Title

Topic

  • ‘Resting-State MRI Functional Connectivity as a Neural Correlate of Multidomain Lifestyle Adherence’

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    “Prior research has demonstrated the importance of a healthy lifestyle to protect brain health and diminish dementia risk in later life. While a multidomain lifestyle provides an ecological perspective to voluntary engagement, its association with brain health is still under-investigated. … Self-reported exercise engagement, cognitive activity engagement, healthy diet adherence, and social activity engagement were included to examine potential phenotypes of an individual’s lifestyle adherence. … The features that show consistently high importance to the classification model were functional connectivity mainly between nodes located in different prior-defined functional networks.” Find the paper and the full list of authors in Scientific…

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  • Closas receives Best Paper in Track Award for work on signal jamming

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    “Associate Professor Pau Closas received the Best Paper in Track Award at the 2023 IEEE/ION Position, Location and Navigation Symposium (PLANS) for the work ‘Jammer Classification with Federated Learning,’ with electrical engineering students Peng Wu and Helena Calatrava, and Associate Research Scientist Tales Imbiriba.”

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  • Odom explains why companies need ‘a clear purpose’ to be effective

    “We’re in the middle of a pivotal moment where purpose, value and meaning are essential for business,” Curtis Odom, associate teaching professor of management and organizational development, writes. It’s vital that businesses identify “a clear purpose [that] can help a company differentiate itself from competitors, inspire and motivate employees, and build or maintain a strong brand identity.” Odom continues by describing how leaders can re-evaluate, and re-instill, purpose in their company and among their employees.

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  • ‘How Informal Entrepreneurship Impacts Innovation in Emerging Economies’

    “New ventures in emerging markets, initially created informally, suffer from costs that persist and constrain a firm’s ability to innovate even after they formalize their status. … Informally created new ventures are more likely to develop imitative rather than innovative new products. However, being acquired by other firms and improvements in the national innovation system can weaken the persistence of these informality costs. … The concept of internal imprinting … captures how the internal characteristics of a company result in the establishment of practices that persist over time.” Find the paper and the list of authors at the Insights @…

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  • ‘Attention to Emotional Stimuli Across Adulthood and Older Age: A Novel Application of Eye-Tracking Within the Home’

    “Previous research has used stationary eye-tracking in the lab to examine age differences in attentional deployment, showing that older adults display gaze patterns toward positive stimuli. … However, the lab environment may lead to different emotion regulation behavior among older adults compared to what they do in their everyday life. We, therefore, present the first use of stationary eye-tracking within participants’ homes to examine gaze patterns toward video clips of varying valence and to study age differences in emotional attention … in a more naturalistic environment.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors at APA PsycNet.

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  • ‘How Digitally Enhanced Autonomous Teams Make Chinese Companies More Agile’

    “Chinese companies are reinventing management through an approach called “digitally enhanced directed autonomy” (DEDA). DEDA uses digital platforms to give frontline employees direct access to corporate resources and capabilities, allowing them to organize themselves around business opportunities without managerial intervention. Autonomy is directed where it is needed and tracked. By giving teams the freedom to design, produce, and sell their products, companies can foster innovation, increase employee engagement, and improve customer satisfaction.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors at the Insights @ Center for Emerging Markets.

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  • ‘Location Effects of the UN Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi Kenya: Challenges and Opportunities’

    “In 1972, Nairobi, Kenya became the first developing country to host the headquarters of a UN organization, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). UNEP’s presence in Nairobi has increased Kenya’s global governance stature. However, it has not fulfilled the promise of promoting greater input from developing countries. The location has posed challenges to UNEP, including security concerns, recruitment and retention of staff, communication and infrastructure difficulties, and the need for resources.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors at the Insights @ Center for Emerging Markets.

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  • ‘Optimal Cancer Evasion in a Dynamic Immune Microenvironment Generates Diverse Post-Escape Tumor Antigenicity Profiles’

    “The failure of cancer treatments, including immunotherapy, continues to be a major obstacle in preventing durable remission. This failure often results from tumor evolution, both genotypic and phenotypic, away from sensitive cell states. Here, we propose a mathematical framework for studying the dynamics of adaptive immune evasion that tracks the number of tumor-associated antigens available for immune targeting.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors at ELife Sciences.

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  • Comparative Health Humanities Symposium ‘gathers international health humanities scholars’ to Northeastern

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    The Comparative Health Humanities Symposium “gathers international health humanities scholars to examine what we can learn about the field across political, social, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Speakers will address topics including race/racism, the environment and health, translation/untranslatability, and health humanities and the health professions.” Attending scholars come from a diverse array of fields and institutions. The symposium took place on April 24th and 25th.

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  • ‘Conceptualizing Human–Nature Relationships: Implications of Human Exceptionalist Thinking’

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    “Human exceptionalism (HE) … involv[es] the belief that humans and human societies exist independently of the ecosystems in which they are embedded, promoting a sharp ontological boundary between humans and the rest of the natural world. In this paper, we introduce HE in more depth, exploring the impact of HE on perceptions of the human–nature relationship, the role of culture in HE, and speculating on the origins of HE. We consider potential implications for environmental decision-making, conservation and environmental science, and promoting proenvironmental behavior. ” Read the paper and see the full list of authors at Topics in Cognitive Science.

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  • Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Science, College of Arts, Media and Design, and College of Engineering each have strong representation at ACM CHI 23 this year, the premier conference on human-computer interaction. Read more about the conference, the papers, and the various awards won by Northeastern faculty researchers at the Khoury College of Computer Science.

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  • ‘Philosophy of Perception in the Psychologist’s Laboratory’

    “Perception is our primary means of accessing the external world. What is the nature of this core mental process? Although this question is at the center of scientific research on perception, it has also long been explored by philosophers. … Although these parallel research programs typically proceed independently in contemporary scholarship, previous eras recognized more active collaboration across philosophical and scientific approaches to perception. Here, we review an emerging research focus that aims to reunite these approaches by putting long-standing philosophical questions to empirical test.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors at Current Directions in Psychological…

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  • ‘Cell Invasion During Competitive Growth of Polycrystalline Solidification Patterns’

    “Spatially extended cellular and dendritic array structures forming during solidification processes … are generally polycrystalline. Both the array structure within each grain and the larger scale grain structure determine the performance of many structural alloys. How those two structures coevolve during solidification remains poorly understood. By in situ observations of microgravity alloy solidification experiments onboard the International Space Station, we have discovered that individual cells from one grain can unexpectedly invade a nearby grain of different misorientation, either as a solitary cell or as rows of cells.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in Nature Communications.

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  • ‘Body Mechanics, Optimality and Sensory Feedback in the Human Control of Complex Objects’

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    “Humans are adept at a wide variety of motor skills, including the handling of complex objects and using tools. Advances to understand the control of voluntary goal-directed movements have focused on simple behaviors such as reaching, uncoupled to any additional object dynamics. … This study examined a task with internal dynamics, inspired by the daily skill of transporting a cup of coffee, with additional expected or unexpected perturbations to probe the structure of the controller.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in Neural Computation.

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  • Bucar wins John G. Cawelti Award for Best Textbook

    Elizabeth Bucar, professor of religion, has won the John G. Cawelti Award for best textbook from the Popular Culture Association for her book “Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation.”

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  • ‘Changes in Water Flow Alter Community Dynamics in Oyster Reefs’

    Professor of marine and environmental sciences Jonathan Grabowski, with professor Sean Powers from the University of South Alabama, has published a new paper in Ecosphere. “Water flow can influence individual fitness and local population dynamics, but less is known about the collective response of natural communities to alteration in water flow. … To examine how changes in water flow affected initial larval settlement patterns of epifaunal and infaunal animals, colonization of larger individuals, and prey survival, we manipulated water flow (−50% or +47%) in situ using large wooden channels over small experimental oyster reefs.”

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  • ‘Why Do We Need to Learn about Citational Practices?’

    “How do you decide which papers to cite, how many, and from which particular sources? We reflect and discuss the implications of these critical questions based on our experiences in the panel and workshops on the topic of citational justice that took place at CSCW, CLIHC, and India HCI in 2021.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in XRDS: Crossroads.

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  • ‘Automated Active Space Selection With Dipole Moments’

    “Selecting a suitable active space for multireference calculations is nontrivial, and the selection of an unsuitable active space can sometimes lead to results that are not physically meaningful. … In this work, we have developed and evaluated two protocols for automated selection of the active space for multireference calculations based on a simple physical observable, the dipole moment, for molecules with nonzero ground-state dipole moments.” Find the paper and the full list of authors at the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation.

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  • Fayyad answers ‘Why Most Machine Learning Applications Fail To Deploy’

    Despite the recent excitement around artificial intelligence endeavors, especially chatbots like ChatGPT, professor of practice and the executive director of the Institute for Experiential AI at the Roux Institute Usama Fayyad points out how, in enterprise environments, machine learning projects often fail to get off the ground. In evaluating how businesses can more successfully deploy those projects, Fayyad points to several options, including estimating the return on investment, building trust, and more.

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  • Finding a ‘systemic approach’ to climate action

    Madhavi Venkatesan, associate teaching professor of economics, has published a chapter in the “Handbook of Multi-Level Climate Actions.” From the publisher’s page, the handbook “emphasizes the need for significant climate action by every capable person on the planet at multiple levels of human experience and society. … It highlights the many ways that our species can meet the climate crisis and how entities at every level of human experience are, could be, and should be developing and implementing climate solutions.” Venkatesan’s chapter is titled “Culture, Education and Sustainability: A Systemic Approach.” Find more about the book at Edward Elgar Publishing.

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  • Carrier receives honorable mention for advancing macular degeneration research

    “Chemical engineering professor Rebecca Carrier received an honorable mention during the National Eye Institute 3-D Retina Organoid Challenge. Carrier’s team created an organoid-microvessel co-culture system that proposes to add vasculature embedded in a biomimetic hydrogel to organoids to increase oxygen and nutrient flow and mimic the chemical and physical cues present in developing eye tissue. The system also includes retinal pigmented epithelium and can be used to model and study age-related macular degeneration.” Read more about the associated research at the National Institutes of Health.

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  • Hashmi receives NSF CAREER Award for work illuminating blood clots

    “Chemical engineering assistant professor Sara Hashmi was awarded a $550,000 NSF CAREER award for ‘In situ Polymer Gelation in Confined Flows’ to examine how polymer gels flow through tight spaces to better predict clogging behavior such as blood flow through a vessel.”

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  • ‘Protected or Porous: A Comparative Analysis of Threat Detection Capability of IoT Safeguards’

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    “Consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices are increasingly common, from smart speakers to security cameras, in homes. Along with their benefits come potential privacy and security threats. To limit these threats a number of commercial services have become available (IoT safeguards). The safeguards claim to provide protection against IoT privacy risks and security threats. However, the effectiveness and the associated privacy risks of these safeguards remains a key open question. In this paper, we investigate the threat detection capabilities of IoT safeguards for the first time.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in ArXiv.

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  • ‘High Purity Hydrogen Separation With HT-PBI Based Electrochemical Pump Operation at 120 °C’

    “Electrochemical Hydrogen Pumps (EHP) provide a unique highly efficient means of separating and compressing hydrogen with continuous steady-state operation. In this paper, we demonstrate the performance of a commercially available, polybenzimidazole (PBI) membrane based platform as a benchmark for ultra-high efficiency performance.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society.

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  • Instead of legislating climate change, act on it, Northeastern professors argue

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    Northeastern University professors Joan Fitzgerald and Ted Landsmark, with decarbonization expert Michael J. Walsh, have penned a new article titled “No More Climate Legislation Needed; It’s Time for Action.” They write that, “In our recent assessment of Boston’s climate action plans for the Boston Foundation, we found that Boston is at risk of not being able to achieve its net-zero 2050 goal.” Ultimately, however, the authors are hopeful, noting that we know the steps we need to take, “the problem is that we have not been taking the necessary actions to achieve these goals.”

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  • ‘Prioritized Mass Spectrometry Increases the Depth, Sensitivity and Sata Completeness of Single-Cell Proteomics’

    “Major aims of single-cell proteomics include increasing the consistency, sensitivity and depth of protein quantification, especially for proteins and modifications of biological interest. Here, to simultaneously advance all these aims, we developed prioritized Single-Cell ProtEomics (pSCoPE). … These strategies increased the sensitivity, data completeness and proteome coverage over twofold. The gains enabled quantifying protein variation in untreated and lipopolysaccharide-treated primary macrophages.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in Nature Methods.

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  • Isolating plastics to analyze pollutants

    Professor of marine and environmental sciences Aron Stubbins, working with graduate teaching assistant Erin Tuttle, has published a new paper in Environmental Pollution describing “An acidic/oxidative digestion that quantitatively removes cellulose acetate.” This process “preserve[s] plastics while digesting synthetic cellulose acetate and a range of organics encountered in environmental samples,” thus isolating the plastics for further study. Find “An optimized acidic digestion for the isolation of microplastics from biota-rich samples and cellulose acetate matrices” in Environmental Pollution.

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  • ‘Lattice Network for Lightweight Image Restoration’

    “Deep learning has made unprecedented progress in image restoration (IR), where residual block (RB) is popularly used and has a significant effect on promising performance. However, the massive stacked RBs bring about burdensome memory and computation cost. To tackle this issue, we aim to design an economical structure for adaptively connecting pair-wise RBs, thereby enhancing the model representation.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

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  • ‘Going Beyond Binary: Rapid Identification of Protein–Protein Interaction Modulators’

    “Kinetic target-guided synthesis (KTGS) is a powerful screening approach that enables identification of small molecule modulators for biomolecules. While many KTGS variants have emerged, a majority of the examples suffer from limited throughput and a poor signal/noise ratio, hampering reliable hit detection. Herein, we present our optimized multifragment KTGS screening strategy that tackles these limitations.” Read “Going Beyond Binary: Rapid Identification of Protein–Protein Interaction Modulators Using a Multifragment Kinetic Target-Guided Synthesis Approach” and see the full list of authors in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry.

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  • Breakthrough in early osteoarthritis diagnoses, potentially improving patient outcomes

    “Early [osteoarthritis] diagnosis is critical. … Computed tomography (CT) has been considered for cartilage imaging … by introducing radio-opaque contrast agents like ioxaglate (IOX) into the joint. IOX, however, is anionic and thus repelled by negatively charged cartilage glycosaminoglycans. … Here we engineer optimally charged cationic contrast agents … such that they can penetrate through the full thickness of cartilage.” Read “Cationic Carrier Mediated Delivery of Anionic Contrast Agents in Low Doses Enable Enhanced Computed Tomography Imaging of Cartilage for Early Osteoarthritis Diagnosis” and see the full list of authors in ACS Publications.

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