Title
Topic
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‘Allosteric Site Variants Affect GTP Hydrolysis on Ras’
“RAS GTPases are proto‐oncoproteins that regulate cell growth, proliferation and differentiation in response to extracellular signals. The signaling functions of RAS, and other small GTPases, are dependent on their ability to cycle between GDP‐bound and GTP‐bound states. … GTP hydrolysis catalyzed by HRAS can be regulated by an allosteric site located between helices 3, 4 and loop 7. Here we explore the relationship between intrinsic GTP hydrolysis on HRAS and the position of helix 3 and loop 7 through manipulation of the allosteric site, showing that the two sites are functionally connected.” Find the paper and authors list at Protein…
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‘Characterizing collective physical distancing in the U.S. during the first nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic’
“The COVID-19 pandemic offers an unprecedented natural experiment providing insights into the emergence of collective behavioral changes. … Here, we characterize collective physical distancing … in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the pre-vaccine era by analyzing de-identified, privacy-preserving location data for a panel of over 5.5 million anonymized, opted-in U.S. devices. We define five indicators of users’ mobility and proximity to investigate how the emerging collective behavior deviates from typical pre-pandemic patterns during the first nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic.” Find the paper and full list of authors at PLOS Digital Health.
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‘Neural Network Field Theories: Non-Gaussianity, Actions and Locality’
“Both the path integral measure in field theory (FT) and ensembles of neural networks (NN) describe distributions over functions. When the central limit theorem can be applied in the infinite-width (infinite-N) limit, the ensemble of networks corresponds to a free FT. … Given the connected correlators of a FT, one can systematically reconstruct the action order-by-order in the expansion parameter, using a new Feynman diagram prescription whose vertices are the connected correlators.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Machine Learning: Science and Technology.
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‘From Alert Child to Sleepy Adolescent: Age Trends in Chronotype, Social Jetlag and Sleep Problems in Youth With Autism’
“Developmental changes in sleep in youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are understudied. In non-ASD youth, adolescents exhibit a ‘night owl chronotype’ … and social jetlag (i.e., shifts in sleep timing across school nights and weekends), with corresponding sleep problems. The purpose of this study is to evaluate age trends in chronotype, social jetlag and sleep problems in high-risk youth with ASD. … Older age was associated with later chronotype, more social jetlag, fewer sleep anxiety/co-sleeping problems, fewer night waking and parasomnia problems and more daytime alertness problems.” Find the paper and authors list at the Journal of Autism and…
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Ocean Genome Legacy Center receives grant from Cell Signaling Technology
Cell Signaling Technology, a biotechnology company located in Danvers, Mass, is providing a grant in support of Northeastern University’s Ocean Genome Legacy Center, bolstering their “long-running and highly successful Student Research in DNA Preservation Program, providing funds for experiments to improve the quality of DNA extracted from frozen biological materials.”
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Lili Su receives NSF CAREER Award for developing ‘resilient, scalable distributed algorithms’
Assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering Lili Su has received an NSF CAREER Award for her work on federated learning, a “privacy-preserving and communication-efficient” methodology for large distributed systems.
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Ghuman traces musical intermingling in ‘Resonances of the Raj’
Professor of music Nalini Ghuman’s book “Resonances of the Raj: India in the English Musical Imagination, 1897-1947,” studies the overlooked transmission of musical influences between English and Indian culture “during the last fifty years of the Indo-British encounter,” according to the book’s companion website. “Ghuman reintegrates music into the cultural history of the British Raj, revealing unexpected minglings of peoples, musics and ideas that raise questions about ‘Englishness,’ about the nature of Empire and about the fixedness of identity.”
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‘Exploring the Indian Political YouTube Landscape: A Multimodal Multi-Task Approach’
“Social media profoundly influences all facets of our lives, including politics. Political parties, politicians, and media outlets have strategically cultivated their social media presence to engage with the public. However, with the advent of freely available Internet services in India, there has been a rising proliferation in the community of independent content creators on YouTube, with many getting millions of views per video. In this study, we present a novel multimodal dataset of videos, taken from 20 independent and influential content creators. … By introducing this novel dataset, we aim to stimulate further investigation within the domains of opinion dissemination…
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‘Deploying and Evaluating LLMs to Program Service Mobile Robots’
“Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have spurred interest in using them for generating robot programs from natural language, with promising initial results. We investigate the use of LLMs to generate programs for service mobile robots leveraging mobility, perception, and human interaction skills, and where accurate sequencing and ordering of actions is crucial for success. We contribute CodeBotler, an open-source robot-agnostic tool to program service mobile robots from natural language, and RoboEval, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ capabilities of generating programs to complete service robot tasks.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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Ferrins receives NIH AViDD Center Development Grant
“There are two goals in this project, firstly, to continue to develop our advanced hit compound … to identify a lead suitable for in vivo proof of concept studies. Secondly, to develop novel methods to study the structural dynamics of both covalent inhibitors and PLpro active site structures enabling the development of more potent covalent inhibitors.”
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‘Interpretation Issues With “Genomic Vulnerability” Arise From Conceptual Issues in Local Adaptation and Maladaptation’
“As climate change causes the environment to shift away from the local optimum that populations have adapted to, fitness declines are predicted to occur. Recently, methods known as genomic offsets (GOs) have become a popular tool to predict population responses to climate change from landscape genomic data. Populations with a high GO have been interpreted to have a high ‘genomic vulnerability’ to climate change. … This study uses hypothetical and empirical data to explore situations in which different types of fitness offsets may or may not be correlated with each other or with a GO.”
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Meni Wanunu, developer of sensitive biological sensors, receives Northeastern University NAI Innovator of the Year Award
Professor of physics and chemistry and chemical biology Meni Wanunu develops “nanopores,” sensors composed of molecule-sized holes that stretch individual molecules for scientific observation. At this year’s annual gathering of the Northeastern chapter of the National Academy of Inventors, Wanunu received the Innovator of the Year Award.
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Dean Hazel Sive edits volume detailing African frog research and best practices that informed her ‘life’s work’
Dean of the College of Science and professor of biology at Northeastern University Hazel Sive has edited “Xenopus: A Laboratory Manual,” a new textbook that presents “a comprehensive collection of experimental procedures for research using Xenopus.”
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‘Inhalable Bottlebrush Polymer Bioconjugates as Vectors for Efficient Pulmonary Delivery of Oligonucleotides’
“Antisense oligonucleotides hold therapeutic promise for various lung disorders, but their efficacy is limited by suboptimal delivery. To address this challenge, we explored the use of inhaled bottlebrush polymer–DNA conjugates, named pacDNA, as a delivery strategy. Inhaled pacDNA exhibits superior mucus penetration, achieving a uniform and sustained lung distribution in mice.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ACS Nano.
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‘The Expressive Function of Public Policy: Renewable Energy Mandates Signal Social Norms’
“Addressing collective action problems requires individuals to engage in coordinated and cooperative behaviours. Existing research suggests that individuals’ propensity to work together depends in part on their belief that others support the cause in question. People form their expectations about prevalent beliefs and behaviours from many sources. To date, most of the literature has focussed on how social norm perceptions are inferred from peers or summary statistics. We explore an understudied source of norm information: the passage of policies by democratically elected institutions.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
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‘Local Adaptation in Trait-Mediated Trophic Cascades’
“Predator-induced changes in prey foraging can influence community dynamics by increasing the abundance of basal resources via a trait-mediated trophic cascade. The strength of these cascades may be altered by eco-evolutionary relationships between predators and prey, but the role of basal resources has received limited attention. We hypothesized that trait-mediated trophic cascade strength may be shaped by selection from trophic levels above and below prey. … We suggest that adaptation to basal resource availability may shape geographical variation in the strength of trait-mediated trophic cascades.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
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‘Does More Advice Help? The Effects of Second Opinions in AI-Assisted Decision Making’
“AI assistance in decision-making has become popular, yet people’s inappropriate reliance on AI often leads to unsatisfactory human-AI collaboration performance. In this paper, through three pre-registered, randomized human subject experiments, we explore whether and how the provision of {second opinions} may affect decision-makers’ behavior and performance in AI-assisted decision-making. We find that if both the AI model’s decision recommendation and a second opinion are always presented together, decision-makers reduce their over-reliance on AI while increase their under-reliance on AI.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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Dy elected as Fellow of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
Professor Jennifer Dy, in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and in the department of electrical and computer engineering, was elected as a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) “For significant contributions to unsupervised and interpretable machine learning, advancing AI to address health care challenges and service to the AI community,” the organization wrote in its announcement.