and Nurse Anesthetists” in “Nurse Practitioners and Nurse Anesthetists: The Evolution of the Global Roles.” The chapter argues that as “the central concept that the measure of essential surgical and anesthesia care is an indication of the quality of a health system has gained traction … Access to safe surgery and anesthesia is linked to a health system’s ability to meet Universal Health Coverage benchmarks.”
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Dewan discusses rising importance of nurse anesthetists at ICN
In a panel discussion at the International Council of Nurses 2023 conference, assistant clinical professor discussed the “importance in global healthcare” of nurse anesthetists. According to the panel description, “It is our hope that through the development of these guidelines, some of the barriers and walls that have hindered Nurse Anesthetists can be broken down. … The session will feature insights into the current challenges faced by nurse anesthetists, the innovative strategies being used to overcome these obstacles, and the transformative policies being adopted globally to support their role.”
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Research on de-centering damage and trauma in human-computer interactions wins Best Paper Award
The paper “Flourishing in the Everyday: Moving Beyond Damage-Centered Design in HCI for BIPOC Communities,” written by several contributors, including assistant professor Alexandra To and PhD. student Dilruba Showkat, has won a Best Paper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery: Designing Interactive Systems Conference. The abstract reads, in part: “Research and design in human-computer interaction centers problem-solving, causing a downstream effect of framing work with and for marginalized communities predominantly from the lens of deficit and damage. … However, we observe an additional need to center positive aspects of humanity … particularly for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.”