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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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  • The actual motivations behind Walmart’s controversial Women’s Empowerment Program

    Eileen Otis, professor of sociology in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, has a new article in Gender & Society teasing apart the “Walmart’s Women’s Empowerment Program,” which some media outlets treated as a cause célèbre. Otis, however, notes that “a closer look at the program reveals a set of actions that are at best insignificant to women working for Walmart, at worst detrimental to women’s status in the workplace.” Read “Walmart… empowering women?” at Gender & Society.

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  • ‘Philosophy of Perception in the Psychologist’s Laboratory’

    “Unlike more general sources of philosophical inspiration, the work described here draws a direct line from a prominent philosophical conjecture or thought experiment about perception to a key test of that question in the laboratory—such that the relevant experimental work would not (and even could not) have proceeded as it did without the preceding philosophical discussion.” Find the paper and the full list of authors at the Association for Psychological Science.

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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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  • Special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies on ‘cultural taxation’ receives introduction co-authored by Northeastern professor

    Tiffany Joseph, professor of sociology and international affairs, writing with Laura Hirshfield of the University of Illinois College of Medicine, have written the introduction to a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies. This issue focuses on the concept of “cultural taxation,” the “extra burdens that stem from faculty of colour’s commitment to campus diversity issues and the lack of legitimacy they experience from colleagues challenging their existence in the academy,” they write.

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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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  • ‘Characterization of Bispecific Antigen-Binding Biotherapeutic Fragmentation Sites’

    “Characterization of the fragmentation pattern of a therapeutic protein is traditionally accomplished using capillary gel electrophoresis with UV detection under both non-reducing and reducing conditions. … Here, we present a novel method to characterize size-based fragmentation variants of a new biotherapeutic kind using microfluidic ZipChip® capillary zone electrophoresis (mCZE) system interfaced with mass spectrometry (MS) to determine the molecular masses of fragments.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in Analyst.

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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

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    “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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  • Winners of the 2023 Outstanding Teachers of First Year Engineering Students Award announced

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    Five professors were named by the College of Engineering: Justin Mellette, associate teaching professor in English. Edward Witten, lab coordinator in chemistry and chemical biology. Camille Gómez-Laberge, associate teaching professor in physics. Angelina Jay, assistant teaching professor of the First Year Engineering Program. Prasanth George, associate teaching professor and director of undergraduate programs in mathematics.

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  • Book chapter, ‘Socially Responsible Consumption and Marketing in Practice’

    “Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter offer both unique and overlapping opportunities to connect with people. The use of images and visual content reduces language barriers, while ease of access to these media applications increases routine engagement. This chapter provides a brief historical overview of social media, specifically addressing how social media has been used for advertising and information dissemination.” Find “Socially Responsible Consumption and Marketing in Practice,” which appears in “Dealing with Socially Responsible Customers,” and see the full list of authors at the publisher’s webpage.

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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’

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    “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.

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  • ‘Modeling and Simulation… for an Analog Computing Design Approach With Application to EEG Feature Extraction’

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    “This article presents a design approach for the modeling and simulation of ultralow power (ULP) analog computing machine learning (ML) circuits for seizure detection using electroencephalography (EEG) signals in wearable health monitoring applications. In this article, we describe a new analog system modeling and simulation technique to associate power consumption, noise, linearity and other critical performance parameters of analog circuits with the classification accuracy of a given ML network.” Find the paper and the full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems.

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  • ‘Restructuring of Emergent Grain Boundaries at Free Surfaces—An Interplay Between Core Stabilization and Elastic Stress Generation’

    “Emergent grain boundaries at free surface impact a wide range of material properties but little is known about their atomic-scale behavior. Using scanning tunneling microscopy and calculations, we studied the structure of emergent grain boundaries at the surfaces of planar nanocrystalline copper (111) films and bicrystals. We show that for a wide range of misorientation angles there exists a strong energetic preference for boundary cores to lie along close-packed planes that leads to the restructuring of emergent grain boundaries at free surfaces.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in Acta Materiala.

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  • Global work and enterprises in the wake of COVID-19

    The authors examine “the future of global work … [for] multinational enterprises” in the wake of “a great ‘reset'” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors apply “a phenomenon-based approach” to cover “the most critical macrotrends shaping the future of global work, their implications for [international human resource management], and global work in the context of MNEs. Specifically, [they] address how these trends have affected the where, how, who, and why of global work.” Read “Global work in a rapidly changing world: Implications for MNEs and individuals” and see the full list of authors in the Journal of World Business.

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  • Using coding languages to teach vibrational mechanics

    “Vibrational Mechanics by Maple Practical Applications” promises “to assist undergraduate and postgraduate students majoring in physics, mechanical engineering, electromechanical and aerospace engineering in acquiring a more thorough knowledge of vibrational mechanics using the Maple programming language.” Read more about the book and see the full list of authors, including Northeastern University affiliated research professor of physics Mohammad Khoshnevisan, at the publisher’s website.

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  • ‘Multiple Forecast Visualizations (MFVs): Trade-offs in Trust and Performance in Multiple COVID-19 Forecast Visualizations’

    “The prevalence of inadequate SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19) responses may indicate a lack of trust in forecasts and risk communication. However, no work has empirically tested how multiple forecast visualization choices impact trust and task-based performance. The three studies presented in this paper ( N=1299 ) examine how visualization choices impact trust in COVID-19 mortality forecasts and how they influence performance in a trend prediction task.” Read “Multiple Forecast Visualizations (MFVs): Trade-offs in Trust and Performance in Multiple COVID-19 Forecast Visualizations” and see the full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

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  • ‘Image-Text Embedding Learning via Visual and Textual Semantic Reasoning’

    “As a bridge between language and vision domains, cross-modal retrieval between images and texts is a hot research topic in recent years. It remains challenging because the current image representations usually lack semantic concepts in the corresponding sentence captions. To address this issue, we introduce an intuitive and interpretable model to learn a common embedding space for alignments between images and text descriptions.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

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  • ‘Data Lake Organization’

    “We consider the problem of building an organizational directory of data lakes to support effective user navigation. The organization directory is defined as an acyclic graph that contains nodes representing sets of attributes and edges indicating subset relationships between nodes. A probabilistic model is constructed to model user navigational behaviour. The model also predicts the likelihood of users finding relevant tables in a data lake given an organization.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.

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  • ‘Not Your Average App: A Large-Scale Privacy Analysis of Android Browsers’

    “Mobile browsers may present contradicting privacy behaviors. On the one end, they can have access to (and can expose) a unique combination of sensitive user data. … However, on the other end, they also are in a unique position to protect users’ privacy by limiting data sharing with other parties by implementing ad-blocking features. In this paper, we perform a comparative and empirical analysis on how hundreds of Android web browsers protect or expose user data during browsing sessions.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in the Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium.

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  • ‘GenoREC: A Recommendation System for Interactive Genomics Data Visualization’

    “Interpretation of genomics data is critically reliant on the application of a wide range of visualization tools. A large number of visualization techniques for genomics data and different analysis tasks pose a significant challenge. … Since genomics analysts typically have limited training in data visualization, their choices are often based on trial and error or guided by technical details. … To address these challenges, we designed GenoREC, a novel visualization recommendation system for genomics. GenoREC enables genomics analysts to select effective visualizations.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

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  • ‘Photosensitive Accessibility for Interactive Data Visualizations’

    “We systematically gathered and tested 1,132 interactive and animated visualizations for seizure-inducing risk using established methods and found that currently available methods for determining photosensitive risk are not reliable when evaluating interactive visualizations, as risk scores varied significantly based on the individual interacting with the visualization. To address this issue, we introduce a theoretical model defining the degree of control visualization designers have over three determinants of photosensitive risk in potentially seizure-inducing sequences: the size, frequency, and color of flashing content.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

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