Title
Topic
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‘The Skills Your Employees Need to Work Effectively With AI’
“Right now, the corporate world is in the throes of a generative AI hype cycle,” writes Nada Sanders, Distinguished Professor of supply chain management, with John D. Wood, attorney and author. “But how do [leaders] actually integrate AI with their workforce to achieve good business outcomes?” they ask. Sanders and Wood argue that the skills a workforce needs during this AI boom comes down to two categories: interpersonal skills and domain expertise.
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With NSF grant, Caracoglia will test life-size buildings against simulated tornados
“Civil and environmental engineering professor Luca Caracoglia is part of a team of researchers across nine universities who have been given a four-year, $14 million grant by the NSF to design a facility that can test tornado effects on real-life scale building models.”
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‘Evaluation of the US COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub for informing pandemic response under uncertainty’
“Our ability to forecast epidemics far into the future is constrained by the many complexities of disease systems. Realistic longer-term projections may, however, be possible under well-defined scenarios that specify the future state of critical epidemic drivers. Since December 2020, the U.S. COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub (SMH) has convened multiple modeling teams to make months ahead projections of SARS-CoV-2 burden, totaling nearly 1.8 million national and state-level projections. Here, we find SMH performance varied widely as a function of both scenario validity and model calibration.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Nature Communications.
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‘Whole genome assembly and annotation of the endangered Caribbean coral Acropora cervicornis’
“Coral species in the genus Acropora are key ecological components of coral reefs worldwide and represent the most diverse genus of scleractinian corals. While key species of Indo-Pacific Acropora have annotated genomes, no annotated genome has been published for either of the two species of Caribbean Acropora. Here we present the first fully annotated genome of the endangered Caribbean staghorn coral, Acropora cervicornis.” Find the paper and full list of authors at G3.
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‘Biochemical Activity of 17 Cancer-Associated Variants of DNA Polymerase Kappa Predicted by Electrostatic Properties’
“DNA damage and repair have been widely studied in relation to cancer and therapeutics. Y-family DNA polymerases can bypass DNA lesions … including some chemotherapy agents. Overexpression of the Y-family polymerase human pol kappa can result in tumorigenesis and drug resistance in cancer. This report describes the use of computational tools to predict the effects of single nucleotide polymorphism variants on pol kappa activity. Partial Order Optimum Likelihood (POOL), a machine learning method, … was used to identify amino acid residues most likely involved in catalytic activity.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Chemical Research in Toxicology.
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‘Chromatin Alternates Between A and B Compartments at Kilobase Scale for Subgenic Organization’
“Nuclear compartments are prominent features of 3D chromatin organization, but sequencing depth limitations have impeded investigation at ultra fine-scale. CTCF loops are generally studied at a finer scale, but the impact of looping on proximal interactions remains enigmatic. Here, we critically examine nuclear compartments and CTCF loop-proximal interactions using a combination of in situ Hi-C at unparalleled depth, algorithm development and biophysical modeling.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Nature Communications.
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‘Kinetics and mechanism of halide exchange in reactions of CpRu(PPh₃)₂Cl with alkyl halides’
“Halide exchange reactions between CpRu(PPh3)2Cl (1) and CBr4, CHBr3, CBr3CO2Et or CHBr2CO2Et yielding CpRu(PPh3)2Br (3) are facile and appear to proceed by a radical pair intermediate in a second order reaction. … Density functional theory calculations on potential intermediates suggests that a pathway leading to CpRu(PPh3)(Cl)(Br) is more likely than oxidative addition, which is preferred in reactions of 1 with bromoethane.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the Royal Society of Chemistry.
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Murthy receives patent for dendritic cell collection
“Devices, systems, and methods can be used for the automated production of dendritic cells (DC) from dendritic cell progenitors, such as monocytes obtained from peripheral blood, and the automated generation of immunotherapeutic products from those dendritic cells, all within a closed system. The invention makes it possible to obtain sufficient quantities of a subject’s own DC for use in preparing and characterizing vaccines, for activating and characterizing the activation state of the subject’s immune response, and to aid in preventing and/or treating cancer or infectious disease.”
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‘Multiconfigurational Photodynamics Simulations Reveal the Mechanism of Photodecarbonylations of Cyclopropenones’
“Gas-evolving photochemical reactions use light and mild conditions to access strained organic compounds irreversibly. Cyclopropenones are a class of light-responsive molecules used in bioorthogonal photoclick reactions; their excited-state decarbonylation reaction mechanisms are misunderstood due to their ultrafast (<100 femtosecond) lifetimes. We have combined multiconfigurational quantum mechanical (QM) calculations and non-adiabatic molecular dynamics (NAMD) simulations to uncover the excited-state mechanism of cyclopropenone and a photoprotected cyclooctyne-(COT)-precursor in gaseous and explicit aqueous environments.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the Royal Society of Chemistry.
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In every designed object, there is ‘a human being at the center’ — Lee Moreau’s new podcast explores just who design is for
Professor of the practice of design Lee Moreau’s new podcast, “Design As,” invites leaders in the field of design to discuss contemporary issues within their discipline and interrogate just who design belongs to or serves.
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Developing cutting-edge testing technology for 5G Open RAN
“Electrical and computer engineering principal research scientist Pedram Johari is leading a $2,000,000 project awarded by the Wireless Innovation Fund to develop a digital framework for testing 5G Open RAN systems called ‘DigiRAN: High-Fidelity Digital Twins for Interoperability, Security and Performance Testing of Open RAN Systems.’ DigiRAN is a digital framework that enables diverse, low-cost and automated testing of three core components for 5G Open RAN: interoperability, performance and security.”
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‘Exploring User Perceptions of Using An LLM-Based Conversational Assistant [as a] Cooking Partner’
Large language models (LLMs) have the ability to help in daily tasks. “In this research, we chose cooking, a complex daily task, as a scenario to investigate people’s successful and unsatisfactory experiences while receiving assistance from an LLM-based CA, Mango Mango. We discovered that participants value the system’s ability to provide extensive information beyond the recipe, offer customized instructions based on context, and assist them in dynamically planning the task. However, they expect the system to be more adaptive to oral conversation and provide more suggestive responses to keep users actively involved.” Find the paper and authors list at ArXiv.
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‘Depredation Influences Anglers’ Perceptions on Soastal Shark Management and Conservation’
“Overfishing, habitat degradation, and climate change have caused declines in shark populations throughout the world’s oceans. … Reported increases in shark depredation within the last several years have begun to erode angler support for shark conservation, potentially undermining decades of previous work. To address these concerns, we implemented a GoM-wide online survey to characterize the impact of depredation on recreational reef fish anglers’ fishing satisfaction and perceptions of shark management and conservation.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Frontiers in Conservation Science.
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‘Design and Characterization of Model Systems that Promote and Disrupt Transparency of Vertebrate Crystallins In Vitro’
“Positioned within the eye, the lens supports vision by transmitting and focusing light onto the retina. As an adaptive glassy material, the lens is constituted primarily by densely-packed, polydisperse crystallin proteins that organize to resist aggregation and crystallization at high volume fractions, yet the details of how crystallins coordinate with one another to template and maintain this transparent microstructure remain unclear. The role of individual crystallin subtypes (α, β, and γ) and paired subtype compositions … is explored using combinations of spectrophotometry, hard-sphere simulations, and surface pressure measurements.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Advanced Science.
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‘Behind the Scenes: Uncovering TLS and Server Certificate Practice of IoT Device Vendors in the Wild’
“IoT devices are increasingly used in consumer homes. Despite recent works in characterizing IoT TLS usage for a limited number of in-lab devices, there exists a gap in quantitatively understanding TLS behaviors from devices in the wild and server-side certificate management. To bridge this knowledge gap, we conduct a new measurement study by focusing on the practice of device vendors, through a crowdsourced dataset of network traffic. … Our study highlights potential concerns in the TLS/PKI practice by IoT device vendors.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference.
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‘BehavIoT: Measuring Smart Home IoT Behavior Using Network-Inferred Behavior Models’
“Smart home IoT platforms are typically closed systems, meaning that there is poor visibility into device behavior. Understanding device behavior is important not only for determining whether devices are functioning as expected, but also can reveal implications for privacy, [security and safety]. … In this work, we demonstrate that the vast majority of IoT behavior can indeed be modeled, using a novel multi-dimensional approach that relies only on the (often encrypted) network traffic exchanged by IoT devices.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference.
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‘Detection of Sexism on Social Media With Multiple Simple Transformers’
“Social media platforms have become virtual communication channels, allowing users to voice their thoughts and opinions. However, this openness and features of anonymity have also given rise to the proliferation of harmful and offensive content, including sexism. This research aims at proposing a methodology and explores the use of different simple transformers. …The proposed approach has great scope for the efficient detection of sexist content on social media, aiding in the development of effective content moderation systems.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the CEUR Workshop Proceedings.
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‘Localizing Traffic Differentiation’
“Network neutrality is important for users, content providers, policymakers, and regulators interested in understanding how network providers differentiate performance. … In prior work, WeHe detects differentiation via end-to-end throughput measurements between a client and server but does not isolate the network responsible for it. Differentiation can occur anywhere on the network path between endpoints. … We present a system, WeHeY, built atop WeHe, that can localize traffic differentiation, i.e., obtain concrete evidence that the differentiation happened within the client’s ISP.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference proceedings.
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‘Decoupled Fitness Criteria for Reactive Systems’
“The correctness problem for reactive systems has been thoroughly explored and is well understood. Meanwhile, the efficiency problem for reactive systems has not received the same attention. Indeed, one correct system may be less fit than another correct system and determining this manually is challenging and often done ad hoc. We propose a novel and general framework which automatically assigns comparable fitness scores to reactive systems using interpretable parameters that are decoupled from the system being evaluated.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Software Engineering and Formal Methods.
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‘Pyramid Attention Network for Image Restoration’
“Self-similarity refers to the image prior widely used in image restoration algorithms that small but similar patterns tend to occur at different locations and scales. However, recent advanced deep convolutional neural network-based methods for image restoration do not take full advantage of self-similarities by relying on self-attention neural modules that only process information at the same scale. To solve this problem, we present a novel Pyramid Attention module for image restoration, which captures long-range feature correspondences from a multi-scale feature pyramid.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the International Journal of Computer Vision.
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‘Layout Sequence Prediction From Noisy Mobile Modality’
“Trajectory prediction plays a vital role in understanding pedestrian movement for applications such as autonomous driving and robotics. Current trajectory prediction models depend on long, complete, and accurately observed sequences from visual modalities. Nevertheless, real-world situations often involve obstructed cameras, missed objects or objects out of sight due to environmental factors, leading to incomplete or noisy trajectories. To overcome these limitations, we propose LTrajDiff, a novel approach that treats objects obstructed or out of sight as equally important as those with fully visible trajectories.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘When Collaborative Filtering is not Collaborative: Unfairness of PCA for Recommendations’
“We study the fairness of dimensionality reduction methods for recommendations. We focus on the established method of principal component analysis (PCA), which identifies latent components and produces a low-rank approximation via the leading components while discarding the trailing components. Prior works have defined notions of “fair PCA”; however, these definitions do not answer the following question: what makes PCA unfair? We identify two underlying mechanisms of PCA that induce unfairness at the item level.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘An Energy-Efficient Neural Network Accelerator With Improved Protections Against Fault-Attacks’
“Embedded neural network (NN) implementations are susceptible to misclassification under fault attacks. Injecting strong electromagnetic (EM) pulses is a non-invasive yet detrimental attack that affects the NN operations by (i) causing faults in the NN model/inputs while being read by the NN computation unit and (ii) corrupting NN computations results to cause misclassification eventually. This paper presents the first ASIC demonstration of an energy-efficient NN accelerator with inbuilt fault attack detection.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the European Conference on Solid-State Circuits proceedings.
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‘CAFA-Evaluator: A Python Tool for Benchmarking Ontological Classification Methods’
“We present CAFA-evaluator, a powerful Python program designed to evaluate the performance of prediction methods on targets with hierarchical concept dependencies. It generalizes multi-label evaluation to modern ontologies where the prediction targets are drawn from a directed acyclic graph and achieves high efficiency by leveraging matrix computation and topological sorting. The program requirements include a small number of standard Python libraries, making CAFA-evaluator easy to maintain. … Owing to its reliability and accuracy, the organizers have selected CAFA-evaluator as the official CAFA evaluation software.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.