Title
Topic
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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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‘Conceptualizing Human–Nature Relationships: Implications of Human Exceptionalist Thinking’
“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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‘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’
“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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‘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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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’
“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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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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Melodia inducted into collaborative Air Force Honorary Commander and Director Program
“Electrical and computer engineering William Lincoln Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia is one of ten local directors to be inducted into the Hanscom Air Force Base Honorary Commander and Director program.” The program “pairs military-connected commanders and directors with civic counterparts to foster relationships, collaborate and share ideas, and build rapport between key community members and senior leaders at Hanscom” Air Force Base, the base wrote in a press release.
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Magowan publishes short story ‘Litter Box’
Kim Magowan, adjunct professor of English and Aurelia H. Reinhardt professor of American literature at Mills College at Northeastern University, has published the short story “Litter Box.” “Litter Box” tells the story of one woman’s spur-of-the-moment trip to London and her confusion around how life has brought her there.
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China Insights Series: How Chinese companies are reinventing management control
Professor George Yip gave a presentation in the China Insight Series. “China’s companies have long been acclaimed for their manufacturing prowess and, more recently, for their pragmatic approach to innovation. It’s time to recognize how they are also reinventing management control for the digital era through an approach we call ‘digitally-enhanced directed autonomy,’ which gives employees autonomy while monitoring more precisely how they exercise it.”