Title
Topic
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MRI studies of ‘nonword repetition’ provides insight into brain function of autistic children
Researchers have “used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the brain bases for nonword repetition challenges in autism.” Nonword repetition, or the ability to repeat sounds not associated with a meaning-laden word, is “a common clinical measure of phonological working memory.” Also employing “Multivoxel pattern analysis within the speech production network,” researchers found that their “findings suggest that atypical function in speech production brain regions may contribute to nonword repetition difficulties in autism.” Find “Altered engagement of the speech motor network is associated with reduced phonological working memory in autism” and the full list of authors in NeuroImage: Clinical.
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Measuring climate change opinions among recreational fishers and citizen scientists
This paper hopes to understand the climatic opinions held by those involved in non-commercial fisheries. “Past research has focused on climate impacts and adaptation efforts in commercial fisheries,” the authors write, with little attention being spared for “recreational fishers and other stakeholders such as citizen scientists.” Overall, they observed that “Citizen scientists showed greater concern for climate change than recreational fishers and non-fisher/non-citizen scientists.” Read “Catching versus Counting: Comparing the Pro-Environmental Attitudes, Behaviors, and Climate Concerns of Recreational Fishers and Citizen Scientists” and see the full list of authors in Sustainability.
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‘Tropical Pacific and North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature Patterns Modulate Mississippi Basin Hydroclimate Extremes’
“Mississippi River basin floods impart large socioeconomic impacts over the central United States. Improving flood predictability depends on our understanding of the dynamical controls on Mississippi basin hydroclimate… Here, we use the Paleo Hydrodynamics Data Assimilation product, spanning the Last Millennium, to investigate the impacts of tropical Pacific and North Atlantic sea surface temperature (SST) variability on hydrological extremes across the Mississippi River and its major tributaries.” Read “Tropical Pacific and North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature Patterns Modulate Mississippi Basin Hydroclimate Extremes Over the Last Millennium” and see the full list of authors in Geophysical Research Letters.
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Rouhanifard receives CMBE Rising Star Award for bioengineering work
“Assistant Professor Sara Rouhanifard was selected to receive a 2023 Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering (CMBE) Rising Star Award for her outstanding impact on the field of cellular and molecular bioengineering.”
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‘Human Motion Segmentation via Velocity-Sensitive Dual-Side Auto-Encoder’
“Human motion segmentation (HMS) aims to segment a long human action video into a bunch of short and meaningful action clips. Existing supervised learning approaches need a large amount of training data which may be costly in real-world scenario, while most unsupervised clustering methods cannot fully explore the temporal correlations among human motions and hard to achieve promising performances. In our paper, we design a novel unsupervised framework, called Velocity-Sensitive Dual-Side Auto-Encoder (VSDA), for HMS task.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.
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‘Microstructural Pattern Formation During Far-From-Equilibrium Alloy Solidification’
“We introduce a new phase-field formulation of rapid alloy solidification that quantitatively incorporates nonequilibrium effects at the solid-liquid interface over a very wide range of interface velocities. Simulations identify a new dynamical instability of dendrite tip growth driven by solute trapping at velocities approaching the absolute stability limit.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors at Physical Review Letters.
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Associate professor John Bai, in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, writing with Anya Mkrtchyan from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, uses “rich microdata” from the United States Census Bureau to examine the “relative performance” of new CEOs within a company, comparing CEOs promoted internally with those who are hired externally. Ultimately, their findings “suggest that inside successors might benefit from adopting an outside perspective, demonstrating a sensitivity to change, and challenging legacies and relationships that might diminish their effectiveness.” Read “What Do Outside CEOs Really Do? Evidence from Plant-Level Data” at the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance.
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Oakes receives ASME 2023 Y.C. Fung Early Career Award for work on respiratory mechanics
“Assistant Professor Jessica Oakes was selected as the 2023 Y.C. Fung Early Career Award Medalist for outstanding work in respiratory mechanics that has significantly advanced the understanding of asthma, smoking and inhalable drug delivery, and for strong advocacy in diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.”
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Breaking through the COVID-19 virus’ shell
A result of a collaboration between labs in Northeastern University’s departments of physics and chemistry, this paper expands on our understanding of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Using optical tweezers, researchers gained “direct measurements” of the SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein, the “N” protein. These new observations on the virus’s binding process set the stage for future attempts at disrupting the process entirely, targeting the nucleocapsid protein and striking at the virus’s interior. See the full list of authors and read their research, “Structural domains of SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein coordinate to compact long nucleic acid substrates,” in Nucleic Acids Research.
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Restuccia receives Young Investigator Award for work increasing the performance of wireless systems
“Francesco Restuccia, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and member of Northeastern’s Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things and the Roux Institute received, in December of 2022, an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program Award to examine the algorithmic foundations and theoretical performance bounds of the dynamic, data-driven wireless systems of the future.”
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Phonological knowledge shared by signers and non-signers
In this article, professor of psychology Iris Berent, with professor Judit Gervain from the University of Padua and Université Paris Cité, argues that the knowledge of sign language and of a non-sign language can mutually inform one another. “Informed by recent findings from adults and infants,” they write, “we argue that the phonological system is partly amodal. We show that hearing infants use a shared brain network to extract phonological rules from speech and sign.” Read this discussion paper, “Speakers aren’t blank slates (with respect to sign-language phonology)!” in Cognition.
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Levendis made associate fellow of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
“Yiannis Levendis, Distinguished Professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, was selected as a member of the Class of 2023 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Associate Fellows for his technical contributions to fuel combustion physics, chemistry, and diagnostics, and for educating engineering students in the fields of gas turbine combustion and air pollution.”
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Gupta delivers supply chains keynote at ICOFT2022
“Professor Surendra M. Gupta delivered a keynote speech titled ‘Academic Research in Reverse Supply Chains, Disassembly and Remanufacturing: A Comprehensive Overview’ at the third International Conference on Future Technologies in Manufacturing, Automation, Design & Energy (ICoFT2022) organized by NIT Puducherry, Karaikal, India. Reverse supply chain consists of a series of activities required to collect used products from consumers and reprocess them to either recover their leftover market values or dispose of them. Disassembly and Remanufacturing are important elements of reverse supply chains.”
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‘Optimal Recursive Expert-Enabled Inference in Regulatory Networks’
“Accurate inference of biological systems, such as gene regulatory networks and microbial communities, is a key to a deep understanding of their underlying mechanisms. Despite several advances in the inference of regulatory networks in recent years, the existing techniques cannot incorporate expert knowledge into the inference process. … This letter models the regulatory networks using Boolean network with perturbation. We develop an expert-enabled inference method for inferring the unknown parameters of the network model using expert-acquired data.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
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Wireless internet of things research leads to first prize at IEEE Advanced Air Mobility challenge
“A team of researchers with the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things (WIoT) consisting of computer engineering students Matteo Bordin, PhD’26, and Pietro Brach Del Prever, PhD’27, and led by electrical and computer engineering research assistant professor Salvatore D’Oro, won first prize at the IEEE Advanced Air Mobility – Concepts Innovation Challenge, a challenge to engage undergraduate and graduate students across the world in developing novel concepts in unmanned air transportation.”
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‘Towards a Unified Drag Coefficient Formula for Quantifying Wave Energy Reduction by Salt Marshes’
“Coastal regions are susceptible to increasing flood risks amid climate change. Coastal wetlands play an important role in mitigating coastal hazards. Vegetation exerts a drag force to the flow and dampens storm surges and wind waves…. As wave height increases, highly flexible vegetation causes reduced wave attenuation, whereas relatively rigid vegetation induces increased wave attenuation. The leaf contribution to wave attenuation is highly dependent on the leaf rigidity. It is recommended that leaf properties, especially its Young’s modulus be collected in future field experiments.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in Coastal Engineering.
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The door doesn’t close on learning: Dean Hazel Sive receives honorary doctorate
Dean of the College of Science and professor of biology Hazel Sive was awarded an honorary doctorate of engineering from her alma mater, the University of the Witwatersrand (lovingly known as “Wits”) earlier this month, in Johannesburg, South Africa. Sive began her scientific career at Wits when a professor, Robin Crewe, gave her a unique assignment.
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Vincent Harris elected as NAI Fellow for ‘facilitating outstanding inventions’
“Vincent Harris, University Distinguished and William Lincoln Smith Professor, electrical and computer engineering, has been named a 2022 Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). Harris was chosen for selection for ‘having demonstrated a highly prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development, and welfare of society.'”
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A virtual home for Antarctic samples around the world
Antarctica provides a remarkable source of biodiversity and serve as “a major sink” of human-made carbon emissions. In “The Time is Right for an Antarctic Biorepository Network,” the authors, from numerous institutions around the United States, argue that there is “an extensive, largely untapped wealth of Antarctic specimens” around the world. “The majority of Antarctic biological specimens are invisible and inaccessible.” With a virtual “biorepository network of Antarctic specimens,” scientists could better address “the most critical questions in Antarctic science, [including] improving human welfare, and mitigating the impacts of climate change.” Find the paper and the full list of authors…
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Tiwari receives Editorial Excellence Award for ‘exceptional contributions’
Associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, Devesh Tiwari has received the Editorial Excellence Award from the IEEE journal Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS). The award “recognizes exceptional contributions by members of the TPDS editorial board,” according to their website. Read more about Tiwari’s award at the College of Engineering.
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Trailblazer award to engineer our way to smarter gut health
“Researchers at the College of Engineering have won a Trailblazer Award from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) for their interdisciplinary work to cure or improve diseases by modulating microbial metabolism in the gut. The funding provides $628,000 for the team’s research over three years.”
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‘Leveraging Structure for Improved Classification of Grouped Biased Data’
“We consider semi-supervised binary classification for applications in which data points are naturally grouped (e.g., survey responses grouped by state) and the labeled data is biased (e.g., survey respondents are not representative of the population). The groups overlap in the feature space and consequently the input-output patterns are related across the groups. To model the inherent structure in such data, we assume the partition-projected class-conditional invariance across groups, defined in terms of the group-agnostic feature space.” Find the paper and the full list of authors at ArXiv.
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Yanzhi Wang receives Distinguished Industrial Leader Award
“Associate Professor Yanzhi Wang received the Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA) Distinguished Industrial Leader award at the APSIPA Annual Summit and Conference 2022 held in November 2022.”
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Purnima Ratilal-Makris wins $1.28 million NSF grant for hydrophone array
“Professor Purnima Ratilal-Makris was awarded a $1.28M National Science Foundation grant for “Large-aperture 160-element coherent hydrophone array system upgrades and operational readiness testing for real-time continental-shelf scale ocean acoustic monitoring.” Research on the array system will be conducted in her Laboratory for Ocean Acoustics and Ecosystem Sensing.”
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Professor Yi Zheng receives Massachusetts recognition for sustainability and clean technology
“Professor Yi Zheng was recognized by the Massachusetts House of Representatives for his ‘Outstanding Contributions to Sustainability and Clean Technology.’ Zheng is devoted to clean energy education, research and business, to provide climate-friendly, energy-saving solutions and reduce carbon emissions globally.”
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Adaptable, reusable tooling for lightweight automotive components
“Associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering Hongli (Julie) Zhu was awarded a $220,000 Department of Energy grant, in collaboration with the University of Delaware, for the manufacturing of lightweight automotive components. The Zhu Lab will synthesize functional thermal conductive material as filler in the composite. In her lab, thermally conductive material will be prepared and added to thermoset resin to increase thermal conductivity and improve curing kinetics of resin during tool manufacturing.”
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Wearable gas sensor for disease detection
“Associate Professor Hongli (Julie) Zhu, in collaboration with Vox Biomedical, LLC, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, was awarded a $154,000 grant for biosensors. Zhu ‘seek[s] to translate detection of… [volatile organic compound] signatures to a more robust and standardized platform, readily adaptable for the identification of a variety of human diseases with distinct pathophysiologies.'”