Title
Topic
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A bellwether of embeddedness: One professor says that ‘the AI system … keeping me alive is ruining my life’
Professor Laura Forlano writes how an insulin pump AI system, which promised to “dynamically adjust blood sugar when compared to the previous linear system,” has actually required such frequent human-computer interactions as to make it medically detrimental. “Rather than dismiss this particular system as bad engineering,” she argues, “it’s more useful to think of it as a bellwether for a world in which autonomous systems are likely to be increasingly embedded in everyday life.” Read “When Things Go Beep in the Night: The AI system that is keeping me alive is ruining my life” at Data & Society: Points.
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Maheswaran elected to American Society for Engineering Education Board of Directors
“First Year Engineering Program teaching professor Bala Maheswaran was elected as the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Zone 1 Chair and to the ASEE Board of Directors in a nationwide vote in the 2023 ASEE election. … He begins his term at the end of June 2023 and will continue for three years.”
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‘The Paradox of Adaptive Trait Clines With Nonclinal Patterns in the Underlying Genes’
“Multivariate climate change presents an urgent need to understand how species adapt to complex environments. Population genetic theory predicts that loci under selection will form monotonic allele frequency clines with their selective environment, which has led to the wide use of genotype–environment associations (GEAs). This study used a set of simulations to elucidate the conditions under which allele frequency clines are more or less likely to evolve as multiple quantitative traits adapt to multivariate environments.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in PNAS.
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Robots can ‘see, smell, hear and perceive touch’
“Electrical and computer engineering professor Ravinder Dahiya has published a book on ‘Sensory Systems for Robotic Applications.’ Topics covered in this edited book,” the abstract reads, “include various types of sensors used in robotics, sensing schemes (e-skin, tactile skin, e-nose, neuromorphic vision and touch), sensing technologies and their applications including healthcare, prosthetics, robotics and wearables.” Read more about the book, and find the full abstract, at the publisher’s page.
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Army Research Office provides additional funding for deep neural network research
“Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Yanzhi Wang has received $450,000 in additional funding for his Young Investigator Award from the Army Research Office. The project title is ‘Generalized Optimization Engine (GOE) for Deep Neural Networks.'”
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Disability studies research incorporated into robotic sculpture
Laura Forlano, professor of art and design and communication studies, has had her work featured in a “robotic sculpture” designed by multimedia artist Itziar Barrio. “Some of the sculptures are programmed and inscribed with text that Forlano, a Type 1 diabetic, transcribed from the alert and alarm history from her ‘smart’ insulin pump and then annotated with field notes,” writes Smack Mellon, Barrio’s exhibition space in Brooklyn, New York. The exhibition’s title, “did not feel low, was sleeping,” is sourced from one of the sculptures in Barrio’s collaboration with Forlano. The exhibition ran from March to April, 2023.
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‘Automated Grading of Automata With ACL2s’
“Almost all Computer Science programs require students to take a course on the Theory of Computation (ToC) which covers various models of computation. … ToC courses tend to give assignments that require paper-and-pencil solutions. Grading such assignments takes time, so students typically receive feedback for their solutions more than a week after they complete them. We present the Automatic Automata Checker (A2C), an open source library that enables one to construct executable automata using definitions that mimic those found in standard textbooks.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in ArXiv.
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Major prize for mRNA vaccine potency research awarded to Northeastern professor Wei Xie
“Wei Xie, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, has received an award with a total value of $851,000 from the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals, for the project ‘Advanced FISH Assay and Mechanism Hybrid Surrogate to Improve mRNA Vaccine Potency Assessment and Prediction.'”
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‘Role of Circular RNA and Its Delivery Strategies to Cancer—An Overview’
“With the passage of years and the progress of research on ribonucleic acids, the range of forms in which these molecules have been observed grows. One of them, discovered relatively recently, is circular RNA – covalently closed circles (circRNA). In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the interest of researchers in this group of molecules.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in the Journal of Controlled Release.
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‘Autonomous Electrochemical System for Ammonia Oxidation Reaction Measurements at the International Space Station’
“An autonomous electrochemical system prototype for ammonia oxidation reaction (AOR) measurements was efficiently done inside a 4” x 4” x 8” 2U Nanoracks module at the International Space Station (ISS). This device, the Ammonia Electrooxidation Lab at the ISS (AELISS), included an autonomous electrochemical system that complied with NASA ISS nondisclosure agreements, power, safety, security, size constrain, and material compatibility established for space missions.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in NPJ Microgravity.
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Shrivastava receives patent for self-powered computing architecture
“Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Aatmesh Shrivastava was awarded a patent for ‘Self-powered analog computing architecture with energy monitoring to enable machine-learning vision at the edge.'”
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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’
“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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‘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’
“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’
“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’
“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’
“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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Air Force Office of Scientific Research provides grant for terahertz communications
“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
“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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‘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.