Professors Flora Lisica and Alistair Robinson are organizing the Literary London Conference, to be held July 6th and 7th, 2023, at Northeastern University London. This year’s conference theme will “explore London’s role in the material production and circulation of fashions, styles and (sub)cultures.”
Learn more
In “Aligned PLLA electrospun fibres based biodegradable triboelectric nanogenerator,” the authors present a new construction method for potential components in energy harvesters. These energy harvesters—like solar cells—”are not always developed using sustainable materials.” Creating components that are biodegradable could make these devices more environmentally friendly. “The presented approach,” the authors argue, “can provide attractive green energy harvesting machine to power portable devices at a large scale—without having to worry about the end-of-life electronic waste management.” Read “Aligned PLLA electrospun fibres based biodegradable triboelectric nanogenerator” and see the full list of authors below.
Assistant professor of architecture Ang Li will exhibit work at the U.S. Pavilion of the 2023 Venice Biennale. Li’s work conducts “investigations into the use of recycled plastic as a building material and structural system.” Read more about Li’s work and the other invited artists below.
The Comparative Health Humanities Symposium “gathers international health humanities scholars to examine what we can learn about the field across political, social, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Speakers will address topics including race/racism, the environment and health, translation/untranslatability, and health humanities and the health professions.” Attending scholars come from a diverse array of fields and institutions. The symposium will occur April 24th and 25th: follow the link below to register and see the full list of speakers.
B Northeastern University’s Khoury College of Computer Science, College of Arts, Media and Design, and College of Engineering each have strong representation at ACM CHI 23 this year, the premier conference on human-computer interaction. From the Khoury College of Computer Science’s Madelaine Millar, Milton Posner, and Matty Wasserman: The most prestigious human–computer interaction conference in the world is taking place in Hamburg, Germany this month, and Khoury College’s researchers—along with their collaborators in the College of Engineering and the College of Arts, Media and Design—are ready. Their work, which touches on everything from parrot socialization to deceptive dark patterns to…
Professor of marine and environmental sciences Jonathan Grabowski, working with professor Sean Powers from the University of South Alabama, has published a new paper in Ecosphere. From their abstract: Fluid (air or water) movements are key determinants of living systems from cellular to community levels of organization. Water flow can influence individual fitness and local population dynamics, but less is known about the collective response of natural communities to alteration in water flow because parameter responses to flow may be additive, juxtaposed, or interactive. To examine how changes in water flow affected initial larval settlement patterns of epifaunal and infaunal…
Despite the recent excitement around artificial intelligence endeavors, especially chatbots like ChatGPT, professor of practice and the executive director of the Institute for Experiential AI at the Roux Institute Usama Fayyad points out how, in enterprise environments, machine learning projects often fail to get off the ground. In evaluating how businesses can more successfully deploy those projects, Fayyad points to several options, including estimating the return on investment, building trust, and more. Read “Why Most Machine Learning Applications Fail To Deploy” at Forbes below.
From the College of Engineering: Chemical engineering professor Rebecca Carrier received an honorable mention during the National Eye Institute 3-D Retina Organoid Challenge. Carrier’s team created an organoid-microvessel co-culture system that proposes to add vasculature embedded in a biomimetic hydrogel to organoids to increase oxygen and nutrient flow and mimic the chemical and physical cues present in developing eye tissue. The system also includes retinal pigmented epithelium and can be used to model and study age-related macular degeneration. Read more about the associated research below.
From the College of Engineering: Chemical engineering assistant professor Sara Hashmi was awarded a $550,000 NSF CAREER award for “in situ Polymer Gelation in Confined Flows.” Read more about Hashmi’s research and the award below.
Northeastern University professors Joan Fitzgerald and Ted Landsmark, with decarbonization expert Michael J. Walsh, have penned a new article in CommonWealth Magazine titled “No more climate legislation needed; it’s time for action.” “In our recent assessment of Boston’s climate action plans for the Boston Foundation,” they write, “we found that Boston is at risk of not being able to achieve its net-zero 2050 goal.” Ultimately, however, the authors are hopeful, noting that we know the steps we need to take: “The list goes on—we are all familiar with it. The problem is that we have not been taking the necessary actions to…
Read “Prioritized mass spectrometry increases the depth, sensitivity and data completeness of single-cell proteomics” and see the full list of authors below.
Read “High Purity Hydrogen Separation with HT-PBI Based Electrochemical Pump Operation at 120 °C” and see the full list of authors below.
Professor of marine and environmental sciences Aron Stubbins, working with graduate teaching assistant Erin Tuttle, has published a new paper in Environmental Pollution describing “An acidic/oxidative digestion that quantitatively removes cellulose acetate.” This process “preserve[s] plastics while digesting synthetic cellulose acetate and a range of organics encountered in environmental samples,” thus isolating the plastics for further study. Read “An optimized acidic digestion for the isolation of microplastics from biota-rich samples and cellulose acetate matrices” below.
Read “Lattice Network for Lightweight Image Restoration” and see the full list of authors below.
Read “Going beyond Binary: Rapid Identification of Protein–Protein Interaction Modulators Using a Multifragment Kinetic Target-Guided Synthesis Approach” and see the full list of authors below.
Read “Cationic Carrier Mediated Delivery of Anionic Contrast Agents in Low Doses Enable Enhanced Computed Tomography Imaging of Cartilage for Early Osteoarthritis Diagnosis” and see the full list of authors below.
A new article published in Energy Research & Social Science illuminates the tactics in play in fossil fuel companies’ messaging and communications, which has shifted “away from outright climate denial to more nuanced discourses of climate delay,” the authors right. By examining four major companies’ global Twitter accounts (BP, ExxonMobil, Shell, and TotalEnergies), the authors have noted that these strategies link “renewables to natural gas and promot[e] natural gas as part of their corporate response to climate change” in an evolving attempt “to delay the energy transition and obstruct climate action. Read “Fossil fuel companies’ climate communication strategies: Industry messaging…
Read professor of English Qianqian Zhang-Wu’s solo-authored paper “Exploring multilingual students’ feedback literacy in an asynchronous online writing course” below.
From the College of Engineering: Electrical and computer engineering William Lincoln Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia is one of ten local directors to be inducted into the Hanscom Air Force Base Honorary Commander and Director program, which “pairs military-connected commanders and directors with civic counterparts to foster relationships, collaborate and share ideas, and build rapport between key community members and senior leaders at Hanscom” Air Force Base, the base wrote in a press release.
Kim Magowan, adjunct professor of English and Aurelia H. Reinhardt professor of American literature at Mills College at Northeastern University, has published “Litter Box” in Juked. “Litter Box” tells the story of one woman’s spur-of-the-moment trip to London and her confusion around how life has brought her there. Read the short story below.
From the College of Engineering: Samuel Muñoz, assistant professor, marine and environmental sciences and civil and environmental engineering, has been awarded a $718,000 National Science Foundation CAREER grant to study floodplain sedimentation through observation and simulation to improve flood hazard assessments. Read more about the grant and Muñoz’s work below.
Teaching professor of Arabic Shakir Mustafa, working with independent artist Maysaloun Faraj, has published a new paper arguing that “responses to art—such as commentary on paintings—construct narratives that run parallel to these artistic works.” By selecting specific paintings by Faraj, and reviewing “the commentary on these paintings by Shakir Mustafa… examine[s] ways of narrativizing art to reflect on the urge to create, receive, interpret and circulate cultural products.” Read “Art, community and social media in Maysaloun Faraj’s contemporary work” below.
Read “Highly-sensitive label-free deep profiling of N-glycans released from biomedically-relevant samples” and see the full list of authors below.
From the D’Amore-McKim School of Business: China’s companies have long been acclaimed for their manufacturing prowess and, more recently, for their pragmatic approach to innovation. It’s time to recognize how they are also reinventing management control for the digital era through an approach we call “digitally-enhanced directed autonomy”, which gives employees autonomy while monitoring more precisely how they exercise it. This talk is based on a new article in Harvard Business Review, to be published in March-April 2023. Authors’ bio: Mark Greeven is a professor at IMD Business School in Lausanne. Katherine Xin is the Bayer Chair in Leadership at the China Europe International Business…
From the College of Engineering: Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Francesco Restuccia and William L. Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia were awarded a patent for “Real-time cognitive wireless networking through deep learning in transmission and reception communication paths.” Read more about their patent below.
Researchers have “Developed data-driven models to estimate wave parameters and spectra near the” Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. “To estimate wave parameters and energy spectra near the CBBT, novel composite data-driven models were developed using the wind, water level, and offshore wave data” were used in “deep neural networks” to model a complex wave environment with relatively low computational resources. Read “Data-driven modeling of Bay-Ocean wave spectra at bridge-tunnel crossing of Chesapeake Bay, USA” and see the full list of authors below.
From the College of Engineering: Electrical and computer engineering research assistant professor Salvatore D’Oro, William Lincoln Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia, and assistant professor Francesco Restuccia were awarded a patent for “Device and method for reliable classification of wireless signals.” Read more about the patent at the College of Engineering below.
From the College of Engineering: Bioengineering assistant professor Tao Sun recently published his postdoctoral research from the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Brigham and Women’s Hospital on “Nonspherical ultrasound microbubbles,” in PNAS. Read more about Sun’s research below.
Associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering Yaning Li and co-author Siyao Liu have published a new paper titled “Mechanical Properties of Cochiral and Contrachiral Mechanical Metamaterials Under Different Temperatures.” The paper was featured on the cover of the March 2023 issue of Advanced Engineering Materials. Read “Mechanical Properties of Cochiral and Contrachiral Mechanical Metamaterials Under Different Temperatures” below.
Read “Erasing Concepts from Diffusion Models” and see the full list of authors below.