Title
Topic
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‘Gradually Typed Languages Should Be Vigilant!’
“In gradual typing, different languages perform different dynamic type checks for the same program. … This raises the question of whether, given a gradually typed language, the combination of the translation that injects checks in well-typed terms and the dynamic semantics that determines their behavior sufficiently enforce the static type system of the language. … In response, we present vigilance, a semantic analytical instrument that defines when the check-injecting translation and dynamic semantics of a gradually typed language are adequate for its static type system.” Find the paper and authors list inthe ACM Programming Languages proceedings.
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‘Dragonfly Algorithm Application for Solving the Nurse Scheduling Problem’
“Scheduling plays a crucial role in allocating re-sources to tasks in various domains, including healthcare. Nurse scheduling, in particular, presents significant challenges due to the limited number of nurses. This paper illustrates how a novel meta-heuristic model known as Dragonfly Algorithm (DA) is used to efficiently solve the nurse scheduling problem faced by a major hospital in Belgium. The DA, inspired by the swarming behaviours of dragonflies, offers a new approach to solving this problem.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the proceedings of the International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications.
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‘Cloud Load Balancing Algorithms Performance Evaluation Using a Unified Testing Platform’
“Due to its improved response time, availability, and efficiency, load balancing emerged as an essential framework for designing high-performance distributed computing systems. This paper introduces a unified testing platform that objectively compares load balancing algorithms and measures their performance. It employs various request patterns and load types to simulate real-world conditions. We evaluate a selection of static and dynamic algorithms on throughput, response time, and failure rate metrics. The results show that most, but not all, dynamic algorithms perform better than static ones.” Find the paper and list of authors in the International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications proceedings.
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‘Visual Exploration of Machine Learning Model Behavior With Hierarchical Surrogate Rule Sets’
“One of the potential solutions for model interpretation is to train a surrogate model: a more transparent model that approximates the behavior of the model to be explained. Typically, classification rules or decision trees are used due to their logic-based expressions. However, decision trees can grow too deep, and rule sets can become too large to approximate a complex model. … In this paper, we focus on tabular data and present novel algorithmic and interactive solutions to address these issues.” Find the paper and full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
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‘RePresent: Enabling Access to Justice for Pro Se Litigants via Co-Authored Serious Games’
“Increasing numbers of people represent themselves in legal disputes—known as pro se litigants. Many lack the skills, experience, or knowledge to navigate legal proceedings without a lawyer. … Serious games may provide an effective, interactive, and engaging way of educating pro se litigants about the law and enabling their access to justice. Through participatory design with legal experts and an authoring tool, we co-designed RePresent, a serious game that helps individuals with limited access to legal support prepare for pro se litigation.” Find the paper and list of authors in the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference proceedings.
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‘Robo-Instruct: Simulator-Augmented Instruction Alignment For Finetuning CodeLLMs’
“Open-weight LLMs are particularly appealing choices to generate training data for fine-tuning Code LLMs on domain-specific service robot applications because they are cost-effective, customizable, and offer better privacy protection. However, unlike proprietary LLMs, open-weight models are more error-prone and often produce programs that violate domain-specific constraints. … In this work, we introduce ROBO-INSTRUCT that preserves the diversity of programs generated by an LLM while providing the correctness of simulator-based checking.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘StudentEval: A Benchmark of Student-Written Prompts for Large Language Models of Code’
“Code LLMs have the potential to make it easier for non-experts to understand and write code. However, current CodeLLM benchmarks rely on a single expert-written prompt per problem, making it hard to generalize their success to non-expert users. In this paper, we present a new natural-language-to-code benchmark of prompts written by a key population of non-experts: beginning programmers. … We use StudentEval to evaluate 12 Code LLMs and find that StudentEval is a better discriminator of model performance than existing benchmarks.” Find the paper and full list of authors in ACL Anthology.
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‘NL2Code-Reasoning and Planning With LLMs for Code Development’
“There is huge value in making software development more productive with AI. An important component of this vision is the capability to translate natural language to a programming language (“NL2Code”) and thus to significantly accelerate the speed at which code is written. This workshop gathers researchers, practitioners, and users from industry and academia that are working on NL2Code, specifically on the problem of using large language models to convert statements posed in a human language to a formal programming language.” Find the paper and authors list in the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining proceedings.
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‘E(2)-Equivariant Graph Planning for Navigation’
“Learning for robot navigation presents a critical and challenging task. The scarcity and costliness of real-world datasets necessitate efficient learning approaches. In this letter, we exploit Euclidean symmetry in planning for 2D navigation, which originates from Euclidean transformations between reference frames and enables parameter sharing. To address the challenges of unstructured environments, we formulate the navigation problem as planning on a geometric graph and develop an equivariant message passing network to perform value iteration.” Find the paper and full list of authors in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
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‘Privacy Norms of Transformative Fandom: A Case Study of an Activity-Defined Community’
“Transformative media fandom is a remarkably coherent, long-lived, and diverse community united primarily by shared engagement in the varied activities of fandom. Its social norms are highly-developed and frequently debated, and have been studied by the CSCW and Media Studies communities in the past, but rarely using the tools and theories of privacy, despite fannish norms often bearing strongly on privacy. We use privacy scholarship and existing theories thereof to examine these norms and bring an additional perspective to understanding fandom communities.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
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‘Seamlessly Insecure: Uncovering Outsider Access Risks in AiDot-Controlled Matter Devices’
“Matter is the recently proclaimed standard for seamless interoperability among connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices, seeking to unify the fragmented IoT landscape. In this paper, we analyze a range of Matter-enabled devices, uncovering a critical security flaw within the manufacturer’s implementation of the device commissioning process. This flaw allows the adversary to exploit an unenrolled manufacturer channel on an operational Matter device to enable unauthorized access, without notifying the user or compromising the existing Matter connection.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops.
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‘Envisioning New Futures of Positive Social Technology: Beyond Paradigms of Fixing, Protecting and Preventing’
“Social technology research today largely focuses on mitigating the negative impacts of technology and, therefore, often misses the potential of technology to enhance human connections and well-being. However, we see a potential to shift towards a holistic view of social technology’s impact on human flourishing. We introduce Positive Social Technology (Positech), a framework that shifts emphasis toward leveraging social technologies to support and augment human flourishing.” Find the paper and full list of authors in ArXiv.
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‘GenAudit: Fixing Factual Errors in Language Model Outputs With Evidence’
“LLMs can generate factually incorrect statements even when provided access to reference documents. Such errors can be dangerous in high-stakes applications (e.g., document-grounded QA for healthcare or finance). We present GenAudit — a tool intended to assist fact-checking LLM responses for document-grounded tasks. GenAudit suggests edits to the LLM response by revising or removing claims that are not supported by the reference document, and also presents evidence from the reference for facts that do appear to have support.” Find the paper and full list of authors in ArXiv.
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‘Unveiling AI-Driven Collective Action for a Worker-Centric Future’
“Collective action by gig knowledge workers is a potent method for enhancing labor conditions on platforms like Upwork, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and Toloka. However, this type of collective action is still rare today. Existing systems for supporting collective action are inadequate for workers to identify and understand their different workplace problems, plan effective solutions, and put the solutions into action. This talk will discuss how with my research lab we are creating worker-centric AI enhanced technologies that enable collective action among gig knowledge workers.”
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‘Quantum Geometry and Nonlinear Optical Responses in Rhombohedral Trilayer Graphene’
“We theoretically study the nonlinear optical response of ABC trilayer graphene with inversion symmetry broken by the application of a displacement field perpendicular to the trilayer. We show that rhombohedral trilayer graphene exhibits a large bulk photovoltaic effect arising from a DC shift-current response. … We focus on a regime of displacement field where certain band gaps close and reopen away from the charge neutrality point, leading to drastic changes in the quantum geometric structure in momentum space, a feature characteristic of the trilayer graphene band structure.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Physical Review B.
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‘Simplified Internal Models in Human Control of Complex Objects’
“Humans are skillful at manipulating objects that possess nonlinear underactuated dynamics, such as clothes or containers filled with liquids. Several studies suggested that humans implement a predictive model-based strategy to control such objects. However, these studies only considered unconstrained reaching without any object involved or. … This study examined a task where participants physically interacted with a nonlinear underactuated system mimicking a cup of sloshing coffee: a cup with a ball rolling inside. … These findings provide evidence that humans use simplified internal models along with mechanical impedance to manipulate complex objects.”Find the paper and list of authors in PLOS Computational…
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Levendis receives engineering communication award
“Mechanical and industrial engineering distinguished professor Yiannis Levendis is one of 15 collaborators who received the 2024 Jack Bono Award for Engineering Communication in the field of fire technology from the Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE) for their paper ‘The Use of Unmanned Aerial Systems in Outdoor Fire Fighting.’ This award recognizes authors who have made contributions to the advancement and application of professional fire protection engineering.”
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‘Is Technology Uniquely Placed to Solve Our Problems? An Examination Into Technosolutionism, What It Entails and What It Predicts’
“Technology plays an important role in business and society. This has resulted in the belief that technology is in a unique position to solve organizational and societal problems. However, technology is not regarded as equally impactful by all. To explore these differences, we designed a technosolutionism scale to measure the extent to which individuals deem technological solutions to be better-suited to address organizational and societal problems.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Sage Business & Society.
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‘Axolotl Retina Regeneration Following NMDA Injury’
“While axolotls (Ambystoma mexicanum) are studied for their remarkable ability to regenerate, there is a lack in understanding on their ability to regenerate their retina and the source of the progenitors responsible. It is also not known if the regeneration process is damage specific and if all retinal cell classes and types can regenerate. … This study serves to investigate the regenerative potential of the axolotl retina following chemical injury. We … discovered that axolotls contain all the major cell types of the vertebrate retina.”Find the paper and full list of authors in Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science.
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‘The Corporate Governance of Business Groups Around the World: A Review and Agenda for Future Research’
“Scholarly interest in business groups (BGs) has grown considerably over the years, as they emerged as important players in the global economy. Yet, there exist ample differences in the corporate governance, strategies, and performance of BG-affiliated firms. … Our review of 301 articles published in highly ranked journals between 1986 and 2023 establishes a mechanism-based framework to explain the effect of BG affiliation, ownership structure and corporate governance practices on firm performance. We also reveal that many relationships between these factors vary cross-nationally and over time.”Find the paper and full list of authors in Corporate Governance.
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Monagle inducted as Academy of Nursing Education fellow
“Twenty-seven distinguished nurse educators have been selected as the 18th class of fellows for induction into the prestigious National League for Nursing Academy of Nursing Education. With the addition of this newest class, the academy membership has now reached 406 members. These fellows join a fellowship of leaders in nursing education who teach in a range of programs across the spectrum of higher education. They are affiliated with top-ranked teaching hospitals, academic institutions, and other organizations committed to advancing the quality of health care in the US and globally.”
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Heising-Simons supports conference for women in physics
“This grant supported the work of professor Orimoto to participate in the the organization of a conference aimed at addressing the unique challenges faced by mid-career women physicists in large collaborations. The name of the workshop was Mid-Act 2024 – A workshop for Mid-Career Women in Physics Collaborations. Professor Orimoto has personal experience as a long-time member of large physics collaborations (BaBar and CMS collaborations) and also from being a mid-career woman physicist. In addition, the PI has had significant conference organization experience in the past.”
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‘Effective Nose-to-Brain Delivery of Blood-Brain Barrier Impermeant Anti-IL-1β Antibody via… MIND Technique’
“Treatment of neuroinflammation and neurodegenerative diseases using biologic therapies is limited due to the blood-brain barrier (BBB). This study explores a clinically validated approach to bypass the BBB for the purposes of direct central nervous system (CNS) delivery of antibodies using the Minimally Invasive Nasal Depot (MIND) technique. … The results demonstrated that MIND delivery resulted in a significant reduction in IL-1β levels and microglial activation in relevant brain regions, notably outperforming conventional intravenous (IV) administration.” Find the paper and full list of authors in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.
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‘Murine model of minimally invasive nasal depot (MIND) technique for central nervous system delivery of … therapeutics’
“The blood–brain barrier (BBB) poses a substantial obstacle to the successful delivery of therapeutics to the central nervous system (CNS). The transnasal route has been extensively explored, but success rates have been modest. … Here, to address these issues, we have developed a surgical technique known as the minimally invasive nasal depot (MIND). … The MIND procedure represents a unique platform that can be used to overcome the limitations posed by the BBB. This technique can potentially expand the therapeutic toolkit in the treatment of neurological diseases.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Lab Animal.
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‘Advancing Delirium Treatment Trials in Older Adults: Recommendations for Future Trials’
“To provide background and context, a review of delirium treatment randomized controlled trials (RCTs) published between 2003 and 2023 was conducted and evidence gaps were identified. The four panels addressed the identified subtopics. For each subtopic, research challenges were identified and recommendations to address each were proposed. … We identified key evidence gaps through a systematic literature review, yielding 43 RCTs of delirium treatments. From this review, eight unique challenges for delirium treatment trials were identified, and recommendations to address each were made based on panel input.”Find the paper and full list of authors in Critical Care Medicine.
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‘Weak Lensing Mass Distributions, Red-sequence Galaxy Distributions, and Their Alignment with the Brightest Cluster Galaxy’
“The Local Volume Complete Cluster Survey is an ongoing program to observe nearly a hundred low-redshift X-ray-luminous galaxy clusters … with the Dark Energy Camera, capturing data in [multiple] bands with a 5σ point source depth of approximately 25th–26th AB magnitudes. Here, we map the aperture masses in 58 galaxy cluster fields using weak gravitational lensing. … We find that the orientations of the BCG and the RS distribution are strongly aligned throughout the [cluster] interiors. … These types of alignment suggest long-term dynamical evolution within the clusters over cosmic timescales.” Find the paper and full list of authors in The…
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Space networks and near fields: Jornet gives IEEE keynote
“Electrical and computer engineering professor and associate dean of research Josep Jornet gave a keynote speech on ‘Terahertz Communications: From the Near Field to Space Networks’ at the IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference in Las Vegas.”