Title

Topic

  • Kane recieves US Department of Energy award for vocational high school programs

    “Michael Kane, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, received a $750,000 award from the US Department of Energy to develop a training program for vocational technology high schools and community colleges that improves entry-level building operators’ literacy in grid-interactive efficient buildings.”

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  • ‘A General Theory of Correct, Incorrect and Extrinsic Equivariance’

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    “Although equivariant machine learning has proven effective at many tasks, success depends heavily on the assumption that the ground truth function is symmetric over the entire domain matching the symmetry in an equivariant neural network. A missing piece in the equivariant learning literature is the analysis of equivariant networks when symmetry exists only partially in the domain. … We propose pointwise definitions of correct, incorrect, and extrinsic equivariance, which allow us to quantify continuously the degree of each type of equivariance a function displays.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in ArXiv.

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  • Abrahms suggests the U.S. is ‘Making a Mistake in Ukraine’

    Associate professor of political science Max Abrahms has written an op-ed, titled “I Teach International Relations. I Think We’re Making a Mistake in Ukraine,” arguing for “greater caution in America’s approach to countering Russia.” He refutes the logic that “supplying more weapons to Ukraine [will] spare its citizens more pain” or would deter Putin. Rather, he expects that the sending of weapons to Ukraine will only antagonize Putin further: “punishment may actually elicit worse behavior from an adversary and lead to mutual escalation.”

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  • Black medical research omitted from ‘leading American medical journal’

    Northeastern University PhD. candidate Cherice Escobar Jones, associate professor of English Mya Poe and Emory University assistant professor of English Gwendolynne Reid have published an article detailing the continued oversight of Black research in a leading American medical journal. This journal, “read regularly by doctors of all specialties,” they begin, “systematically ignores an equally reputable and rigorous body of medical research that focuses on Black Americans’ health.” Their article traces the history behind this issue and details how Black medical research remains “invisible.”

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  • How justice in transitional periods affects political perceptions

    Risa Kitagawa, assistant professor of political science and international affairs, has published a new article in International Studies Quarterly exploring how transitional justice efforts weaken or strengthen citizen’s views of their governments. She employs “survey-experimental evidence from post-conflict Guatemala, [to] compare how three commonly deployed justice policies (trials, truth commissions, and reparations) and political rhetoric accompanying them affect citizen attitudes toward government.” Read “From Political Violence to Political Trust? How Transitional Justice Affects Citizen Views of Government” in International Studies Quarterly.

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  • ‘Automatically Summarizing Evidence From Clinical Trials: A Prototype Highlighting Current Challenges’

    “We present TrialsSummarizer, a system that aims to automatically summarize evidence presented in the set of randomized controlled trials most relevant to a given query. Building on prior work, the system retrieves trial publications matching a query specifying a combination of condition, intervention(s), and outcome(s), and ranks these according to sample size and estimated study quality.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in ArXiv.

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  • ‘Model Sketching: Centering Concepts in Early-Stage Machine Learning Model Design’

    “Machine learning practitioners often end up tunneling on low-level technical details like model architectures and performance metrics. Could early model development instead focus on high-level questions of which factors a model ought to pay attention to? Inspired by the practice of sketching in design, which distills ideas to their minimal representation, we introduce model sketching: a technical framework for iteratively and rapidly authoring functional approximations of a machine learning model’s decision-making logic.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in ArXiv.

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  • ‘Ungrading With Empathy: An Experiment in Ungrading for Intermediate Data Science’

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    “We implemented a model for grading weekly assignments in an intermediate data science course that explicitly gave students useful feedback on their code while not evaluating it on the traditional metrics of correctness or style. … Our ungrading policy was designed to extend empathy towards students and to give them useful, actionable feedback. Our policy reduced the stress that students felt each week, stabilized the amount of time they spent on assignments, and ask them to reflect on their code to request feedback from the teaching team.” Find the paper and the full list of authors in the SIGCSE 2023…

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  • ‘WADER at SemEval-2023 Task 9: A Weak-Labelling Framework for Data Augmentation in Text Regression Tasks’

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    “Intimacy is an essential element of human relationships and language is a crucial means of conveying it. Textual intimacy analysis can reveal social norms in different contexts and serve as a benchmark for testing computational models’ ability to understand social information. In this paper, we propose a novel weak-labeling strategy for data augmentation in text regression tasks called WADER.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in ArXiv.

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  • ‘Online Paging With Heterogeneous Cache Slots’

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    “It is natural to generalize the online k-Server problem by allowing each request to specify not only a point p, but also a subset S of servers that may serve it. … We focus on uniform and star metrics. For uniform metrics, the problem is equivalent to a generalization of Paging in which each request specifies not only a page p, but also a subset S of cache slots, and is satisfied by having a copy of p in some slot in S.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in the Dagstuhl Research Online Publication Server.

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  • ‘A Flexible Formative/Summative Grading System for Large Courses’

    “We designed a formative/summative grading system in our CS0 and CS1 classes for both on-campus and online students to support a structured growth mindset. Students can redo formative assignments and are provided flexible deadlines. They demonstrate their mastery in summative assignments. While being inspired by other grading systems, our system works seamlessly with auto-grading tools used in large, structured courses. … These students went to the traditional follow-on CS2 course and 94% passed compared with 71% who took CS1 with a traditional grading system.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in the proceedings of SIGCSE 2023.

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  • ‘Teaching Assistant Training: An Adjustable Curriculum for Computing Disciplines’

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    “We present an adaptable curriculum for training undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants (TAs) in computing disciplines that is modular, synchronous, and explicitly mirrors the teaching techniques that are used in our classes. Our curriculum is modular, with each component able to be expanded or compressed based on institutional needs and resources. It is appropriate for TAs from CS1 through advanced computing classes.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in the proceedings of SIGCSE 2023.

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  • ‘Initial Recommendations for Performing, Benchmarking and Reporting Single-Cell Proteomics Experiments’

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    “Analyzing proteins from single cells by tandem mass spectrometry (MS) has recently become technically feasible. … We expect that broadly accepted community guidelines and standardized metrics will enhance rigor, data quality and alignment between laboratories. Here we propose best practices, quality controls and data-reporting recommendations to assist in the broad adoption of reliable quantitative workflows for single-cell proteomics. Read the paper and see the full list of authors in Nature Methods.

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  • Air Force Office of Scientific Research provides grant for terahertz communications

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    “Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Josep Jornet, assistant professor Cristian Casella, assistant professor Ben Davaji, and associate research scientist for the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things Vitaly Petrov were awarded a $500,000 Air Force Office of Scientific Research grant titled ‘Programmable Electromagnetic Surfaces Based on Ferroelectric and Antiferroelectric Hafnium Zirconium Oxide Films and Graphene for Terahertz Communications and Sensing.'”

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  • Patent awarded for ‘beam management’ system in RF transmissions

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    “Electrical and computer engineering principal research scientist Michele Polese, assistant professor Francesco Restuccia, and professor Tommaso Melodia were awarded a patent for ‘Coordination-free mmWave beam management with deep waveform learning.'”

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  • Best practice recommendations in advanced proteome analysis

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    Advances in proteome research have led to the ability to analyze “proteins from single cells by tandem mass spectrometry.” These advances “the potential to accurately quantify thousands of proteins across thousands of single cells,” but nevertheless face several issues in the areas of “accuracy and reproducibility.” The authors of this study “propose best practices, quality controls and data-reporting recommendations to assist in the broad adoption of reliable quantitative workflows for single-cell proteomics.” Read “Initial Recommendations for Performing, Benchmarking and Reporting Single-Cell Proteomics Experiments” and see the full list of authors in Nature Methods.

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  • ‘Image as Set of Points’

    “Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) consider an image as organized pixels in a rectangular shape and extract features via convolutional operation in local region; Vision Transformers (ViTs) treat an image as a sequence of patches and extract features via attention mechanism in a global range. In this work, we introduce a straightforward and promising paradigm for visual representation, which is called Context Clusters. Context clusters (CoCs) view an image as a set of unorganized points and extract features via simplified clustering algorithm.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in ArXiv.

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  • ‘Multi-Objective Optimization of Custom Compound Prism Arrays for Multiplexed Optical Imaging’

    “Compound prism arrays are a powerful, yet underutilized, solution for producing high transmission and customized chromatic dispersion profiles over broad bandwidths, the quality of which is unobtainable with commercially available prisms or diffraction gratings. However, the computational complexity associated with designing these prism arrays presents a barrier to the widespread adoption of their use. Here we introduce customizable prism designer software that facilitates high-speed optimization of compound arrays guided by target specifications for chromatic dispersion linearity and detector geometry.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in Optics Express.

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  • Northeastern University Qualitative Research Conference builds ‘a global community’

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    Hosted by professors Stine Grodal and Jamie Ladge, as well as postdoctoral associate Gabriel Sala, the Northeastern University Qualitative Research Conference is “a free half-day online conference” that aims “to build a global community of qualitative scholars in order to advance qualitative methods and develop junior scholars.” The conference was hosted on March 1st, 2023.

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  • Odom lays out a ‘Road Map To Organizational Resilience’

    Associate professor of management Curtis Odom has written “The Road Map To Organizational Resilience.” Some of the tenets he lays out include: soliciting “feedback from employees,” conducting “operational reviews,” and designing “continuous improvement initiatives, among others.

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  • To protect the shoreline in Boston and its surrounds, create a ‘coastal adaptation agency’

    Professor of public policy and urban affairs Joan Fitzgerald, in collaboration with policy advisor Julie Wormser and Tufts University professor Jonathan Lamontagne, has written an op-ed on the need for a statewide “coastal adaptation agency.” “If Boston were to build infrastructure to safeguard its shore,” independent of surrounding communities, they write, “it could well increase vulnerability in adjoining towns.” They argue that “Failing to take a regional approach not only exposes important equity gaps between poor and wealthy communities but also leaves wealthier communities more vulnerable.”

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  • Fang receives patent for non-invasive brain imaging probe

    “A flexible head probe and modular head probe system that includes an optical functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) system and integrated position sensor. The head probe and modular head probe system determines physiological data based upon the optical information gathered by the fNIRS system and gathers motion and position data from the position sensor. The physiological data and motion and position data are combined to permit topographical and tomographic analyses of a user’s brain tissue.”

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  • ‘Co-Encapsulation of Drugs for Topical Application—A Review’

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    “Achieving the best possible outcome for the therapy is the main goal of a medicine. Therefore, nanocarriers and co-delivery strategies were invented to meet this need, as they can benefit many diseases. This approach was applied specifically for cancer treatment, with some success.” Read “Co-Encapsulation of Drugs for Topical Application—A Review” and see the full list of authors in Molecules.

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  • ‘High Probability Convergence of Stochastic Gradient Methods’

    “In this work, we describe a generic approach to show convergence with high probability for both stochastic convex and non-convex optimization with sub-Gaussian noise. In previous works for convex optimization, either the convergence is only in expectation or the bound depends on the diameter of the domain. Instead, we show high probability convergence with bounds depending on the initial distance to the optimal solution. The algorithms use step sizes analogous to the standard settings and are universal to Lipschitz functions, smooth functions, and their linear combinations.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in ArXiv.

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  • ‘Image to Sphere: Learning Equivariant Features for Efficient Pose Prediction’

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    “Predicting the pose of objects from a single image is an important but difficult computer vision problem. Methods that predict a single point estimate do not predict the pose of objects with symmetries well and cannot represent uncertainty. Alternatively, some works predict a distribution over orientations in SO(3). However, training such models can be computation- and sample-inefficient. Instead, we propose a novel mapping of features from the image domain to the 3D rotation manifold. ” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in ArXiv.

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  • Advances in ‘multimaterial 3D printers’

    In the effort to create “multimaterial 3D printers,” the printers often only “allow printing of one material at a time, with limited ability of mixing multiple materials.” In this paper, researchers describe a “new 3D printer which eliminates the above shortcoming by merging the Fused Filament Fabrication and Direct Ink Write in one compact system.” Read “Closed-loop direct ink extruder system with multi-part materials mixing” and see the full list of authors in Additive Manufacturing.

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  • Morales presents subjectivity research at Ethics Institute

    “Jorge Morales, assistant professor of psychology and philosophy, will present his research on the subjectivity of the mind and how we perceive the world, how the brain creates conscious experiences, and how introspection opens a window into our own minds.” The talk took place on Friday, February 24, 2023.

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  • How to say ‘Homosaurus’ in Spanish: A renowned LGBTQ+ resource gets another edition

    Professor K.J. Rawson poses for a portrait.

    The Homosaurus: An International LGBTQ+ Linked Data Vocabulary recently received a three-year grant to fund the development of a Spanish-language version of this valuable research resource.

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  • ‘SantaCoder: Don’t Reach for the Stars!

    “The BigCode project is an open-scientific collaboration working on the responsible development of large language models for code. This tech report describes the progress of the collaboration until December 2022, outlining the current state of the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) redaction pipeline, the experiments conducted to de-risk the model architecture, and the experiments investigating better preprocessing methods for the training data. … We find that more aggressive filtering of near-duplicates can further boost performance and, surprisingly, that selecting files from repositories with 5+ GitHub stars deteriorates performance significantly.” Find the paper and the full list of authors at ArXiv.

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  • Opponents to The Calculus Project have got it ‘all wrong’

    Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, director of africana studies, writes about a threat to The Calculus Project, a program designed to “increase the representation and success of low-income students and students of color in high-level high school math courses.” Jean-Charles argues that a group called Parents Defending Education “deploy[s] accusations of reverse discrimination to hoard opportunities. Their message is clear — the pie is not big enough for everyone to share, so whatever small slice others receive infringes upon their consumption of the entire pie.”

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