Title
Topic
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‘What I Learned at the White House, or, the Importance of Measurement Researchers Engaging with Policy’
“Computing systems now impact almost every aspect of our daily lives. As these systems evolve and develop, they often raise new challenges to our security and privacy, as well as to our commitments to equity and justice. To identify and mitigate the risks that these new technologies present, it is crucial to have scientific and technological experts participate in the conversation. … In this talk, I’ll reflect on my 18 months serving at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer for Privacy.”
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‘Ethics and Transparency in Game Data’
“While existing work has discussed ethics and fairness in relation to data generally, and a small number of papers have raised the same issues within games specifically, work on addressing fairness and ethical issues with game data collection and usage is still rare. … Our goal for this workshop is, thus, to bring together researchers and professionals working in the spaces of game human–computer interaction (HCI), game data and AI, and ethics in both games and AI to discuss and identify interdisciplinary research opportunities and devise potential solutions.” Find the paper and list of authors in the CHI PLAY Companion…
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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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‘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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‘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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‘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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‘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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‘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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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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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.”
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‘SoK: Technical Implementation and Human Impact of Internet Privacy Regulations’
“Growing recognition of the potential for exploitation of personal data and of the shortcomings of prior privacy regimes has led to the passage of a multitude of new privacy regulations. Some… have been the focus of large bodies of research by the computer science community, while others have received less attention. In this work, we analyze a set of 24 privacy laws and data protection regulations drawn from around the world… and develop a taxonomy of rights granted and obligations imposed by these laws.” Find the paper and list of authors in the 2024 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy proceedings.
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‘Project-Based Activities to Introduce Hardware in a Software-Focused Course’
“This workshop introduces attendees to the low-level components used in the design of computer hardware, allowing them to experiment with the hardware-software interface. Attendees explore hands-on experiments that are designed for students unlikely to encounter hardware topics in their course of study. These experiments are offered in bridge courses of a graduate program enrolling students without a Computer Science background at Northeastern University (the Align MSCS Program). The workshop consists of 3 groupings of hardware experiments. In one grouping, attendees use breadboarding to construct digital circuits.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the SIGCSE 2024 proceedings.
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‘Fully Dynamic Matching: (2-√2)-Approximation in Polylog Update Time’
“We study maximum matchings in fully dynamic graphs, … graphs that undergo both edge insertions and deletions. Our focus is on algorithms that estimate the size of maximum matching after each update while spending a small time. … We show that for any fixed ɛ > 0, a (2 — √2— ɛ) approximation can be maintained in poly(log n) time per update even in general graphs. Our techniques also lead to the same approximation for general graphs in two passes of the semi-streaming setting, removing a similar gap.” Find the paper and authors list in the 2024 Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium…
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‘A Retrospective Study of One Decade of Artifact Evaluations’
“Reproducibility is a vital property of experimental and empirical research, without whichit is difficult to establish trust in derived conclusions. If results cannot be independently confirmed, they may be affected by observer bias or other confounding factors. As the full-scale reproduction of scientific results from a study takes significant time, which does not match well with the conference-focused publication in computer science, a lighter quality assurance mechanism for scientific work has been established. … After a decade of artifact evaluations, we analyze the impact they have had on published articles and artifacts.” Find the paper authors list at Software Engineering…
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‘The Arrangement of Marks Impacts Afforded Messages: Ordering, Partitioning, Spacing and Coloring in Bar Charts’
“Data visualizations present a massive number of potential messages to an observer. … The message that a viewer tends to notice — the message that a visualization ‘affords’ — is strongly affected by how values are arranged in a chart, e.g., how the values are colored or positioned. … We present a set of empirical evaluations of how different messages … are afforded by variations in ordering, partitioning, spacing and coloring of values, within the ubiquitous case study of bar graphs.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
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Mid-Atlantic Topology Conference held at Northeastern
The 2024 Mid-Atlantic Topology Conference was held at Northeastern University in late March, 2024. The conference was sponsored by professors Ben Knudsen, Iva Halacheva and Jose Perea in the department of mathematics.
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‘ICML 2023 Topological Deep Learning Challenge: Design and Results’
“This paper presents the computational challenge on topological deep learning that was hosted within the ICML 2023 Workshop on Topology and Geometry in Machine Learning. The competition asked participants to provide open-source implementations of topological neural networks from the literature by contributing to the python packages TopoNetX (data processing) and TopoModelX (deep learning). The challenge attracted twenty-eight qualifying submissions in its two month duration. This paper describes the design of the challenge and summarizes its main findings.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Proceedings of Machine Learning Research.
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‘”The Wallpaper is Ugly”: Indoor Localization Using Vision and Language’
“We study the task of locating a user in a mapped indoor environment using natural language queries and images from the environment. Building on recent pretrained vision-language models, we learn a similarity score between text descriptions and images of locations in the environment. … Our approach is capable of localizing on environments, text, and images that were not seen during training. One model, finetuned CLIP, outperformed humans in our evaluation.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication proceedings.
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‘Multi-Instance Randomness Extraction and Security Against Bounded-Storage Mass Surveillance’
“Consider a state-level adversary who observes and stores large amounts of encrypted data from all users on the Internet, but does not have the capacity to store it all. Later, it may target certain ‘persons of interest.’ … We would like to guarantee that, if the adversary’s storage capacity is only (say) 1% of the total encrypted data size, then even if it can later obtain the decryption keys of arbitrary users, it can only learn something about the contents of (roughly) 1% of the ciphertexts.” Find the paper and authors list at Theory of Cryptography.
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‘Code Coverage Criteria for Asynchronous Programs’
“Asynchronous software often exhibits complex and error-prone behaviors that should be tested thoroughly. … Traditional code coverage criteria do not adequately reflect completion, interactions and error handling of asynchronous operations. This paper proposes novel test adequacy criteria for measuring: (i) completion of asynchronous operations in terms of both successful and exceptional execution, (ii) registration of reactions for handling both possible outcomes and (iii) execution of said reactions through tests.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering.
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‘Increasing the Responsiveness of Web Applications by Introducing Lazy Loading’
“Front-end developers want their applications to contain no more code than is needed in order to minimize the amount of time that elapses between visiting a web page and the page becoming responsive. However, front-end code is typically written in JavaScript … and tends to rely heavily on third-party packages. … One way to combat such bloat is to lazily load external packages on an as-needed basis. … In this work, we propose an approach for automatically introducing lazy loading of third-party packages in JavaScript applications.” Find the paper and authors list in the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Automated…
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‘Testing the Limits of Neural Sentence Alignment Models on Classical Greek and Latin Texts and Translations’
“The Greek and Latin classics, like many other ancient texts, have been widely translated into a variety of languages over the past two millennia. … Aligning the corpus of classical texts and translations at the sentence and word level would provide a valuable resource for studying translation theory, digital humanities and natural language processing (NLP). … This paper evaluates and examines the limits of such state-of-the-art models for cross-language sentence embedding and alignment of ancient Greek and Latin texts with translations into English, French, German and Persian.” Find the paper and authors list in the Computational Humanities Research Conference 2023…
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‘Automatic Collation for Diversifying Corpora: Commonly Copied Texts as Distant Supervision for Handwritten Text Recognition’
“Handwritten text recognition (HTR) has enabled many researchers to gather textual evidence from the human record. … To build generalized models for Arabic-script manuscripts, perhaps one of the largest textual traditions in the pre-modern world, we need an approach that can improve its accuracy on unseen manuscripts and hands without linear growth in the amount of manually annotated data. We propose Automatic Collation for Diversifying Corpora (ACDC), taking advantage of the existence of multiple manuscripts of popular texts.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Computational Humanities Research Conference 2023 proceedings.
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‘OAuth 2.0 Redirect URI Validation Falls Short, Literally’
“OAuth 2.0 requires a complex redirection trail between websites and Identity Providers (IdPs). In particular, the ‘redirect URI’ parameter included in the popular Authorization Grant Code flow governs the callback endpoint that users are routed to, together with their security tokens. The protocol specification, therefore, includes guidelines on protecting the integrity of the redirect URI. … We analyze the OAuth 2.0 specification in light of modern systems-centric attacks and reveal that the prescribed redirect URI validation guidance exposes IdPs to path confusion and parameter pollution attacks.” Find the paper and authors list in the 39th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference…
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‘How To Evaluate Blame for Gradual Types, Part 2’
“Equipping an existing programming language with a gradual type system requires two major steps. The first and most visible one in academia is to add a notation for types and a type checking apparatus. The second, highly practical one is to provide a type veneer for the large number of existing untyped libraries. … When programmers create such typed veneers for libraries, they make mistakes that persist and cause trouble. … This paper provides a first, surprising answer to this [dilemma] via a rational-programmer investigation.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the proceedings of the ACM on…
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‘How Profilers Can Help Navigate Type Migration’
“Sound migratory typing envisions a safe and smooth refactoring of untyped code bases to typed ones. However, the cost of enforcing safety with run-time checks is often prohibitively high, thus performance regressions are a likely occurrence. … In principal though, migration could be guided by off-the-shelf profiling tools. To examine this hypothesis, this paper follows the rational programmer method and reports on the results of an experiment on tens of thousands of performance-debugging scenarios via seventeen strategies for turning profiler output into an actionable next step.” Find the paper and authors list in the proceedings of the ACM on Programming…