Research

Groundbreaking work and published results in peer reviewed journals across disciplines.

Title

Topic

  • ‘Type Prediction With Program Decomposition and Fill-in-the-Type Training’

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    “TypeScript and Python are two programming languages that support optional type annotations, which are useful but tedious to introduce and maintain. This has motivated automated type prediction: given an untyped program, produce a well-typed output program. Large language models (LLMs) are promising for type prediction, but there are challenges. … We address these challenges [with] OpenTau, a search-based approach for type prediction that leverages large language models. We propose a new metric for type prediction quality, give a tree-based program decomposition that searches a space of generated types and present fill-in-the-type fine-tuning.” Find the paper and full list of authors…

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  • ‘HVA_CPS Proposal: A Process for Hazardous Vulnerability Analysis in Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems’

    “Society is increasingly dependent upon the use of distributed cyber-physical systems (CPSs), such as energy networks, chemical processing plants and transport systems. Such CPSs typically have multiple layers of protection to prevent harm to people or the CPS. However, if both the control and protection systems are vulnerable to cyber-attacks, an attack may cause CPS damage or breaches of safety. … This article identifies the attributes that a rigorous hazardous vulnerability analysis (HVA) process would require and compares them against related works. None fully meet the requirements for rigour.” Find the paper and full list of authors at PeerJ Computer Science.

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  • ‘Companion: A Pilot Randomized Clinical Trial … for Detecting and Modifying Daily Inactivity Among Adults >60 Years — Design and Protocol’

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    “Supervised personal training is most effective in improving the health effects of exercise in older adults. … Strategies to extend the effect of trainer contact outside of supervision and that integrate meaningful and intelligent two-way communication to provide complex and interactive problem solving may motivate older adults to “move more and sit less” and sustain positive behaviors to further improve health. This paper describes … a technology-based behavior-aware text-based virtual “Companion” … to deliver behavior change strategies using socially engaging, contextually salient, and tailored text message conversations in near-real-time.” Find the paper and full list of authors at MDPI Sensors.

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  • ‘SECDA-TFLite: A Toolkit for Efficient Development of FPGA-Based DNN Accelerators for Edge Inference’

    “In this paper we propose SECDA-TFLite, a new open source toolkit for developing DNN hardware accelerators integrated within the TFLite framework. The toolkit leverages the principles of SECDA, a hardware/software co-design methodology, to reduce the design time of optimized DNN inference accelerators on edge devices with FPGAs. With SECDA-TFLite, we reduce the initial setup costs associated with integrating a new accelerator design within a target DNN framework, allowing developers to focus on the design.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing.

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  • ‘A Study of Multi-Factor and Risk-Based Authentication Availability’

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    “Password-based authentication (PBA) remains the most popular form of user authentication on the web despite its long-understood insecurity. Given the deficiencies of PBA, many online services support multi-factor authentication (MFA) and/or risk-based authentication (RBA) to better secure user accounts. … In this paper, we present a study of 208 popular sites in the Tranco top 5K that support account creation to understand the availability of MFA and RBA on the web … and how logging into sites through more secure SSO providers changes the landscape of user authentication security.” Find the paper and full list of authors at USENIX Security…

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  • ‘The Science of Fake News’

    “Fake news emerged as an apparent global problem during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. Addressing it requires a multidisciplinary effort to define the nature and extent of the problem, detect fake news in real time and mitigate its potentially harmful effects. This will require a better understanding of how the Internet spreads content, how people process news and how the two interact. We review the state of knowledge in these areas and discuss two broad potential mitigation strategies: better enabling individuals to identify fake news” and aiding platforms in intervention. Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.

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  • ‘Wrapped in Story: The Affordances of Narrative for Citizen Science Games’

    “Citizen science games enable public participation in scientific research, yet these games often struggle to engage wide audiences. As a potential solution, some game developers look to narrative as an experience-enhancing feature. … We investigated the effects of wrapping a story around the tutorial puzzles of the citizen science game Foldit. We found that the narrative increased the time players spent engaging with the game’s tutorial and its scientific puzzles but did not substantially affect their progress through the tutorial.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 18th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games proceedings.

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  • ‘Iterative Soft Shrinkage Learning for Efficient Image Super-Resolution’

    “Image super-resolution (SR) has witnessed extensive neural network designs from CNN to transformer architectures. However, prevailing SR models suffer from prohibitive memory footprint and intensive computations, which limits further deployment on edge devices. This work investigates the potential of network pruning for super-resolution to take advantage of off-the-shelf network designs and reduce the underlying computational overhead. … We adopt unstructured pruning with sparse models directly trained from scratch.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.

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  • ‘UniControl: A Unified Diffusion Model for Controllable Visual Generation in the Wild’

    “Achieving machine autonomy and human control often represent divergent objectives in the design of interactive AI systems. Visual generative foundation models such as Stable Diffusion show promise in navigating these goals, especially when prompted with arbitrary languages. However, they often fall short in generating images with spatial, structural or geometric controls. … In response, we introduce UniControl, a new generative foundation model that consolidates a wide array of controllable condition-to-image (C2I) tasks within a singular framework, while still allowing for arbitrary language prompts.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.

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  • ‘Linearity of Relation Decoding in Transformer Language Models’

    “Much of the knowledge encoded in transformer language models (LMs) may be expressed in terms of relations: relations between words and their synonyms, entities and their attributes, etc. We show that, for a subset of relations, this computation is well-approximated by a single linear transformation on the subject representation. Linear relation representations may be obtained by constructing a first-order approximation to the LM from a single prompt, and they exist for a variety of factual, commonsense, and linguistic relations.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.

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  • ‘TikTok as Algorithmically Mediated Biographical Illumination: Autism, Self-Discovery and Platformed Diagnosis on #Autisktok’

    “Scholarship in the sociology of medicine has tended to characterize diagnosis as disruptive to one’s self-concept. This categorization, though, requires reconsideration in light of public conversations about mental health and community building around neurocognitive conditions, particularly among youth online. … We explored the shifting nature of [‘biographical illumination’] through the case of TikTok. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, we argue that TikTok serves as a space to discuss diagnosis and refine one’s sense of self as a result of diagnosis.” Find the paper and full list of authors at New Media & Society.

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  • ‘Work Strains and Disabilities in French Workers: A Career-Long Retrospective Study’

    “This study aims to estimate the causal impact of detrimental working conditions on the self-reported disabilities in France. Using a retrospective lifelong panel, we implement a mixed econometric strategy that relies on difference-in-differences and matching methods to take into account for selection biases as well as unobserved heterogeneity. Deleterious effects from exposure on disability are found. … These results provide insights into the debate on legal retirement age postponement and justify policies being enacted early in individuals’ careers, but also schemes that are more focused on psychosocial risk factors.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Labour.

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  • ‘Why Look at Dead Animals?’ asks Coughlin in provocative taxidermy study

    “Lion Attacking a Dromedary was a sensational object for its first viewers at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1867. … As we now know, the Verreaux brothers embedded human remains in the figure of the rider that had formerly been assumed to be just a clothed mannequin. … This essay suggests that theoretical tools derived from Material Ecocriticism and Monster Theory that may help us to think about, or alongside, the affective power of this disturbing taxidermy assemblage, ever aware that this piece draws its power from the theatrical, colonial violence of extraction and extinction.”

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  • ‘Deep Bayesian Active Learning for Accelerating Stochastic Simulation’

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    “Stochastic simulations such as large-scale, spatiotemporal, age-structured epidemic models are computationally expensive at fine-grained resolution. While deep surrogate models can speed up the simulations, doing so for stochastic simulations and with active learning approaches is an underexplored area. We propose Interactive Neural Process (INP), a deep Bayesian active learning framework for learning deep surrogate models to accelerate stochastic simulations. INP consists of two components, a spatiotemporal surrogate model built upon Neural Process (NP) family and an acquisition function for active learning.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining proceedings.

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  • ‘Disentangling Node Attributes From Graph Topology for Improved Generalizability in Link Prediction’

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    “Link prediction is a crucial task in graph machine learning with diverse applications. We explore the interplay between node attributes and graph topology and demonstrate that incorporating pre-trained node attributes improves the generalization power of link prediction models. Our proposed method, UPNA (Unsupervised Pre-training of Node Attributes), solves the inductive link prediction problem by learning a function that takes a pair of node attributes and predicts the probability of an edge, as opposed to Graph Neural Networks, … which can be prone to topological shortcuts in graphs with power-law degree distribution.” Find the paper and full list of authors at…

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  • ‘Can Euclidean Symmetry Be Leveraged in Reinforcement Learning and Planning?’

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    “In robotic tasks, changes in reference frames typically do not influence the underlying physical properties of the system, which has been known as invariance of physical laws.These changes, which preserve distance, encompass isometric transformations such as translations, rotations, and reflections, collectively known as the Euclidean group. In this work, we delve into the design of improved learning algorithms for reinforcement learning and planning tasks that possess Euclidean group symmetry.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.

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  • ‘Leveraging Structure for Improved Classification of Grouped Biased Data’

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    “We consider semi-supervised binary classification for applications in which data points are naturally grouped … and the labeled data is biased. … The groups overlap in the feature space and consequently the input-output patterns are related across the groups. To model the inherent structure in such data, we assume the partition-projected class-conditional invariance across groups. … We demonstrate that under this assumption, the group carries additional information about the class, over the group-agnostic features, with provably improved area under the ROC curve.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence proceedings.

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  • ‘Accelerating Neural MCTS Algorithms Using Neural Sub-Net Structures’

    “Neural MCTS algorithms are a combination of Deep Neural Networks and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and have successfully trained Reinforcement Learning agents in a tabula-rasa way. … However, these algorithms … take a long time to converge, which requires high computational power and electrical energy. It also becomes difficult for researchers without cutting-edge hardware to pursue Neural MCTS research. We propose Step-MCTS, a novel algorithm that uses subnet structures, each of which simulates a tree that provides a lookahead for exploration.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems…

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  • ‘Sustainable HCI Under Water: Opportunities for Research with Oceans, Coastal Communities and Marine Systems’

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    “Although the world’s oceans play a critical role in human well-being, they have not been a primary focus of the sustainable HCI (SHCI) community to date. In this paper, we present a scoping review to show how concerns with the oceans are threaded throughout the broader SHCI literature and to find new research opportunities. We identify several themes that could benefit from focused SHCI research, including marine food sources, culture and coastal communities, ocean conservation, and marine climate change impacts and adaptation strategies.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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  • ‘Opportunities for Nature-Based Solutions To Contribute to Climate-Resilient Development Pathways’

    “There is potential for nature-based solutions (NbS) to contribute to climate-resilient development (CRD) due to their integrated approach to mitigation, adaptation, and sustainable development. … A CRD pathways (CRDP) approach helps to analyze the complexities of the relationship between CRD and NbS, and a climate justice lens enables the identification of the multiple ways that NbS can support or undermine CRD. … We present a framework that combines climate justice and CRDP in an analytical tool for understanding the potential for a NbS to support CRD.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability.

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  • ‘Rapid Convergence: The Outcomes of Making PPE During a Healthcare Crisis’

    “The U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) 3D Print Exchange is a public, open-source repository for 3D printable medical device designs with contributions from clinicians, expert-amateur makers, and people from industry and academia. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the NIH formed a collection to foster submissions of low-cost, locally manufacturable personal protective equipment (PPE). We evaluated the 623 submissions in this collection … [and] found an immediate design convergence to manufacturing-focused remixes of a few initial designs affiliated with NIH partners and major for-profit groups.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.

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  • ‘OPTIMISM: Enabling Collaborative Implementation of Domain Specific Metaheuristic Optimization’

    “For non-technical domain experts and designers it can be a substantial challenge to create designs that meet domain specific goals. This presents an opportunity to create specialized tools that produce optimized designs in the domain. However, implementing domain-specific optimization methods requires a rare combination of programming and domain expertise. … We present OPTIMISM, a toolkit which enables programmers and domain experts to collaboratively implement an optimization component of design tools.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems proceedings.

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  • ‘The First COVID Wave: Comparing Experiences of Adults Age 50 and Older in the U.S. and Europe’

    “The first wave of COVID-19, from March to September 2020, had significant health, social, and financial consequences for older Americans and their European peers. Comparing their COVID-19 experiences is important for understanding the variable impacts of the pandemic. … During the first COVID-19 wave, older Americans were much more likely than their European peers to report at least one of the four adverse COVID-19 experiences we studied. These experiences could have lasting effects on older adults in the U.S.” Find the paper and full list of authors at The Commonwealth Fund.

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  • ‘Closing the Gap in Merger Enforcement’

    “Most mergers in industries with only a handful of competitors are anticompetitive, so why don’t we block them?” asks Neal F. Finnegan Distinguished Professor of Economics John Kwoka. “The fix is to use a structural presumption to lower the burden for regulators,” he argues, stating that “a well-designed merger enforcement policy should focus on mergers with the greatest likelihood of anticompetitive outcomes,” which has not recently been true of United States policy.

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  • ‘Documentary Film and Institutional Behavioral Change: A Student-Driven Mobilization for Sustainability’

    “There are multiple methods available to convey the need for sustainability. However, most often communications are limited to one discipline or one instructional medium, which limits engagement and even interest. In the summer of 2021, students at Northeastern University working with their faculty advisor, adopted a multidisciplinary approach to discussing sustainability by producing a documentary film. The subject of the film is waste resulting from convenience consumption of coffee at the University’s multiple coffee shops.” Find this book chapter and the full list of authors in Educating the Sustainability Leaders of the Future.

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  • Understanding human decision-making during supply chains shortages

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    “Research conducted by mechanical and industrial engineering associate professor Jacqueline Griffin, professor Ozlem Ergun, and professor Stacy Marsella [in the Khoury College of Computer science, titled] ‘Agent-Based Modeling of Human Decision-Makers Under Uncertain Information During Supply Chain Shortages’ was published in the proceedings from the 2023 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.”

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  • ‘The Interplay Among Savings Accounts and Network-Based Financial Arrangements: Evidence From a Field Experiment’

    “This paper studies how formal financial access affects network-based financial arrangements. We use a field experiment that granted access to a savings account to a random subset of households in 19 Nepalese villages. Exploiting a unique panel dataset that follows all bilateral informal financial transactions before and after the intervention, we show that households that were offered access to an account increased their loans and total transfers to others, independent of the treatment status of the receiver.” Find the paper and full list of authors at The Economic Journal.

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  • ‘Small Business Lending and the Bank-Branch Network’

    “I examine the role of bank’s distance to the borrower and the proximity of other lenders for the transmission of financial shocks across the bank network. I use a novel dataset of small business lending based on information from the Community Reinvestment Act, which measures lending at census tract groups within each county and yields rich variation. … I document that small banks with increased liquidity from proximity to local oil booms, originate more loans to firms far from these booms, and lenders with above-average geographic exposure to residential booms reduce lending in census tract groups with stable house prices.”

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  • ‘Designing Engagement: A Student-Based Perspective of the Economics of Crime’

    “This paper, developed by participants in an Economics of Crime course at Northeastern University in conjunction with their professor, highlights student perspectives of the relationship between the economic system, its operations and institutions, and the marginalization and victimization of Black people. The paper addresses specific attributes of the course curriculum that facilitated student understanding of these topics, and in doing so suggests an alternative pedagogy for discussing crime from an economics disciplinary perspective.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Contemporary Justice Review.

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  • Northeastern researchers claim two editorial roles for Written Communication

    Mya Poe, associate professor in the department of English and Tieanna Graphenreed, PhD. student in English, have become co-editors of Written Communication, along with Dylan B. Dryer, University of Maine. They write that they “hope to further enrich Written Communication in four ways: First, we aim to increase the journal’s visibility as a potential home for work by scholars based in Asia, Africa, and South America. … Second, Written Communication will continue to advance methodological representation. … Third, we are planning to roll out a series of novel text-types. … Fourth, … we hope to reanimate the journal’s important role…

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