Research

Groundbreaking work and published results in peer reviewed journals across disciplines.

Title

Topic

  • ‘Linearity of Relation Decoding in Transformer Language Models’

    “Much of the knowledge encoded in transformer language models (LMs) may be expressed in terms of relations: relations between words and their synonyms, entities and their attributes, etc. We show that, for a subset of relations, this computation is well-approximated by a single linear transformation on the subject representation. Linear relation representations may be obtained by constructing a first-order approximation to the LM from a single prompt, and they exist for a variety of factual, commonsense, and linguistic relations.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.

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  • ‘TikTok as Algorithmically Mediated Biographical Illumination: Autism, Self-Discovery and Platformed Diagnosis on #Autisktok’

    “Scholarship in the sociology of medicine has tended to characterize diagnosis as disruptive to one’s self-concept. This categorization, though, requires reconsideration in light of public conversations about mental health and community building around neurocognitive conditions, particularly among youth online. … We explored the shifting nature of [‘biographical illumination’] through the case of TikTok. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, we argue that TikTok serves as a space to discuss diagnosis and refine one’s sense of self as a result of diagnosis.” Find the paper and full list of authors at New Media & Society.

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  • ‘Work Strains and Disabilities in French Workers: A Career-Long Retrospective Study’

    “This study aims to estimate the causal impact of detrimental working conditions on the self-reported disabilities in France. Using a retrospective lifelong panel, we implement a mixed econometric strategy that relies on difference-in-differences and matching methods to take into account for selection biases as well as unobserved heterogeneity. Deleterious effects from exposure on disability are found. … These results provide insights into the debate on legal retirement age postponement and justify policies being enacted early in individuals’ careers, but also schemes that are more focused on psychosocial risk factors.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Labour.

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  • ‘Why Look at Dead Animals?’ asks Coughlin in provocative taxidermy study

    “Lion Attacking a Dromedary was a sensational object for its first viewers at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1867. … As we now know, the Verreaux brothers embedded human remains in the figure of the rider that had formerly been assumed to be just a clothed mannequin. … This essay suggests that theoretical tools derived from Material Ecocriticism and Monster Theory that may help us to think about, or alongside, the affective power of this disturbing taxidermy assemblage, ever aware that this piece draws its power from the theatrical, colonial violence of extraction and extinction.”

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  • ‘Deep Bayesian Active Learning for Accelerating Stochastic Simulation’

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    “Stochastic simulations such as large-scale, spatiotemporal, age-structured epidemic models are computationally expensive at fine-grained resolution. While deep surrogate models can speed up the simulations, doing so for stochastic simulations and with active learning approaches is an underexplored area. We propose Interactive Neural Process (INP), a deep Bayesian active learning framework for learning deep surrogate models to accelerate stochastic simulations. INP consists of two components, a spatiotemporal surrogate model built upon Neural Process (NP) family and an acquisition function for active learning.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining proceedings.

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  • ‘Disentangling Node Attributes From Graph Topology for Improved Generalizability in Link Prediction’

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    “Link prediction is a crucial task in graph machine learning with diverse applications. We explore the interplay between node attributes and graph topology and demonstrate that incorporating pre-trained node attributes improves the generalization power of link prediction models. Our proposed method, UPNA (Unsupervised Pre-training of Node Attributes), solves the inductive link prediction problem by learning a function that takes a pair of node attributes and predicts the probability of an edge, as opposed to Graph Neural Networks, … which can be prone to topological shortcuts in graphs with power-law degree distribution.” Find the paper and full list of authors at…

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  • ‘Can Euclidean Symmetry Be Leveraged in Reinforcement Learning and Planning?’

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    “In robotic tasks, changes in reference frames typically do not influence the underlying physical properties of the system, which has been known as invariance of physical laws.These changes, which preserve distance, encompass isometric transformations such as translations, rotations, and reflections, collectively known as the Euclidean group. In this work, we delve into the design of improved learning algorithms for reinforcement learning and planning tasks that possess Euclidean group symmetry.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.

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  • ‘Leveraging Structure for Improved Classification of Grouped Biased Data’

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    “We consider semi-supervised binary classification for applications in which data points are naturally grouped … and the labeled data is biased. … 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. … We demonstrate that under this assumption, the group carries additional information about the class, over the group-agnostic features, with provably improved area under the ROC curve.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence proceedings.

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  • ‘Accelerating Neural MCTS Algorithms Using Neural Sub-Net Structures’

    “Neural MCTS algorithms are a combination of Deep Neural Networks and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and have successfully trained Reinforcement Learning agents in a tabula-rasa way. … However, these algorithms … take a long time to converge, which requires high computational power and electrical energy. It also becomes difficult for researchers without cutting-edge hardware to pursue Neural MCTS research. We propose Step-MCTS, a novel algorithm that uses subnet structures, each of which simulates a tree that provides a lookahead for exploration.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems…

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  • ‘Sustainable HCI Under Water: Opportunities for Research with Oceans, Coastal Communities and Marine Systems’

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    “Although the world’s oceans play a critical role in human well-being, they have not been a primary focus of the sustainable HCI (SHCI) community to date. In this paper, we present a scoping review to show how concerns with the oceans are threaded throughout the broader SHCI literature and to find new research opportunities. We identify several themes that could benefit from focused SHCI research, including marine food sources, culture and coastal communities, ocean conservation, and marine climate change impacts and adaptation strategies.” Find the paper and full list of authors at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

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  • ‘Opportunities for Nature-Based Solutions To Contribute to Climate-Resilient Development Pathways’

    “There is potential for nature-based solutions (NbS) to contribute to climate-resilient development (CRD) due to their integrated approach to mitigation, adaptation, and sustainable development. … A CRD pathways (CRDP) approach helps to analyze the complexities of the relationship between CRD and NbS, and a climate justice lens enables the identification of the multiple ways that NbS can support or undermine CRD. … We present a framework that combines climate justice and CRDP in an analytical tool for understanding the potential for a NbS to support CRD.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability.

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  • ‘Rapid Convergence: The Outcomes of Making PPE During a Healthcare Crisis’

    “The U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH) 3D Print Exchange is a public, open-source repository for 3D printable medical device designs with contributions from clinicians, expert-amateur makers, and people from industry and academia. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the NIH formed a collection to foster submissions of low-cost, locally manufacturable personal protective equipment (PPE). We evaluated the 623 submissions in this collection … [and] found an immediate design convergence to manufacturing-focused remixes of a few initial designs affiliated with NIH partners and major for-profit groups.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction.

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  • ‘OPTIMISM: Enabling Collaborative Implementation of Domain Specific Metaheuristic Optimization’

    “For non-technical domain experts and designers it can be a substantial challenge to create designs that meet domain specific goals. This presents an opportunity to create specialized tools that produce optimized designs in the domain. However, implementing domain-specific optimization methods requires a rare combination of programming and domain expertise. … We present OPTIMISM, a toolkit which enables programmers and domain experts to collaboratively implement an optimization component of design tools.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems proceedings.

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  • ‘The First COVID Wave: Comparing Experiences of Adults Age 50 and Older in the U.S. and Europe’

    “The first wave of COVID-19, from March to September 2020, had significant health, social, and financial consequences for older Americans and their European peers. Comparing their COVID-19 experiences is important for understanding the variable impacts of the pandemic. … During the first COVID-19 wave, older Americans were much more likely than their European peers to report at least one of the four adverse COVID-19 experiences we studied. These experiences could have lasting effects on older adults in the U.S.” Find the paper and full list of authors at The Commonwealth Fund.

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  • ‘Closing the Gap in Merger Enforcement’

    “Most mergers in industries with only a handful of competitors are anticompetitive, so why don’t we block them?” asks Neal F. Finnegan Distinguished Professor of Economics John Kwoka. “The fix is to use a structural presumption to lower the burden for regulators,” he argues, stating that “a well-designed merger enforcement policy should focus on mergers with the greatest likelihood of anticompetitive outcomes,” which has not recently been true of United States policy.

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  • ‘Documentary Film and Institutional Behavioral Change: A Student-Driven Mobilization for Sustainability’

    “There are multiple methods available to convey the need for sustainability. However, most often communications are limited to one discipline or one instructional medium, which limits engagement and even interest. In the summer of 2021, students at Northeastern University working with their faculty advisor, adopted a multidisciplinary approach to discussing sustainability by producing a documentary film. The subject of the film is waste resulting from convenience consumption of coffee at the University’s multiple coffee shops.” Find this book chapter and the full list of authors in Educating the Sustainability Leaders of the Future.

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  • Understanding human decision-making during supply chains shortages

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    “Research conducted by mechanical and industrial engineering associate professor Jacqueline Griffin, professor Ozlem Ergun, and professor Stacy Marsella [in the Khoury College of Computer science, titled] ‘Agent-Based Modeling of Human Decision-Makers Under Uncertain Information During Supply Chain Shortages’ was published in the proceedings from the 2023 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.”

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  • ‘The Interplay Among Savings Accounts and Network-Based Financial Arrangements: Evidence From a Field Experiment’

    “This paper studies how formal financial access affects network-based financial arrangements. We use a field experiment that granted access to a savings account to a random subset of households in 19 Nepalese villages. Exploiting a unique panel dataset that follows all bilateral informal financial transactions before and after the intervention, we show that households that were offered access to an account increased their loans and total transfers to others, independent of the treatment status of the receiver.” Find the paper and full list of authors at The Economic Journal.

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  • ‘Small Business Lending and the Bank-Branch Network’

    “I examine the role of bank’s distance to the borrower and the proximity of other lenders for the transmission of financial shocks across the bank network. I use a novel dataset of small business lending based on information from the Community Reinvestment Act, which measures lending at census tract groups within each county and yields rich variation. … I document that small banks with increased liquidity from proximity to local oil booms, originate more loans to firms far from these booms, and lenders with above-average geographic exposure to residential booms reduce lending in census tract groups with stable house prices.”

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  • ‘Designing Engagement: A Student-Based Perspective of the Economics of Crime’

    “This paper, developed by participants in an Economics of Crime course at Northeastern University in conjunction with their professor, highlights student perspectives of the relationship between the economic system, its operations and institutions, and the marginalization and victimization of Black people. The paper addresses specific attributes of the course curriculum that facilitated student understanding of these topics, and in doing so suggests an alternative pedagogy for discussing crime from an economics disciplinary perspective.” Find the paper and full list of authors at Contemporary Justice Review.

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  • Northeastern researchers claim two editorial roles for Written Communication

    Mya Poe, associate professor in the department of English and Tieanna Graphenreed, PhD. student in English, have become co-editors of Written Communication, along with Dylan B. Dryer, University of Maine. They write that they “hope to further enrich Written Communication in four ways: First, we aim to increase the journal’s visibility as a potential home for work by scholars based in Asia, Africa, and South America. … Second, Written Communication will continue to advance methodological representation. … Third, we are planning to roll out a series of novel text-types. … Fourth, … we hope to reanimate the journal’s important role…

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  • ‘Predictors and Consequences of Pro-Environmental Behavior at Work’

    “Increasingly, people are looking for meaning through their jobs, for employers that have a positive impact on the world, and for workplaces that promote mission-driven behavior. One such mission that is a growing priority is addressing climate change, especially for younger cohorts entering the workforce. Addressing the climate crisis will necessitate substantial changes at all levels of society, including organizational change. This paper examines individual, social, and contextual variables that are associated with pro-environmental behavior (PEB).” Find the paper and full list of authors at ResearchGate.

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  • The math says that parents shouldn’t worry over shootings as students head back to school, says Northeastern researcher

    Professor of criminology, law and public policy James Alan Fox, and a principal researcher for the Northeastern University Mass Killing Database, writes that, while anxiety around rising numbers of school shootings are understandable, “The real epidemic is fear.” Fox argues that the data shows “Our nation’s schools are safe. In fact, only one-half of 1% of school-age victims of gun homicide are killed at school. Children are safer in school, where they have supervision and structure, than on playgrounds, ball fields and street corners. Indeed, some are safer at school than in their own home.”

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  • ‘Microbial Chemolithoautotrophs are Abundant in Salt Marsh Sediment Following Long-Term Experimental Nitrate Enrichment’

    “Long-term anthropogenic nitrate (NO3−) enrichment is a serious threat to many coastal systems. Nitrate reduction coupled with the oxidation of reduced forms of sulfur is conducted by chemolithoautotrophic microbial populations in a process that decreases nitrogen (N) pollution. However, little is known about the diversity and distribution of microbes capable of carbon fixation within salt marsh sediment and how they respond to long-term NO3− loading. We used genome-resolved metagenomics to characterize the distribution, phylogenetic relationships, and adaptations important to microbial communities within NO3− enriched sediment.” Find the paper and full list of authors at FEMS Microbiology Letters.

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  • ‘Workforce Ecosystems and AI’

    “Companies increasingly rely on an extended workforce (e.g., contractors, gig workers … and technologies such as algorithmic management and artificial intelligence) to achieve strategic goals and objectives. When we ask leaders to describe how they define their workforce today, they mention a diverse array of participants, beyond just full- and part-time employees, all contributing in various ways. … Our ongoing research on workforce ecosystems demonstrates that managing work across organizational boundaries with groups of interdependent actors in a variety of employment relationships creates new opportunities and risks for both workers and businesses.” Find the paper and full list of authors…

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  • Questions of equitability surround low-emission zones

    A As London attempts to expand its Ultra-Low Emissions Zone, the policy faces backlash, as the pay-to-drive policies “punish the poorest drivers and offer no alternatives in places with limited public transit,” writes professor Joan Fitzgerald. While these zones may be helpful in the fight against climate change, without public services like “adequate public transportation, safe bike lanes, and fair subsidies for purchasing compliant vehicles,” she continues, low-emission zones “are unjust and lose necessary political support.”

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  • ‘Adolescent Friendship, Cross-Sexuality Ties and Attitudes Toward Sexual Minorities: A Social Network Approach to Intergroup Contact’

    “Social ties between members of in- and outgroups are theorized to reduce individual levels of prejudice. However, instances of intergroup contact are not isolated events; cross-group interactions are embedded in broader networks defined by various social processes that guide the formation and maintenance of interpersonal relationships. This project reconsiders the potential benefits of intergroup contact by applying a network perspective to examine whether friendships between youth of different sexualities can shape individuals’ homophobic attitudes.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Social Science Research.

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  • ‘Does Ukraine Have Kompromat on Joe Biden?’ asks Abrahms

    Associate professor of political science in the College of Social Science and Humanities and the D’Amore-McKim School of Business Max Abrahms raises the question of whether Ukraine may have compromising information (“kompromat”) on Joe Biden or his family. The suspicions Abrahms raise stem from the “many millions of dollars” that were paid to Hunter Biden “by the shady Ukrainian energy firm Burisma,” Joe Biden’s subsequent firing of Victor Shokin, Ukrainian general prosecutor “who had begun an investigation into the Burisma-Hunter gravy train.”

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  • ‘A Tool for Mutation Analysis in Racket’

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    “Racket is a functional programming language that is used to teach CS1 at many high schools and colleges. … In order to evaluate [mutation analysis’s] efficacy in our college’s introductory programming courses, we created a prototype mutation analysis tool for Racket. We describe the design and features of the tool and perform a feasibility study using two assignments from an intro CS course where student test suite thoroughness was evaluated by hand by human graders.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing Verification and Validation Workshop.

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  • ‘SliceLens: Guided Exploration of Machine Learning Datasets’

    “SliceLens is a tool for exploring labeled, tabular, machine learning datasets. To explore a dataset, the user selects combinations of features in the dataset that they are interested in. The tool splits those features into bins and then visualizes the label distributions for the subsets of data created by the intersections of the bins. SliceLens guides the user in determining which feature combinations to explore. Guidance is based on a user-selected rating metric, which assigns a score to the subsets created by a given combination of features.”

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