Title
Topic
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‘Rapidly Changing Range Limits in a Warming World: Critical Data Limitations and Knowledge Gaps for Advancing Understanding of Mangrove Range Dynamics’
“Climate change is altering species’ range limits and transforming ecosystems. For example, warming temperatures are leading to the range expansion of tropical, cold-sensitive species at the expense of their cold-tolerant counterparts. In some temperate and subtropical coastal wetlands, warming winters are enabling mangrove forest encroachment into salt marsh, which is a major regime shift that has significant ecological and societal ramifications. Here, we synthesized existing data and expert knowledge to assess the distribution of mangroves near rapidly changing range limits in the southeastern USA.”Find the paper and full list of authors in Estuaries and Coasts.
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‘Effects of Aerobic Exercise on Cognitive Function in Adults With Major Depressive Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis’
“Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a highly prevalent psychiatric disorder that impairs the cognitive function of individuals. Aerobic exercise stands out as a promising non-pharmacological intervention for enhancing cognitive function and promoting brain health. … Twelve randomized trials including 945 adults with MDD were included. Results indicated that aerobic exercise significantly improved overall cognitive function … and the sub-domains of memory … and executive function. … Significant benefits in cognitive function were found from moderate-to-vigorous (mixed) intensity … aerobic exercise conducted 3 times per week.”Find the paper and full list of authors in the International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology.
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‘Revisiting the Roles of Catalytic Residues in Human Ornithine Transcarbamylase’
“Human ornithine transcarbamylase (hOTC) is a mitochondrial transferase protein involved in the urea cycle and is crucial for the conversion of toxic ammonia to urea. Structural analysis coupled with kinetic studies of Escherichia coli, rat, bovine, and other transferase proteins has identified residues that play key roles in substrate recognition and conformational changes but has not provided direct evidence for all of the active residues involved. … Here, computational methods were used to predict the likely active residues of hOTC; the function of these residues was then probed with site-directed mutagenesis and biochemical characterization.”Find the paper and authors list in Biochemistry.
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A decision-making guide to ‘Sustainability in Business’
“Sustainability in Business,” written by associate teaching professor of finance and director of the Business Sustainability Initiative David H. Myers, “provides an approach to sustainable decision-making rooted in financial and economic literature,” according to the publisher’s webpage. The text supplies a framework for sustainable practices that businesses can adopt while expanding their market reach, innovation and leverage, all while attending to “the different definitions of sustainability and the role those differences” play in business operations.
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‘Framework for Department-Level Accountability To Diversify Engineering’
“Diverse teams are more innovative and creative. Nevertheless, science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines, including bioengineering, continue to fall short in increasing representation from persons from groups historically excluded because of their ethnicity or race. … In this Perspective, we present a framework for building, assessing and continuously improving strategic plans to improve recruitment and retention and to make departments more inclusive, including the collection of demographic data, the establishment and assessment of DEI plans, specific goal setting and assessment of achievements, with specific examples and guidelines.”Find the paper and full list of authors at Nature Reviews Bioengineering.
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Zhao receives NSF award for modeling ammonia production methods
“Chemical engineering assistant professor Qing Zhao was awarded a $537,226 NSF award for ‘Automated Embedded Correlated Wavefunction Theory for Kinetic Modeling in Heterogeneous Catalysis.’ The research will investigate ammonia production with a goal of developing advanced computational modeling tools to understand fundamental chemistry in ammonia synthesis powered by renewable electrical energy/stored electrons.”
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For a volatile world, a practical guide to ‘Business Resilience’
As the complexity and volatility of the world increase, associate professor in project management Serhiy Kovela — writing with Islam Choudhury, David Roberts, Sheila Roberts and Jawwad Tanvir — has produced “Business Resilience,” which the publisher’s webpage calls “a practical guide to making organizations more resilient and improving current practices by building on what the organization does well.” The authors provide “new models for resilience and progress,” which focus on building a foundation of resilience into a company while still prioritizing progress.
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Engineering professor receives 2024 Excellence in Teaching Award
“First-year engineering teaching professor Joshua Hertz received the 2024 University Excellence in Teaching Award. … Hertz has been instrumental in advancing instruction in the Cornerstone of Engineering program. He emphasizes a curriculum based on highly open-ended problems, increasing students’ self-efficacy and tolerance for ambiguity. His hands-on approach and commitment to experiential learning has students work with community and global partners, supporting Northeastern’s mission to create engaged, passionate, ethical problem solvers.”
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How Buddhist architecture has fostered ‘a comprehensive culture that sustains life’
Co-edited by associate professor of architecture Shuishan Yu, with Aibin Yan of East China University, “Buddhist Architecture in East Asia” examines how Buddhism “transformed not only the intellectual and practical lives but also the built environments of East Asia” over two millennia. The editors attempt “to restore a more balanced picture of Buddhist practice and the built environment by incorporating buildings and planning from the overlooked regions and aspects of Buddhism.” The volume prioritizes “in-depth discussions of examples from regions and cultures of religious hybridity [that] … foster a comprehensive culture that sustains life and identity of a place.”
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National Institute of Aging supports Apfeld lifespan research
Javier Apfeld, associate professor of biology, has received funding from the National Institute of Aging for “Genome-Wide CRISPR Activation: A Novel Strategy for Identifying Anti-Aging Targets.” Apfeld writes that, “This project will characterize and optimize a novel time and cost saving toolkit that allows simple, rapid and robust activation of gene expression in the widely used model organism C. elegans, bringing new capabilities to systematically test the effect of gene activation in a broad range of biological problems. These capabilities will be employed to search for novel genes whose activation promotes healthy aging and increases lifespan.”
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‘Geometric Origin of the Intrinsic Transverse Spin Transport in a Canted-Antiferromagnet/Heavy-Metal Heterostructure’
“We theoretically study the conditions under which an intrinsic spin Nernst effect—a transverse spin current induced by an applied temperature gradient—can occur in a canted-antiferromagnet insulator, such as LaFeO3 and other materials of the same family. … Our paper provides a general derivation of a symmetry-breaking-induced spin Nernst effect, which may open a path to engineering a finite spin Nernst effect in systems where it would otherwise not arise.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Physical Review B.
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Leading nanomedicine researcher named Highly Ranked Scholar by ScholarGPS
Northeastern University Distinguished Professor Vladimir Torchilin has been named a Highly Ranked Scholar by ScholarGPS for research advances in the fields of drug delivery and nanomedicine.
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‘Synthesizing Tight Privacy and Accuracy Bounds via Weighted Model Counting’
“Programmatically generating tight differential privacy (DP) bounds is a hard problem. Two core challenges are (1) finding expressive, compact and efficient encodings of the distributions of DP algorithms and (2) state space explosion stemming from the multiple quantifiers and relational properties of the DP definition. We address the first challenge by developing a method for tight privacy and accuracy bound synthesis using weighted model counting on binary decision diagrams. … We address the second challenge by developing a framework for leveraging inherent symmetries in DP algorithms.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘The Joint Effect of Task Similarity and Overparameterization on Catastrophic Forgetting — An Analytical Model’
“In continual learning, catastrophic forgetting is affected by multiple aspects of the tasks. Previous works have analyzed separately how forgetting is affected by either task similarity or overparameterization. In contrast, our paper examines how task similarity and overparameterization jointly affect forgetting in an analyzable model. Specifically, we focus on two-task continual linear regression, where the second task is a random orthogonal transformation of an arbitrary first task (an abstraction of random permutation tasks). We derive an exact analytical expression for the expected forgetting — and uncover a nuanced pattern.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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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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‘Stability of P2P Networks Under Greedy Peering (Full Version)’
“Major cryptocurrency networks have relied on random peering choice rules for making connections in their peer-to-peer networks. Generally, these choices have good properties, particularly for open, permissionless networks. Random peering choices however do not take into account that some actors may choose to optimize who they connect to such that they are quicker to hear about information being propagated in the network. In this paper, we explore the dynamics of such greedy strategies.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘SunBlock: Cloudless Protection for IoT Systems’
“With an increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices present in homes, there is a rise in the number of potential information leakage channels and their associated security threats and privacy risks. Despite a long history of attacks on IoT devices in unprotected home networks, the problem of accurate, rapid detection and prevention of such attacks remains open. … This paper investigates the potential for effective IoT threat detection locally, on a home router, using AI tools combined with classic rule-based traffic-filtering algorithms.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘A Survey on Hypergraph Mining: Patterns, Tools and Generators’
“Hypergraphs are a natural and powerful choice for modeling group interactions in the real world, which are often referred to as higher-order networks. For example, when modeling collaboration networks, where collaborations can involve not just two but three or more people, employing hypergraphs allows us to explore beyond pairwise (dyadic) patterns and capture groupwise (polyadic) patterns. … We provide comprehensive taxonomies for them, and we also provide in-depth discussions to provide insights into future research on hypergraph mining.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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Exploring the history of woodworking through gender
Deirdre Visser, adjunct professor and visiting curator at Mills College at Northeastern, has published “Joinery, Joists and Gender: A History of Woodworking for the 21st Century.” The publisher’s webpage describes the book as “the first publication of its kind to survey the long and rich histories of women and gender non-conforming persons who work in wood.” After providing a history of women’s contributions — practical and philosophical — to woodworking in Europe and the U.S., the volume continues with “sixteen in-depth profiles of contemporary woodworkers, all of whom identify fine woodworking as their principal vocation.”
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‘RichWasm: Bringing Safe, Fine-Grained, Shared-Memory Interoperability Down to WebAssembly’
“Safe, shared-memory interoperability between languages with different type systems and memory-safety guarantees is an intricate problem as crossing language boundaries may result in memory-safety violations. In this paper, we present RichWasm, a novel richly typed intermediate language designed to serve as a compilation target for typed high-level languages with different memory-safety guarantees. RichWasm is based on WebAssembly and enables safe shared-memory interoperability by incorporating a variety of type features that support fine-grained memory ownership and sharing.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘Fine-Tuning Enhances Existing Mechanisms: A Case Study on Entity Tracking’
“Fine-tuning on generalized tasks such as instruction following, code generation, and mathematics has been shown to enhance language models’ performance on a range of tasks. Nevertheless, explanations of how such fine-tuning influences the internal computations in these models remain elusive. We study how fine-tuning affects the internal mechanisms implemented in language models. As a case study, we explore the property of entity tracking, a crucial facet of language comprehension, where models fine-tuned on mathematics have substantial performance gains.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘Measuring and Controlling Persona Drift in Language Model Dialogs’
“System-prompting is a standard tool for customizing language-model chatbots, enabling them to follow a specific instruction. An implicit assumption in the use of system prompts is that they will be stable, so the chatbot will continue to generate text according to the stipulated instructions for the duration of a conversation. We propose a quantitative benchmark to test this assumption, evaluating instruction stability via self-chats between two instructed chatbots. Testing popular models like LLaMA2-chat-70B and GPT-3.5, we reveal a significant instruction drift within eight rounds of conversations.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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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…