Title
Topic
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‘FibeRobo: Fabricating 4D Fiber Interfaces by Continuous Drawing of Temperature Tunable Liquid Crystal Elastomers’
“We present FibeRobo, a thermally-actuated liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) fiber that can be embedded or structured into textiles and enable silent and responsive interactions with shape-changing, fiber-based interfaces. … This paper contributes to developing temperature-responsive LCE fibers, a facile and scalable fabrication pipeline with optional heating element integration for digital control, mechanical characterization and the establishment of higher hierarchical textile structures and design space. Finally, we introduce a set of demonstrations that illustrate the design space FibeRobo enables.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology proceedings.
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‘Exploring Question Decomposition for Zero-Shot VQA’
“Visual question answering (VQA) has traditionally been treated as a single-step task where each question receives the same amount of effort, unlike natural human question-answering strategies. We explore a question decomposition strategy for VQA to overcome this limitation. We probe the ability of recently developed large vision-language models to use human-written decompositions and produce their own decompositions of visual questions, finding they are capable of learning both tasks from demonstrations alone. However, we show that naive application of model-written decompositions can hurt performance.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘Rethinking Neighborhood Consistency Learning on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation’
“Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) involves predicting unlabeled data in a target domain by using labeled data from the source domain. However, recent advances in pseudo-labeling (PL) methods have been hampered by noisy pseudo-labels. … Although neighborhood-based PL can help preserve the local structure, it also risks assigning the whole local neighborhood to the wrong semantic category. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework called neighborhood consistency learning (NCL) that operates at both the semantic and instance levels and features a new consistency objective function.” Find the paper and authors list in the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia…
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‘GRASP: Accelerating Shortest Path Attacks via Graph Attention’
“Recent advances in machine learning (ML) have shown promise in aiding and accelerating classical combinatorial optimization algorithms. ML-based speed ups that aim to learn in an end to end manner (i.e., directly output the solution) tend to trade off run time with solution quality. … We consider an APX-hard problem, where an adversary aims to attack shortest paths in a graph by removing the minimum number of edges. We propose the GRASP algorithm: Graph Attention Accelerated Shortest Path Attack, an ML aided optimization algorithm that achieves run times up to 10x faster.” Find the paper and full authors list at…
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‘In the Room Where It Happens: Characterizing Local Communication and Threats in Smart Homes’
“The network communication between Internet of Things (IoT) devices on the same local network has significant implications for platform and device interoperability, security, privacy and correctness. Yet, the analysis of local home Wi-Fi network traffic and its associated security and privacy threats have been largely ignored by prior literature. … In this paper, we present a comprehensive and empirical measurement study to shed light on the local communication within a smart home deployment and its threats.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference proceedings.
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‘Tracking, Profiling and Ad Targeting in the Alexa Echo Smart Speaker Ecosystem’
“Smart speakers collect voice commands, which can be used to infer sensitive information about users. Given the potential for privacy harms, there is a need for greater transparency and control over the data collected, used and shared by smart speaker platforms as well as third party skills supported on them. To bridge this gap, we build a framework to measure data collection, usage, and sharing by the smart speaker platforms. … Our results show that Amazon and third parties … collect smart speaker interaction data.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the 2023 ACM on Internet Measurement…
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‘Medical Imaging RPA System Design’
“Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can minimize human errors, improve efficiency and create a seamless operational environment in the healthcare industry. This paper examines the existing radiology imaging requisition system, which requires human labourers to perform medical request processing and classification. To improve this slow, error-prone and hard-to-scale process, we design an RPA approach that significantly improves efficiency.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering proceedings.
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‘AI-Based General Visual Inspection of Aircrafts Based on YOLOv5’
“Safety is the cornerstone on which the commercial airline industry is built. … The time required for general visual inspections of aircraft can be drastically reduced by using deep learning and remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS). Deep learning techniques can be used in aircraft maintenance thanks to the availability of Graphic Processing Units. In our proof of concept study, we use YOLOv5 to build a model that uses high-quality data to find five different aircraft flaws.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the 2023 Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering proceedings.
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‘Robust Client and Server State Synchronisation Framework For React Applications: React-State-Sync’
“As the front-end web frameworks ecosystem evolves, we have encountered problems managing client data. Not only are the solutions for this problem diverse, but the problem too has devolved into two parts — client-side state and server-side state. … Our goal is to provide a consolidated architecture that ensures a full sync between the two states while being performant and developer friendly. Based on our tests against React Context API, we increased the dispatch performance by over 400%.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the 2023 Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering proceedings.
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Function Vectors in Large Language Models
“We report the presence of a simple neural mechanism that represents an input-output function as a vector within autoregressive transformer language models (LMs). Using causal mediation analysis on a diverse range of in-context-learning (ICL) tasks, we find that a small number attention heads transport a compact representation of the demonstrated task, which we call a function vector (FV). … We test FVs across a range of tasks, models and layers and find strong causal effects across settings in middle layers.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘The Effects of Computational Resources on Flaky Tests’
“Flaky tests are tests that nondeterministically pass and fail in unchanged code. These tests can be detrimental to developers’ productivity. Particularly when tests run in continuous integration environments, the tests may be competing for access to limited computational resources (CPUs, memory etc.) and we hypothesize that resource (in)availability may be a significant factor in the failure rate of flaky tests. We present the first assessment of the impact that computational resources have on flaky tests, including a total of 52 projects written in Java, JavaScript and Python and 27 different resource configurations.” Find the paper and authors list at ArXiv.
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‘Graph-SCP: Accelerating Set Cover Problems With Graph Neural Networks’
“Machine learning (ML) approaches are increasingly being used to accelerate combinatorial optimization (CO) problems. We look specifically at the Set Cover Problem (SCP) and propose Graph-SCP, a graph neural network method that can augment existing optimization solvers by learning to identify a much smaller sub-problem that contains the solution space. We evaluate the performance of Graph-SCP on synthetic weighted and unweighted SCP instances with diverse problem characteristics and complexities, and on instances from the OR Library, a canonical benchmark for SCP.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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To combat counterfeiting, organizations must employ a ‘multilayered strategy’
Anand Nair, professor of supply chain and information management in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, writes — with Thomas Choi and Robert Handfield — about the “counterfeiting epidemic” affecting many companies, “whether their leaders know it or not.” Combating this crisis, they write, “works best with a multilayered strategy encompassing diverse methods and engaging the entire organization and its partners.” This strategy includes “routinely keeping tabs on contract manufacturers and charting how products move through the supply chain … scoping out what is for sale in consumer markets, deploying covert markings, reviewing warranty claims, educating customers and partnering with key…
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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, which may result from external or internal DNA damaging agents, 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.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Chemical Research in Toxicology.
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‘Linguistic Illusions Guide Eye Movement: Evidence From Doubling’
“Across languages, certain phonological patterns are preferred to others (e.g., blog > lbog). But whether such preferences arise from abstract linguistic constraints or sensorimotor pressures is controversial. We address this debate by examining the constraints on doubling (e.g., slaflaf, generally, XX). Doubling demonstrably elicits conflicting responses (aversion or preference), depending on the linguistic level of analysis (phonology vs. morphology). Since the stimulus remains unchanged, the shifting responses imply abstract constraints. Here, we ask whether these constraints apply online, in eye movements.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.
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‘Hyper-cores Promote Localization and Efficient Seeding in Higher-Order Processes’
“Going beyond networks, to include higher-order interactions of arbitrary sizes, is a major step to better describe complex systems. In the resulting hypergraph representation, tools to identify structures and central nodes are scarce. We consider the decomposition of a hypergraph in hyper-cores, subsets of nodes connected by at least a certain number of hyperedges of at least a certain size. We show that this provides a fingerprint for data described by hypergraphs and suggests a novel notion of centrality, the hypercoreness.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Nature Communications.
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‘Recent Advances in the Neuroscience of Spontaneous and Off-Task Thought: Implications for Mental Health’
“People spend a remarkable 30–50% of their awake life thinking about something other than what they are currently doing. These experiences of being ‘off-task’ can be described as spontaneous thought when mental dynamics are relatively flexible. Here we review recent neuroscience developments in this area and consider implications for mental well-being and illness. We provide updated overviews of the roles of the default mode network and large-scale network dynamics and we discuss emerging candidate mechanisms involving hippocampal memory (sharp-wave ripples, replay) and neuromodulatory (noradrenergic and serotonergic) systems.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Nature Mental Health.
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‘DNA Damage Alters Binding Conformations of E. coli Single-Stranded DNA-Binding Protein’
“Single-stranded DNA-binding proteins (SSBs) are essential cellular components, binding to transiently exposed regions of single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) with high affinity and sequence non-specificity to coordinate DNA repair and replication. … We introduce non-canonical DNA bases that mimic naturally occurring DNA damage, synthetic abasic sites, as well as a non-DNA linker into our experimental constructs at sites predicted to interact with [Escherichia coli SSB (EcSSB)]. … Changes in the binding and cooperative behaviors of EcSSB across these constructs can inform how genomic repair and replication processes may change as environmental damage accumulates in DNA.” Find the paper and authors list at…
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‘Quantum Metric Nonlinear Hall Effect in a Topological Antiferromagnetic Heterostructure’
“Quantum geometry in condensed-matter physics has two components: the real part quantum metric and the imaginary part Berry curvature. Whereas the effects of Berry curvature have been observed through phenomena such as the quantum Hall effect in two-dimensional electron gases and the anomalous Hall effect (AHE) in ferromagnets, the quantum metric has rarely been explored. Here, we report a nonlinear Hall effect induced by the quantum metric dipole. … Our results open the door to discovering quantum metric responses predicted theoretically and pave the way for applications that bridge nonlinear electronics with AFM spintronics.” Find the paper and authors list…
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‘Hypodescent or Ingroup Overexclusion?: Children’s and Adults’ Racial Categorization of Ambiguous Black/White Biracial Faces’
“Two processes describe racially ambiguous Black/White Biracial categorization — the one-drop rule, or hypodescent, whereby racially ambiguous people are categorized as members of their socially subordinated racial group (i.e., Black/White Biracial faces categorized as Black) and the ingroup overexclusion effect, whereby racially ambiguous people are categorized as members of a salient outgroup, regardless of the group’s status. Without developmental research with racially diverse samples, it is unclear when these categorization patterns emerge. … Results suggest the ingroup overexclusion effect is present across populations early in development and persists into adulthood.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Dev…
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‘Effects of (−)-MBP … on Brain Activity: A phMRI Study on Awake Mice’
“A novel serotonin ligand (−)-MBP was developed for the treatment of schizophrenia. … The multi-functional activity of this novel drug candidate was characterized using pharmacological magnetic resonance imaging. It was hypothesized (−)-MBP would affect activity in brain areas associated with sensory perception. … BOLD functional imaging was used to follow changes in global brain activity. Data for each treatment were registered to a 3D MRI mouse brain atlas providing site-specific information on 132 different brain areas. There was a dose-dependent decrease in positive BOLD signal in numerous brain regions.” Find the paper and authors list at Pharmacology Research & Perspectives.
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‘Assessing the Potential for the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) Mission for Constituent Flux Estimations’
“The recently launched Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite will simultaneously measure river surface water widths, elevations, and slopes. These novel observations combined with assumptions for unobserved bathymetry and roughness enable the derivation of river discharge. … Here, we present how best to use SWOT data when it becomes live, including consideration of how best to accommodate or utilize the irregular flyover frequency of SWOT as it intersects with river reaches.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Frontiers in Earth Science.
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‘Bridging the Gap Between Collective Motility and Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transitions Through the Active Finite Voronoi Model’
“We introduce an active version of the recently proposed finite Voronoi model of epithelial tissue. The resultant Active Finite Voronoi (AFV) model enables the study of both confluent and non-confluent geometries and transitions between them, in the presence of active cells. Our study identifies six distinct phases, characterized by aggregation-segregation, dynamical jamming-unjamming, and epithelial-mesenchymal transitions (EMT), thereby extending the behavior beyond that observed in previously studied vertex-based models.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Soft Matter.
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Teaching AI to see in 3D: How Northeastern researchers are revolutionizing the field of computer vision
Associate professor of electrical and computer engineering Sarah Ostadabbas, with Ph.D. students Le Jiang and Zhouping Wang, is developing a computer vision algorithm that can estimate three-dimensional human movement — in real time — from livestreamed, two-dimensional video sources.
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‘COSMOS-Web: An Overview of the JWST Cosmic Origins Survey’
“We present the survey design, implementation and outlook for COSMOS-Web, a 255 hr treasury program conducted by the James Webb Space Telescope. … We anticipate COSMOS-Web’s legacy value to reach far beyond [its] scientific goals, touching many other areas of astrophysics, such as the identification of the first direct collapse black hole candidates, ultracool subdwarf stars in the Galactic halo and possibly the identification of z > 10 pair-instability supernovae. In this paper we provide an overview of the survey’s key measurements, specifications, goals and prospects for new discovery.” Find the paper and full list of authors at The Astrophysical…