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Topic
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DARPA Award to revolutionize navigation systems
“Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Cristian Cassella (PI), professor Matteo Rinaldi, professor David Horsley, and assistant professor Benyamin Davaji were awarded a $2 million DARPA grant for ‘Enabling Higher Scale Factors in Gyroscopes Through soFt and LacAlized interface-States in microelectromecHanical resonators (FLASH).’ This project aims to develop a new microelectromechanical (MEMS) inertial sensor surpassing the material-limited performance of the existing counterparts by exploiting topological properties in thin-film piezoelectric metamaterials.”
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NSF grant awarded for adaptive clothing
“Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Kris Dorsey and Khoury/mechanical and industrial engineering assistant professor Megan Hofmann, in collaboration with Emory University, were awarded a $699,789 NSF grant for ‘Adaptive Intelligent Healthcare Garment: Advancing Real-Time Monitoring and Behavioral Interventions.'”
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Restuccia and Jornet receive NSF grant for AI-incorporated hardware
“Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Francesco Restuccia and electrical and computer engineering professor and associate Dean for Research Josep Jornet, in collaboration with Princeton University, Florida International University, and SUNY Polytechnic Institute, were awarded a $200,000 NSF grant for ‘DHARMA.AI Digital Hardware + Analog-RF for Multifunctional Apertures with AI.'”
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Patent for automated of drone swarm networks
“Electrical and computer engineering William Lincoln Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia and associate research professor Salvatore D’Oro were awarded a patent for ‘Software Defined Drone Network Control System.'”
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AI-powered drone networks
“Electrical and computer engineering William Lincoln Smith Professor Tommaso Melodia and associate research professor Salvatore D’Oro were awarded a patent for ‘Distributed Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Software-Defined Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Network Control.'”
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‘Lysine vitcylation is a vitamin C-derived protein modification that enhances STAT1-mediated immune response’
“Vitamin C (vitC) is essential for health and shows promise in treating diseases like cancer, yet its mechanisms remain elusive. Here, we report that vitC directly modifies lysine residues to form “vitcyl-lysine”-a process termed vitcylation. Vitcylation occurs in a dose-, pH-, and sequence-dependent manner in both cell-free systems and living cells. … The discovery of vitcylation as a distinctive post-translational modification provides significant insights into vitC’s cellular function and therapeutic potential, opening avenues for understanding its biological effects and applications in disease treatment.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Cell.
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‘Tunable Superconductivity Coexisting With the Anomalous Hall Effect in a Transition Metal Dichalcogenide’
“Antibiotic resistance poses a significant threat to human health, and wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are important reservoirs of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). Here, we analyze the antibiotic resistomes of 226 activated sludge samples from 142 WWTPs across six continents, using a consistent pipeline for sample collection, DNA sequencing and analysis. We find that ARGs are diverse and similarly abundant, with a core set of 20 ARGs present in all WWTPs.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Communications.
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‘Passive Acoustic Dynamic Differentiation and Mapping (PADAM): A Time-Domain Passive Cavitation Localization and Classification Approach’
“Passive cavitation imaging has explored various beamforming algorithms to optimize spatial resolution, suppress imaging artifacts, and maintain computational efficiency. … Precise cavitation localization and dose control are required to minimize off-target effects. Commonly used methods such as Delay-Sum-Integrate (DSI) and Robust Capon Beamforming (RCB) have shown utility, but are limited by either significant artifacts or the need for a nonphysical input parameter. To address these challenges, we aimed to develop a method that enhances resolution and introduces a physically grounded parameter for signal characterization, without compromising computational speed and robustness.” Find the paper and authors list in IEEE Transactions on…
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Patent for magnetic microwires in medicine
“Distinguished University and Cabot professor Laura Lewis, chemical engineering/mechanical and industrial engineering, and chemical engineering associate professor Abigail Koppes were awarded a patent for ‘Magnetic Microwires for Energy-Transporting Biomedical Applications.'”
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‘A Phosphorylation Signal Activates Genome-Wide Transcriptional Control by BfmR’
“The nosocomial pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii is a major threat to human health. The sensor kinase-response regulator system, BfmS-BfmR, is essential to multidrug resistance and virulence in the bacterium and represents a potential antimicrobial target. Important questions remain about how the system controls resistance and pathogenesis. Although BfmR knockout alters expression of >1000 genes, its direct regulon is undefined. Moreover, how phosphorylation controls the regulator is unclear. Here, we address these problems by combining mutagenesis, ChIP-seq, and in vitro phosphorylation to study the functions of phospho-BfmR.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nucleic Acids Research.
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‘Synergistic Signatures of Group Mechanisms in Higher-Order Systems’
“The interplay between causal mechanisms and emerging collective behaviors is a central aspect of understanding, controlling, and predicting complex networked systems. In our work, we investigate the relationship between higher-order mechanisms and higher-order behavioral observables in two representative models with group interactions: a simplicial Ising model and a social contagion model. In both systems, we find that group (higher-order) interactions show emergent synergistic (higher-order) behavior.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Physical Review Letters.
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‘Leading AI Adoption in Organizations: Introducing a Behavioral Human-Centered Approach’
“Initiatives to implement AI technologies in organizations fail at an alarming rate. We argue that leading the adoption of AI is not a simple engineering exercise but rather represents a behavioral exercise where change management principles … are employed. However, many AI initiatives in business focus predominantly on the AI systems themselves, assuming humans will fall in line. To solve this, we integrate ideas from change management with scholarship on human-centered artificial intelligence to offer a behavioral approach.” Find the paper and full list of authors in International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction.
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‘Supercooled Phase Transitions: Why Thermal History of Hidden Sector Matters in Analysis of Pulsar Timing Array Signals’
“The detection of a gravitational wave background in the nanohertz frequency range from pulsar timing array (PTA) observations offers new insights into evolution of the early Universe. In this work we analyze gravitational wave data from PPTA, EPTA, and NANOGrav, as arising from a supercooled first-order phase transition within a hidden sector, characterized by a broken 𝑈(1)𝑋 gauge symmetry. Several previous works have discussed challenges in producing observable PTA signal from supercooled phases transitions. We discuss these challenges and show how they are overcome.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Physical Review D.
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‘Symmetric Circle Configurations From Regular Skeletal Polyhedra’
“The paper studies finite and infinite periodic point-circle configurations in ordinary Euclidean 3-space associated with regular skeletal polyhedra or related structures. The configurations preserve all the symmetries of the underlying polyhedron and, in most cases, are point-circle transitive.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Symmetry.
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Patents for experimental virtual reality methods
“Electrical and computer engineering affiliated faculty Eugene Tunik and Bouvé/electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Mathew Yarossi were awarded a patent for ‘Computer-Implemented Methods and Systems for Designing and Conducting Virtual Reality Experiments.'”
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‘Functional Diversification of Dietary Plant Small Molecules by the Gut Microbiome’
“Plants are composed of diverse secondary metabolites (PSMs), which are widely associated with human health. Whether and how the gut microbiome mediates such impacts of PSMs is poorly understood. Here, we show that discrete dietary and medicinal phenolic glycosides, abundant health-associated PSMs, are utilized by distinct members of the human gut microbiome.” Find the paper and full list of authors in CellPress.
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‘A Chlorinated Diketopiperazine Antibiotic Targets Mycobacterium tuberculosis’
“We describe a novel macrocyclic peptide, speirobactin, produced by Photorhabdus temperata that selectively kills Mycobacterium tuberculosis. … The biosynthetic operon contains a pentapeptide-repeat protein as a resistance gene. Genomic analysis of speirobactin-resistant mutants of M. tuberculosis led to the identification of DNA gyrase as the molecular target. The mutations were recreated and show that DNA gyrase is the only target. Transcriptome analysis of M. tuberculosis treated with antibiotics shows that speirobactin clusters close to fluoroquinolones, supporting its action against the DNA gyrase.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
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‘Limiting the Impact of Protein Leakage in Single-Cell Proteomics’
“Limiting artifacts during sample preparation can significantly increase data quality in single-cell proteomics experiments. Towards this goal, we characterize the impact of protein leakage by analyzing thousands of primary single cells from mouse trachea. The cells were prepared either fresh immediately after dissociation or first cryopreserved and prepared at a later date. We directly identify permeabilized cells by imaging a cell permeable dye and use the data to define a signature for protein leakage.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Communications.
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‘A Universal Language for Finding Mass Spectrometry Data Patterns’
“Despite being information rich, the vast majority of untargeted mass spectrometry data are underutilized; most analytes are not used for downstream interpretation or reanalysis after publication. The inability to dive into these rich raw mass spectrometry datasets is due to the limited flexibility and scalability of existing software tools. Here we introduce a new language, the Mass Spectrometry Query Language (MassQL), and an accompanying software ecosystem that addresses these issues by enabling the community to directly query mass spectrometry data with an expressive set of user-defined mass spectrometry patterns.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Methods.
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Polese new AI-and-RAN Working Group chair
“Electrical and computer engineering assistant research professor Michele Polese was elected as Chair of the WG2 AI-and-RAN Working Group. Polese will chair one of the three working groups of the AI-RAN Alliance, an initiative spanning industry and academia that aims to transform how networks are designed with AI and support AI. This is an area of significant interest for both our research and the full realization of the AI-RAN Alliance vision.”
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‘Investigating the Pathway Through Which Lon Protease Regulates Cell Envelope in Acinetobacter baumannii’
“Acinetobacter baumannii is an opportunistic pathogen prevalent in hospital settings. The virulence in A. baumannii is associated with biofilms, bacterial multicellular communities embedded in bacterial produced coating that provides protection from environmental stress. Lon protease is essential in biofilm formation; in strains with Lon protease deficiency (KO), there is decreased biofilm formation along with surprising upregulation of two genes: surA1 and surA2. The protein products SurA1 and A1S_2230 (SurA2), especially SurA2, increase A. baumannii virulence through desiccation tolerance and antibiotic resistance. This project focused on identifying possible regulators of surA2 in the lon KO strain.” Find the paper and full…
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NSF award to model crystal growth
“Chemical engineering associate professor Francisco Hung, in collaboration with Erik Santiso from North Carolina State University, was awarded a $590,666 NSF grant for ‘Molecular Modeling of Solute Precipitate Nucleation in Confinement.'”
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‘Spectrally Sharp Magnetic Excitations Above the Critical Temperature in a Frustrated Weyl Semimetal’
“The rare-earth α-pyrochlore iridates are a prospective class of conducting frustrated magnets where electronic correlations, large spin-orbit coupling, and geometrical frustration interplay, leading to a rich set of magnetic and electronic phases. Despite their intriguing properties, the magnetic order and excitations in this fundamental class of topological quantum materials remain poorly understood. … We unequivocally reveal the presence of spectrally sharp, gapped magnetic excitations in Y2Ir2O7 that surprisingly persist well above the Néel transition temperature, signaling the presence of a quasi-universal regime connected to fluctuations on frustrated lattices.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Commmunications.
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‘Machine Learning Photodynamics Decode Multiple Singlet Fission Channels in Pentacene Crystal’
“Crystalline pentacene is a model solid-state light-harvesting material because its quantum efficiencies exceed 100% via ultrafast singlet fission. The singlet fission mechanism in pentacene crystals is disputed due to insufficient electronic information in time-resolved experiments and intractable quantum mechanical calculations for simulating realistic crystal dynamics. Here we combine a multiscale multiconfigurational approach and machine learning photodynamics to understand competing singlet fission mechanisms in crystalline pentacene.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Communications.
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Next-gen, ai-driven cellular devices
“Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Francesco Restuccia, in collaboration with Saint Louis University, was awarded a $900,000 NSF grant for ‘Securing xApps in Open RANs with Reliable and Principled AI Red-Teaming.'”
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‘Genetically Encoded Fluorescent Reporter for Polyamines’
“Polyamines are abundant and evolutionarily conserved metabolites that are essential for life. Dietary polyamine supplementation extends life-span and health-span. Dysregulation of polyamine homeostasis is linked to Parkinson’s disease and cancer, driving interest in therapeutically targeting this pathway. However, measuring cellular polyamine levels, which vary across cell types and states, remains challenging. We introduce a genetically encoded polyamine reporter for real-time measurement of polyamine concentrations in single living cells.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Communications.
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‘Leading AI Adoption in Organizations: Introducing a Behavioral Human-Centered Approach’
“Initiatives to implement AI technologies in organizations fail at an alarming rate. We argue that leading the adoption of AI is not a simple engineering exercise but rather represents a behavioral exercise where change management principles—the process by which organizations plan, implement, and embed changes in practices—are employed. … We integrate ideas from change management with scholarship on human-centered artificial intelligence to offer a behavioral approach that accounts for the impact of AI adoption on humans at all stages of implementation and change management.” Find the paper and authors list in International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction.
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‘Atomistic Characterization of Hydration-Dependent Fuel Cell Ionomer Nanostructure: Validation by Vibrational Spectroscopy’
“The development of Nafion alternatives for fuel cells and electrolyzers requires a fundamental understanding of hydration-dependent ion-exchange site acid/base chemistry. We present here reactive force field (ReaxFF) molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of Nafion at varying molar water/ion-exchange-site ratios (λ), which we correlate to our experimental and density functional theory-based vibrational spectra. … We expect that these nanostructural characterizations of Nafion exchange sites will contribute to the development of new ionomers.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Journal of Materials Chemistry A.
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‘Bridging Deep Learning Force Fields and Electronic Structures With a Physics-Informed Approach’
“This work presents a physics-informed neural network approach bridging deep-learning force field and electronic structure simulations, illustrated through twisted two-dimensional large-scale material systems. The deep potential molecular dynamics model is adopted as the backbone, and the electronic structure simulation is integrated. Using Wannier functions as the basis, we categorize Wannier Hamiltonian elements based on physical principles to incorporate diverse information from a deep-learning force field model.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Computational Materials.