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‘In Search of the Miraculous’ in New York art exhibition
Yulia Pinkusevich, professor of studio art at Mills College, was part of a group exhibition that ran between January and March, 2023. The exhibition was titled “In Search of the Miraculous,” and was held at the Marlborough Gallery, in New York City.
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Top 10 in Annals of Internal Medicine: Miller featured with two papers
Matthew Miller, professor of health sciences and epidemiology, was featured in the Annals of Internal Medicine’s “Best of 2022” list with two articles on firearms research, “Homicide Deaths Among Adult Cohabitants of Handgun Owners in California, 2004 to 2016” and the “Firearm Purchasing During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Results From the 2021 National Firearms Survey.” Find his papers with their full list of authors, and the full best-of list, at Annals of Internal Medicine.
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‘The Rise of Emerging Market Lead Firms in Global Value Chains’
“Extending the resource-based view that location characteristics influence firms’ resources and internationalization, we argue that the global value chains (GVCs) of lead firms from emerging and advanced economies differ in three dimensions: objectives, trajectory, and governance.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in the Journal of Business Research.
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‘Generating Unified Platforms Using Multigranularity Domain DSE (MG-DmDSE) Exploiting Application Similarities’
“Heterogeneous accelerator-rich (ACC-rich) platforms combining general-purpose cores and specialized HW accelerators (ACCs) promise high-performance and low-power streaming application deployments in a variety of domains, such as video analytics and software-defined radio. … A domain platform exploration tool must take advantage of structural and functional similarities across applications by allocating a common set of ACCs. … This article introduces a multigranularity-based domain design space exploration tool (MG-DmDSE) to improve both average application throughput as well as platform generality.” Find the paper and the full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems.
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‘Modeling and Simulation… for an Analog Computing Design Approach With Application to EEG Feature Extraction’
“This article presents a design approach for the modeling and simulation of ultralow power (ULP) analog computing machine learning (ML) circuits for seizure detection using electroencephalography (EEG) signals in wearable health monitoring applications. In this article, we describe a new analog system modeling and simulation technique to associate power consumption, noise, linearity and other critical performance parameters of analog circuits with the classification accuracy of a given ML network.” Find the paper and the full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems.
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‘Restructuring of Emergent Grain Boundaries at Free Surfaces—An Interplay Between Core Stabilization and Elastic Stress Generation’
“Emergent grain boundaries at free surface impact a wide range of material properties but little is known about their atomic-scale behavior. Using scanning tunneling microscopy and calculations, we studied the structure of emergent grain boundaries at the surfaces of planar nanocrystalline copper (111) films and bicrystals. We show that for a wide range of misorientation angles there exists a strong energetic preference for boundary cores to lie along close-packed planes that leads to the restructuring of emergent grain boundaries at free surfaces.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in Acta Materiala.
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Global work and enterprises in the wake of COVID-19
The authors examine “the future of global work … [for] multinational enterprises” in the wake of “a great ‘reset'” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors apply “a phenomenon-based approach” to cover “the most critical macrotrends shaping the future of global work, their implications for [international human resource management], and global work in the context of MNEs. Specifically, [they] address how these trends have affected the where, how, who, and why of global work.” Read “Global work in a rapidly changing world: Implications for MNEs and individuals” and see the full list of authors in the Journal of World Business.
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‘Multiple Forecast Visualizations (MFVs): Trade-offs in Trust and Performance in Multiple COVID-19 Forecast Visualizations’
“The prevalence of inadequate SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19) responses may indicate a lack of trust in forecasts and risk communication. However, no work has empirically tested how multiple forecast visualization choices impact trust and task-based performance. The three studies presented in this paper ( N=1299 ) examine how visualization choices impact trust in COVID-19 mortality forecasts and how they influence performance in a trend prediction task.” Read “Multiple Forecast Visualizations (MFVs): Trade-offs in Trust and Performance in Multiple COVID-19 Forecast Visualizations” and see the full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
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‘Image-Text Embedding Learning via Visual and Textual Semantic Reasoning’
“As a bridge between language and vision domains, cross-modal retrieval between images and texts is a hot research topic in recent years. It remains challenging because the current image representations usually lack semantic concepts in the corresponding sentence captions. To address this issue, we introduce an intuitive and interpretable model to learn a common embedding space for alignments between images and text descriptions.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.
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‘Data Lake Organization’
“We consider the problem of building an organizational directory of data lakes to support effective user navigation. The organization directory is defined as an acyclic graph that contains nodes representing sets of attributes and edges indicating subset relationships between nodes. A probabilistic model is constructed to model user navigational behaviour. The model also predicts the likelihood of users finding relevant tables in a data lake given an organization.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.
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‘Not Your Average App: A Large-Scale Privacy Analysis of Android Browsers’
“Mobile browsers may present contradicting privacy behaviors. On the one end, they can have access to (and can expose) a unique combination of sensitive user data. … However, on the other end, they also are in a unique position to protect users’ privacy by limiting data sharing with other parties by implementing ad-blocking features. In this paper, we perform a comparative and empirical analysis on how hundreds of Android web browsers protect or expose user data during browsing sessions.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in the Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium.
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‘GenoREC: A Recommendation System for Interactive Genomics Data Visualization’
“Interpretation of genomics data is critically reliant on the application of a wide range of visualization tools. A large number of visualization techniques for genomics data and different analysis tasks pose a significant challenge. … Since genomics analysts typically have limited training in data visualization, their choices are often based on trial and error or guided by technical details. … To address these challenges, we designed GenoREC, a novel visualization recommendation system for genomics. GenoREC enables genomics analysts to select effective visualizations.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
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‘Photosensitive Accessibility for Interactive Data Visualizations’
“We systematically gathered and tested 1,132 interactive and animated visualizations for seizure-inducing risk using established methods and found that currently available methods for determining photosensitive risk are not reliable when evaluating interactive visualizations, as risk scores varied significantly based on the individual interacting with the visualization. To address this issue, we introduce a theoretical model defining the degree of control visualization designers have over three determinants of photosensitive risk in potentially seizure-inducing sequences: the size, frequency, and color of flashing content.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
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‘Learning How To Listen: Automatically Finding Bug Patterns in Event-Driven JavaScript APIs’
“Event-driven programming is widely practiced in the JavaScript community. … Concentrating on the problem of detecting dead listeners, we present an approach to learn how to use event-based APIs by first mining a large corpus of JavaScript code using a simple static analysis to identify code snippets that register an event listener, and then applying statistical modeling to identify anomalous patterns, which often indicate incorrect API usage.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
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MRI studies of ‘nonword repetition’ provides insight into brain function of autistic children
Researchers have “used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the brain bases for nonword repetition challenges in autism.” Nonword repetition, or the ability to repeat sounds not associated with a meaning-laden word, is “a common clinical measure of phonological working memory.” Also employing “Multivoxel pattern analysis within the speech production network,” researchers found that their “findings suggest that atypical function in speech production brain regions may contribute to nonword repetition difficulties in autism.” Find “Altered engagement of the speech motor network is associated with reduced phonological working memory in autism” and the full list of authors in NeuroImage: Clinical.
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Measuring climate change opinions among recreational fishers and citizen scientists
This paper hopes to understand the climatic opinions held by those involved in non-commercial fisheries. “Past research has focused on climate impacts and adaptation efforts in commercial fisheries,” the authors write, with little attention being spared for “recreational fishers and other stakeholders such as citizen scientists.” Overall, they observed that “Citizen scientists showed greater concern for climate change than recreational fishers and non-fisher/non-citizen scientists.” Read “Catching versus Counting: Comparing the Pro-Environmental Attitudes, Behaviors, and Climate Concerns of Recreational Fishers and Citizen Scientists” and see the full list of authors in Sustainability.
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‘Tropical Pacific and North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature Patterns Modulate Mississippi Basin Hydroclimate Extremes’
“Mississippi River basin floods impart large socioeconomic impacts over the central United States. Improving flood predictability depends on our understanding of the dynamical controls on Mississippi basin hydroclimate… Here, we use the Paleo Hydrodynamics Data Assimilation product, spanning the Last Millennium, to investigate the impacts of tropical Pacific and North Atlantic sea surface temperature (SST) variability on hydrological extremes across the Mississippi River and its major tributaries.” Read “Tropical Pacific and North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature Patterns Modulate Mississippi Basin Hydroclimate Extremes Over the Last Millennium” and see the full list of authors in Geophysical Research Letters.
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‘Human Motion Segmentation via Velocity-Sensitive Dual-Side Auto-Encoder’
“Human motion segmentation (HMS) aims to segment a long human action video into a bunch of short and meaningful action clips. Existing supervised learning approaches need a large amount of training data which may be costly in real-world scenario, while most unsupervised clustering methods cannot fully explore the temporal correlations among human motions and hard to achieve promising performances. In our paper, we design a novel unsupervised framework, called Velocity-Sensitive Dual-Side Auto-Encoder (VSDA), for HMS task.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.
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‘Microstructural Pattern Formation During Far-From-Equilibrium Alloy Solidification’
“We introduce a new phase-field formulation of rapid alloy solidification that quantitatively incorporates nonequilibrium effects at the solid-liquid interface over a very wide range of interface velocities. Simulations identify a new dynamical instability of dendrite tip growth driven by solute trapping at velocities approaching the absolute stability limit.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors at Physical Review Letters.
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Associate professor John Bai, in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, writing with Anya Mkrtchyan from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, uses “rich microdata” from the United States Census Bureau to examine the “relative performance” of new CEOs within a company, comparing CEOs promoted internally with those who are hired externally. Ultimately, their findings “suggest that inside successors might benefit from adopting an outside perspective, demonstrating a sensitivity to change, and challenging legacies and relationships that might diminish their effectiveness.” Read “What Do Outside CEOs Really Do? Evidence from Plant-Level Data” at the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance.
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Breaking through the COVID-19 virus’ shell
A result of a collaboration between labs in Northeastern University’s departments of physics and chemistry, this paper expands on our understanding of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Using optical tweezers, researchers gained “direct measurements” of the SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein, the “N” protein. These new observations on the virus’s binding process set the stage for future attempts at disrupting the process entirely, targeting the nucleocapsid protein and striking at the virus’s interior. See the full list of authors and read their research, “Structural domains of SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein coordinate to compact long nucleic acid substrates,” in Nucleic Acids Research.
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Phonological knowledge shared by signers and non-signers
In this article, professor of psychology Iris Berent, with professor Judit Gervain from the University of Padua and Université Paris Cité, argues that the knowledge of sign language and of a non-sign language can mutually inform one another. “Informed by recent findings from adults and infants,” they write, “we argue that the phonological system is partly amodal. We show that hearing infants use a shared brain network to extract phonological rules from speech and sign.” Read this discussion paper, “Speakers aren’t blank slates (with respect to sign-language phonology)!” in Cognition.
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‘Optimal Recursive Expert-Enabled Inference in Regulatory Networks’
“Accurate inference of biological systems, such as gene regulatory networks and microbial communities, is a key to a deep understanding of their underlying mechanisms. Despite several advances in the inference of regulatory networks in recent years, the existing techniques cannot incorporate expert knowledge into the inference process. … This letter models the regulatory networks using Boolean network with perturbation. We develop an expert-enabled inference method for inferring the unknown parameters of the network model using expert-acquired data.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
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‘Towards a Unified Drag Coefficient Formula for Quantifying Wave Energy Reduction by Salt Marshes’
“Coastal regions are susceptible to increasing flood risks amid climate change. Coastal wetlands play an important role in mitigating coastal hazards. Vegetation exerts a drag force to the flow and dampens storm surges and wind waves…. As wave height increases, highly flexible vegetation causes reduced wave attenuation, whereas relatively rigid vegetation induces increased wave attenuation. The leaf contribution to wave attenuation is highly dependent on the leaf rigidity. It is recommended that leaf properties, especially its Young’s modulus be collected in future field experiments.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in Coastal Engineering.
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A virtual home for Antarctic samples around the world
Antarctica provides a remarkable source of biodiversity and serve as “a major sink” of human-made carbon emissions. In “The Time is Right for an Antarctic Biorepository Network,” the authors, from numerous institutions around the United States, argue that there is “an extensive, largely untapped wealth of Antarctic specimens” around the world. “The majority of Antarctic biological specimens are invisible and inaccessible.” With a virtual “biorepository network of Antarctic specimens,” scientists could better address “the most critical questions in Antarctic science, [including] improving human welfare, and mitigating the impacts of climate change.” Find the paper and the full list of authors…
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‘Leveraging Structure for Improved Classification of Grouped Biased Data’
“We consider semi-supervised binary classification for applications in which data points are naturally grouped (e.g., survey responses grouped by state) and the labeled data is biased (e.g., survey respondents are not representative of the population). 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, defined in terms of the group-agnostic feature space.” Find the paper and the full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘Calibration of Computational Tools for Missense Variant Pathogenicity Classification’
“Recommendations from the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics and the Association for Molecular Pathology for interpreting sequence variants specify the use of computational predictors as ‘supporting’ level of evidence for pathogenicity. … Previously, we described a probabilistic framework that quantified the strengths of evidence … within ACMG/AMP recommendations. We have extended this framework to computational predictors and introduce a new standard that converts a tool’s scores to PP3 and BP4 evidence strengths.” Read “Calibration of computational tools for missense variant pathogenicity classification and ClinGen recommendations for PP3/BP4 criteria” and see the full list of authors in AJHG.
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‘The Birth of a Relativistic Jet Following the Disruption of a Star by a Cosmological Black Hole’
This highly collaborative, multi-institutional effort models black holes when they become relativistic jets “after… tidally disrupt[ing] a star.” These events, when they point toward Earth, “have the potential to unveil cosmological… quiescent black holes and are ideal test beds.” The results of their modeling “implies a beamed, highly relativistic jet akin to blazars… and challenges our theoretical understanding of jets.” Find the paper and the full list of authors at Nature Astronomy.