Title
Topic
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Building a better hologram: Just add noise
Researchers from Northeastern University, in collaboration with Nanjing University, have broken a “theoretical limit” in metasurface capacities—a.k.a. “holograms.” By introducing carefully engineered noise into Jones matrices, they have produced “the highest capacity reported for polarization multiplexing.” They demonstrate this raised capacity across “11 independent holographic images.” Read “Breaking the Limitation of Polarization Multiplexing in Optical Metasurfaces with Engineered Noise” and find the full list of authors at Science.
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Fu named ACM Fellow for contributions to computer security
“Professor Kevin Fu was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for contributions to computer security, and especially to the secure engineering of medical devices.”
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‘Lineage-Mismatched Mitochondrial Replacement … Effectively Restores the Original Proteomic Landscape of Recipient Cells’
“Here an inducible mitochondrial depletion modelis used to study how cells lacking endogenous mitochondria respond, on a global protein expression level, to transplantation with lineage-mismatched (LM) mitochondria. It is shown that LM mitochondrial transplantation does not alter the proteomic profile in nonmitochondria–depleted recipient cells; however, enforced depletion of endogenous mitochondria results in dramatic changes in the proteomic landscape, which returns to the predepletion state following internalization of LM mitochondria.” Find “Lineage-Mismatched Mitochondrial Replacement in an Inducible Mitochondrial Depletion Model Effectively Restores the Original Proteomic Landscape of Recipient Cells” and the full list of authors in Advanced Biology.
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International Business Today: Podcast from the D’Amore-McKim School of Business
“The D’Amore-McKim School of Business’ international business and strategy academic group is launching the International Business Today podcast. Episodes will explore the most critical business issues through the lens of cutting-edge research. This podcast is for all global business professionals and any student who hopes to work for a multinational organization in the future.”
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The straightest line between two points: When your map’s incomplete
The authors of “Finding shortest and nearly shortest path nodes in large substantially incomplete networks by hyperbolic mapping” have determined that large, real-world networks “are not random but are organized according to latent-geometric rules.” This being the case, they argue that, when “mapped to points in latent hyperbolic spaces,” they can calculate shortest paths “along geodesic curves connecting endpoint nodes.” In other words, they can get from A to C, without knowing B’s location. Read “Finding shortest and nearly shortest path nodes in large substantially incomplete networks by hyperbolic mapping” and see the full list of authors in Nature Communications.
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Spring 2023 Spark Fund awardees announced for Northeastern innovators
Professors Ryan Koppes, Yaning Li, Diomedes Logothetis, Carolyn Lee-Parsons, Edmund Yeh and Ke Zhang have all received Spark Funds from the Center for Research Innovation for Spring 2023. “The Spark Fund supports commercially valuable inventions (from any field) from university researchers in earlier stages of development. The goal of the award is to advance a technology or suite of technologies from academia towards commercialization.”
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Li receives NSF CAREER Grant for pathogen work
“Assistant professor Jiahe Li was awarded a $636,000 National Science Foundation CAREER award for a project titled ‘Understanding and Harnessing Host-derived Small RNAs Against Opportunistic Pathogens.’”
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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.