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Sharifkhani receives Riesman Professorship to study ‘macroeconomic risks’ on local labor markets
Assistant professor of finance Ali Sharifkhani has received the Riesman Professorship in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business. Sharifkhani will use the professorship to “study the effects of a firm’s local labor market on its exposure to macroeconomic risks and the expected return on its equity.”
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Liu receives Walsh Professorship to study ‘diversity faultlines’ in business leadership
Associate professor of accounting Kelvin Liu has received the Walsh Professorship from the D’Amore-McKim School of Business. He will use the professorship to “study the effect of diversity faultlines among senior executives on internal governance and corporate destabilization,” the school of business wrote.
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‘Effects of Inhaled Cannabis High in Δ9-THC or CBD on the Aging Brain: A Translational MRI and Behavioral Study’
“To understand the neurobiological effects of cannabis on the aging brain, 19–20 months old mice were divided into three groups exposed to vaporized cannabis containing. … Voxel based morphometry, diffusion weighted imaging, and resting state functional connectivity data were gathered after 28 days of exposure and following a two-week washout period. … Chronic inhaled CBD resulted in enhanced global network connectivity that persisted after drug cessation. The behavioral consequences of this sustained change in brain connectivity remain to be determined.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.
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Reframing disability as ‘a property of both humans and machines’
Laura Forlano, professor of art and design and communication studies, has a new article titled “Living Intimately with Machines: Can AI Be Disabled?” Forlano proposes to take seriously the idea that we can “understand disability to be a property of both humans and machines.”
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‘Do Multi-Document Summarization Models Synthesize?’
“Multi-document summarization entails producing concise synopses of collections of inputs. For some applications, the synopsis should accurately synthesize inputs with respect to a key property or aspect. … In this paper we ask: To what extent do modern multi-document summarization models implicitly perform this type of synthesis? To assess this we perform a suite of experiments that probe the degree to which conditional generation models trained for summarization using standard methods yield outputs that appropriately synthesize inputs.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in ArXiv.
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Foregrounding care in the co-creation of urban spaces: How to find ‘liveable urban futures’
This article asks, “Can participatory engagements in the form of more-than-human co-creation be a generative form of socially and ecologically-just and critical urban placemaking?” It goes on to explore “three interrelated examples of critical urban placemaking in the arts, interrogating how we might design for liveable urban futures as matters of care.” In foregrounding care, the authors explore “co-creation” practices that are “responsive and dynamic rather than prescriptive… [and that] “can transform the status quo, rather than merely reproduce it.” Read “Care-full co-curation: critical urban placemaking for more-than-human futures” and see the full list of authors in City: Analysis of Urban Change,…
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‘Explaining Dataset Changes for Semantic Data Versioning with Explain-Da-V (Technical Report)’
“In multi-user environments in which data science and analysis is collaborative, multiple versions of the same datasets are generated. While managing and storing data versions has received some attention in the research literature, the semantic nature of such changes has remained under-explored. In this work, we introduce \texttt{Explain-Da-V}, a framework aiming to explain changes between two given dataset versions.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in ArXiv.
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‘Thought Bubbles: A Proxy into Players’ Mental Model Development’
“Studying mental models has recently received more attention, aiming to understand the cognitive aspects of human-computer interaction. However, there is not enough research on the elicitation of mental models in complex dynamic systems. We present Thought Bubbles as an approach for eliciting mental models and an avenue for understanding players’ mental model development in interactive virtual environments.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘A Bias-Variance-Privacy Trilemma for Statistical Estimation’
“The canonical algorithm for differentially private mean estimation is to first clip the samples to a bounded range and then add noise to their empirical mean. Clipping controls the sensitivity and, hence, the variance of the noise that we add for privacy. But clipping also introduces statistical bias. We prove that this tradeoff is inherent: no algorithm can simultaneously have low bias, low variance, and low privacy loss for arbitrary distributions.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in ArXiv.
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‘Making Reconstruction-Based Method Great Again for Video Anomaly Detection’
“Anomaly detection in videos is a significant yet challenging problem. Previous approaches based on deep neural networks employ either reconstruction-based or prediction-based approaches. … existing reconstruction-based methods 1) rely on old-fashioned convolutional autoencoders and are poor at modeling temporal dependency; 2) are prone to overfit the training samples, leading to indistinguishable reconstruction errors. … To address such issues, firstly, we get inspiration from transformer and propose Spatio-Temporal Auto-Trans-Encoder, dubbed as STATE, as a new autoencoder model for enhanced consecutive frame reconstruction.” Find the paper and the full list of authors in ArXiv.
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Re-evaluating ESG reporting: The missing human factor
Researchers from the Center for the Future of Higher Education and Talent Strategy have produced a new report that details the importance of human capital and its measurement in Environmental, Social, and Governance reporting.
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Saksono and Hoffman win Google Health Equity Research Initiative award
Assistant professor of health sciences Herman Saksono and professor of applied psychology Jessica Hoffman have won a Google Health Equity Research Initiative award. Their proposal, “Augmenting fitness tracking data with community storytelling to advance the impact of wearables in promoting health equity,” hopes to interrogate “how to amplify social support in marginalized communities by augmenting fitness data with first-person storytelling,” they wrote. They plan to leverage fitness tracking devices to “facilitate social support within marginalized communities.” Crucially, this study is a product of a close community partnership with the Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition, which was established in 2017.
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‘Trajectory-Aware Eligibility Traces for Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning’
“Off-policy learning from multistep returns is crucial for sample-efficient reinforcement learning, but counteracting off-policy bias without exacerbating variance is challenging. Classically, off-policy bias is corrected in a per-decision manner. … Many off-policy algorithms rely on this mechanism, along with differing protocols for cutting the IS ratios to combat the variance of the IS estimator. Unfortunately, once a trace has been fully cut, the effect cannot be reversed. … In this paper, we propose a multistep operator that can express both per-decision and trajectory-aware methods.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in ArXiv.
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‘HoLA Robots: Mitigating Plan-Deviation Attacks in Multi-Robot Systems’
“Emerging multi-robot systems rely on cooperation between humans and robots, with robots following automatically generated motion plans to service application-level tasks. Given the safety requirements associated with operating in proximity to humans and expensive infrastructure, it is important to understand and mitigate the security vulnerabilities of such systems. … We focus on centralized systems, where a *central entity* (CE) is responsible for determining and transmitting the motion plans to the robots, which report their location as they move following the plan.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in ArXiv.
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Ocean Genome Legacy Center partners with 1% for the Planet
Northeastern’s Ocean Genome Legacy Center has become an Environmental Partner with 1% for the Planet, which brings together companies and individuals to support environmental nonprofits.
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Paper from the Ocean Genome Legacy Center, ‘Greater Than pH 8: The pH Dependence of EDTA as a Preservative of High Molecular Weight DNA’
“Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) is a divalent cation chelator and chemical preservative that has been shown to be the active ingredient of the popular DNA preservative DESS. EDTA may act to reduce DNA degradation during tissue storage by sequestering divalent cations that are required by nucleases naturally occurring in animal tissues. … Increasing the pH of EDTA-containing preservative solutions may improve their effectiveness as DNA preservatives.” Read “Greater Than pH 8: The pH Dependence of EDTA as a Preservative of High Molecular Weight DNA in Biological Samples” and find the full list of authors in PLOS ONE.
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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. … We present a single-pass algorithm that obtains a 5-approximation using O(n) space. The algorithm itself is extremely simple and has implications beyond the streaming setting (such as for dynamic and local computation algorithms). The approximation analysis, on the other hand, is delicate and in fact tight.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in 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. For instance, it is known how to maintain a 1/2-approximate matching in (poly log n) update time or a 2/3-approximate matching in O(√n) update time, where n is the number of vertices. … 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.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.
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‘Decadal Application of WRF/Chem Under Future Climate and Emission Scenarios’
“This work presents new climate and emissions scenarios to investigate changes on future meteorology and air quality in the U.S. Here, we employ a dynamically downscaled Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with chemistry (WRF/Chem) simulations that use two Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios (i.e., A1B and B2) integrated with explicitly projected emissions from a novel Technology Driver Model (TDM).” Read “Decadal Application of WRF/Chem Under Future Climate and Emission Scenarios: Impacts of Technology-Driven Climate and Emission Changes on Regional Meteorology and Air Quality” and see the full list of authors in Atmosphere.
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SMART Center receives $4 million DARPA grant for thermal imaging program
The SMART Center at Northeastern University, whose mission statement “aims to conceive and pilot disruptive technological innovation in smart devices and systems,” has received a $4 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), under their Optomechanical Thermal Imaging program. The SMART Center proposed the development of “Nano-opto-mechanical Piezoelectric Resonant Infrared-sensitive Metamaterials for Quantum-Limited Photodetection,” which would work to develop an exceptionally small detector of infrared light.
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Lehman elected President of IEEE Power Electronics Society
Professor of electrical and computer engineering Bradley Lehman has been elected president of the IEEE Power Electronics Society. The Power Electronics Society studies “technology [that] encompasses the effective use of electronic components, the application of circuit theory and design techniques, and the development of analytical tools for efficient conversion, control, and condition of electric power,” they write on their website.
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‘Who Wants To Cooperate—And Why? Attitude and Perception of Crowd Workers in Online Labor Markets’
“Existing literature and studies predominantly focus on how crowdsource workers individually complete tasks and projects. Our study examines crowdsource workers’ willingness to work collaboratively. We report results from a survey of 122 workers on a leading online labor platform (Upwork) to examine crowd workers’ behavioral preferences for collaboration. … We then test if actual cooperative behavior matches with workers’ behavioral preferences through an incentivized social dilemma experiment. We find that respondents cooperate at a higher rate (85%) than reported in previous comparable studies (between 50-75%).” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in ArXiv.
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‘Interphase Chromosomes of the Aedes Aegypti Mosquito Are Liquid Crystalline and Can Sense Mechanical Cues’
In “Interphase chromosomes of the Aedes aegypti mosquito are liquid crystalline and can sense mechanical cues,” the authors observe “the three-dimensional architecture of the Aedes aegypti genome,” a species of mosquito. Their observations “[provide] a possible physical mechanism linking mechanical cues to gene regulation.” Find the paper and the full list of authors at Nature Communications.