Title
Topic
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How the ‘two ingredients of language’ come from different regions of the brain
The authors of “Phonetic Categorization Relies on Motor Simulation, But Combinatorial Phonological Computations Are Abstract” note two elements required in human language, categorization (identifying words as “distinct units”) and combination (distinguishing between units). The authors explore these mechanisms “using transcranial magnetic stimulation. [They] show that speech categorization engages the motor system. … In contrast, the combinatorial computation of syllable structure engages Broca’s area,” a region within the brain’s frontal lobe. They “conclude that the two ingredients of language—categorization and combination—are distinct functions in human brains.” Read their paper and see the full list of authors in Scientific Reports.
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Patent for a ‘Zero Power Plasmonic Microelectromechanical Device’
“Professor Matteo Rinaldi and research assistant professor Zhenyun Qian were awarded a patent for designing a ‘Zero Power Plasmonic Microelectromechanical Device.’ According to the abstract, the ‘device is capable of specifically sensing electromagnetic radiation and performing signal processing operations. … The devices can continuously monitor an environment and wake up an electronic circuit upon detection of a specific trigger signature of electromagnetic radiation.'”
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‘Byzantine Resilience at Swarm Scale: A Decentralized Blocklist Protocol From Inter-Robot Accusations’
“The Weighted-Mean Subsequence Reduced (W-MSR) algorithm, the state-of-the-art method for Byzantine-resilient design of decentralized multi-robot systems, is based on discarding outliers received over Linear Consensus Protocol (LCP). Although W-MSR provides well-understood theoretical guarantees relating robust network connectivity to the convergence of the underlying consensus, the method comes with several limitations preventing its use at scale. … In this work, we propose a Decentralized Blocklist Protocol (DBP) based on inter-robot accusations.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in ArXiv.
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‘Beating (1 – 1/e)-Approximation for Weighted Stochastic Matching’
“In the stochastic weighted matching problem, the goal is to find a large-weight matching of a graph when we are uncertain about the existence of its edges. In particular, each edge e has a known weight we but is realized independently with some probability pe. The algorithm may query an edge to see whether it is realized. We consider the well-studied query commit version of the problem, in which any queried edge that happens to be realized must be included in the solution.” Find the paper and the full list of authors at SIAM.
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‘Beating Greedy Matching in Sublinear Time’
“We study sublinear time algorithms for estimating the size of maximum matching in graphs. Our main result is a (½ + Ω(1))-approximation algorithm which can be implemented in O(n1+ε) time, where n is the number of vertices and the constant ε > 0 can be made arbitrarily small. The best known lower bound for the problem is Ω(n), which holds for any constant approximation.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
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‘Single-Pass Streaming Algorithms for Correlation Clustering’
“We study correlation clustering in the streaming setting. This problem has been studied extensively and numerous algorithms have been developed, most requiring multiple passes over the stream. For the important case of single-pass algorithms, recent work of Assadi and Wang [8] obtains a c-approximation using Õ(n) space where c > 105 is a constant and n is the number of vertices to be clustered. We present a single-pass algorithm that obtains a 5-approximation using O(n) space.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
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‘Dynamic Algorithms for Maximum Matching Size’
“We study fully dynamic algorithms for maximum matching. This is a well-studied problem, known to admit several update-time/approximation trade-offs. … It has been a long-standing open problem to determine whether either of these bounds can be improved. In this paper, we show that when the goal is to maintain just the size of the matching (and not its edge-set), then these bounds can indeed be improved.”
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‘Sublinear Algorithms for TSP via Path Covers’
“We study sublinear time algorithms for the traveling salesman problem (TSP). First, we focus on the closely related maximum path cover problem, which asks for a collection of vertex disjoint paths that include the maximum number of edges. Our analysis of the running time uses connections to parallel algorithms and is information-theoretically optimal up to poly log n factors. Additionally, we show that our approximation guarantees for path cover and (1,2)-TSP hit a natural barrier: We show better approximations require better sublinear time algorithms for the well-studied maximum matching problem.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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Using computer science to tell stories ‘that make a difference’
In “Code for What?: Computer Science for Storytelling and Social Justice,” Clifford Lee and co-author Elisabeth Soep ask, “What if coding were a justice-driven medium for storytelling rather than a narrow technical skill?” The authors show why computer coding can be more than a career-motivated pursuit, but can also be used for the social good. “Code for What?” tells the “stories of a diverse group of young people in Oakland, California, who combine journalism, data, design, and code to create media that makes a difference.”
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Chowdhury awarded patent for intelligent wi-fi access points
Professor Kaushik Chowdhury received a patent for work on the “Method and apparatus for access point discovery in dense WiFi networks.” The abstract to the patent offers “Systems, devices, and methods for access point discovery in a wireless network,” which rely on phase shift methods “encoded into bits in selected ones of a plurality of subcarriers.”
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Rethinking the source: COVID-19 and global supply chains in 2023
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, distinguished professor Nada Sanders tracks “three major shifts in how companies manage their supply chains.” According to her analysis, both customers and businesses will be impacted by the force of: 1) Bringing supply chains home, 2) investments in more technology, and 3) a shift from “just-in-time” thinking to “just-in-case” processes. The goal through all of these changes, Sanders writes, “is to ensure [that companies] can withstand disruptions and maintain business continuity.” To read more about these three forces and their potential impacts on the economy, see her article in The Conversation.
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Online ‘oracle reviewers’ serve as bellwethers of success
Professor of marketing in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business Yael Karlinsky Shichor, with co-author Verena Schoenmueller of the ESADE Business School, have identified “oracle reviewers” in online product reviews, “whose early reviews serve as a signal to various measures of future book success.” The researchers used “unique data of Amazon book reviews” to generate a “reviewer score” that identifies how often a particular reviewer reviewed “successful books early on.” The more of these highly successful “oracle reviewers” appeared in a population of reviews, the more likely a book was to succeed. Read “The Oracles of Online Reviews” in SSRN.
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Machine learning at play while ‘Rethinking Bacterial Relationships in Light of Their Molecular Abilities’
“Determining the repertoire of a microbe’s molecular functions is a central question in microbial genomics. Modern techniques achieve this goal by comparing microbial genetic material against reference databases of functionally annotated genes/proteins or known taxonomic markers such as 16S rRNA. Here we describe a novel approach to exploring bacterial functional repertoires without reference databases.” See the paper and the full list of authors at BioRxiv.
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Jaeger-Helton selected as Panel Fellow for NSF CMMI Game Changer Academies
“Teaching Professor Beverly Kris Jaeger-Helton was selected as a panel fellow for the 2023 National Science Foundation (NSF) CMMI Game Changer Academies for Advancing Research Innovation Program. The NSF Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) created the Game Changer Academies for Advancing Research Innovation to improve group dynamics during panel discussions, increase awareness of bias and identity, and enhance understanding of high-risk, high-reward ideas. Once trained, ‘Panel Fellows’ will bring enhanced skills and awareness when they participate in panel discussions during NSF merit review.”
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Protein identification methods: Now digestion free
Whereas sequencing proteins generally involves “digestion into short peptides before detection and identification,” the authors of this paper have “developed a digestion-free method to chemically unfold and ‘scan’ full-length proteins through a nanopore,” they wrote in a summary of this paper. Read “Unidirectional single-file transport of full-length proteins through a nanopore” and see the full list of authors Nature Biotechnology.
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Zheng receives Early Career Researcher Award from ASTFE
“Associate Professor Yi Zheng was awarded the inaugural American Society of Thermal and Fluids Engineers (ASTFE) Early Career Researcher Award for his significant contributions to the field of Thermal and Fluids Engineering.”
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Untangling single-cell proteins with the Slavov Laboratory
“Inside Precision Medicine published an article entitled ‘Untangling the Complexities of Single Cell Protein Analysis’ that highlights the latest research from the team of Allen Distinguished Investigator and associate professor of bioengineering Nikolai Slavov. Read the article and more about the research team at Inside Precision Medicine.
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‘DCVNet: Dilated Cost Volume Networks for Fast Optical Flow’
“The cost volume, capturing the similarity of possible correspondences across two input images, is a key ingredient in state-of-the-art optical flow approaches. When sampling correspondences to build the cost volume, a large neighborhood radius is required to deal with large displacements, introducing a significant computational burden. To address this, coarse-to-fine or recurrent processing of the cost volume is usually adopted. … In this paper, we propose an alternative by constructing cost volumes with different dilation factors to capture small and large displacements simultaneously.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in IEEE Xplore.
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Facial recognition by any memes necessary
“As part of ‘JUSTICE,’ an exhibit opening at the Science Gallery Atlanta at Emory University in January 2023,” writes the College of Arts, Media and Design, “professors Derek Curry and Jennifer Gradecki have created the faux surveillance company Boogaloo Bias, a facial recognition tool aimed at finding suspected members of the Boogaloo Bois, an anti-law enforcement militia that emerged from 4chan meme culture and has been present at protests since January 2020. … This interactive artwork and research project highlights some of the known problems with law enforcement agencies’ use of facial recognition technologies.”
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‘In Search of the Miraculous’ in New York art exhibition
Yulia Pinkusevich, professor of studio art at Mills College, was part of a group exhibition that ran between January and March, 2023. The exhibition was titled “In Search of the Miraculous,” and was held at the Marlborough Gallery, in New York City.
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Top 10 in Annals of Internal Medicine: Miller featured with two papers
Matthew Miller, professor of health sciences and epidemiology, was featured in the Annals of Internal Medicine’s “Best of 2022” list with two articles on firearms research, “Homicide Deaths Among Adult Cohabitants of Handgun Owners in California, 2004 to 2016” and the “Firearm Purchasing During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Results From the 2021 National Firearms Survey.” Find his papers with their full list of authors, and the full best-of list, at Annals of Internal Medicine.
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Detwiler recognized among Food Safety Set: ‘The people who have shaped’ food safety
Professor Darin Detwiler, who also serves as Assistant Dean of Academic and Faculty Affairs for the College of Professional Studies, was recently recognized in Quality Assurance Magazine as a member of The Food Safety Set, one of twenty-one individuals who have had a pronounced impact on the development of food safety practices in the past 30 years, since the 1992 Jack in the Box E. coli outbreak. Detwiler was featured on the cover of the January-February 2023 issue, among other notables. Find the full Food Safety Set at Quality Assurance Magazine.
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‘The Rise of Emerging Market Lead Firms in Global Value Chains’
“Extending the resource-based view that location characteristics influence firms’ resources and internationalization, we argue that the global value chains (GVCs) of lead firms from emerging and advanced economies differ in three dimensions: objectives, trajectory, and governance.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in the Journal of Business Research.
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‘Generating Unified Platforms Using Multigranularity Domain DSE (MG-DmDSE) Exploiting Application Similarities’
“Heterogeneous accelerator-rich (ACC-rich) platforms combining general-purpose cores and specialized HW accelerators (ACCs) promise high-performance and low-power streaming application deployments in a variety of domains, such as video analytics and software-defined radio. … A domain platform exploration tool must take advantage of structural and functional similarities across applications by allocating a common set of ACCs. … This article introduces a multigranularity-based domain design space exploration tool (MG-DmDSE) to improve both average application throughput as well as platform generality.” Find the paper and the full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems.