Research

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

Title

Topic

  • ‘Lineage-Mismatched Mitochondrial Replacement … Effectively Restores the Original Proteomic Landscape of Recipient Cells’

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    “Here an inducible mitochondrial depletion modelis used to study how cells lacking endogenous mitochondria respond, on a global protein expression level, to transplantation with lineage-mismatched (LM) mitochondria. It is shown that LM mitochondrial transplantation does not alter the proteomic profile in nonmitochondria–depleted recipient cells; however, enforced depletion of endogenous mitochondria results in dramatic changes in the proteomic landscape, which returns to the predepletion state following internalization of LM mitochondria.” Find “Lineage-Mismatched Mitochondrial Replacement in an Inducible Mitochondrial Depletion Model Effectively Restores the Original Proteomic Landscape of Recipient Cells” and the full list of authors in Advanced Biology.

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  • The straightest line between two points: When your map’s incomplete

    The authors of “Finding shortest and nearly shortest path nodes in large substantially incomplete networks by hyperbolic mapping” have determined that large, real-world networks “are not random but are organized according to latent-geometric rules.” This being the case, they argue that, when “mapped to points in latent hyperbolic spaces,” they can calculate shortest paths “along geodesic curves connecting endpoint nodes.” In other words, they can get from A to C, without knowing B’s location. Read “Finding shortest and nearly shortest path nodes in large substantially incomplete networks by hyperbolic mapping” and see the full list of authors in Nature Communications.

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  • How the ‘two ingredients of language’ come from different regions of the brain

    The authors of “Phonetic Categorization Relies on Motor Simulation, But Combinatorial Phonological Computations Are Abstract” note two elements required in human language, categorization (identifying words as “distinct units”) and combination (distinguishing between units). The authors explore these mechanisms “using transcranial magnetic stimulation. [They] show that speech categorization engages the motor system. … In contrast, the combinatorial computation of syllable structure engages Broca’s area,” a region within the brain’s frontal lobe. They “conclude that the two ingredients of language—categorization and combination—are distinct functions in human brains.” Read their paper and see the full list of authors in Scientific Reports.

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  • ‘Byzantine Resilience at Swarm Scale: A Decentralized Blocklist Protocol From Inter-Robot Accusations’

    “The Weighted-Mean Subsequence Reduced (W-MSR) algorithm, the state-of-the-art method for Byzantine-resilient design of decentralized multi-robot systems, is based on discarding outliers received over Linear Consensus Protocol (LCP). Although W-MSR provides well-understood theoretical guarantees relating robust network connectivity to the convergence of the underlying consensus, the method comes with several limitations preventing its use at scale. … In this work, we propose a Decentralized Blocklist Protocol (DBP) based on inter-robot accusations.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in ArXiv.

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  • ‘Beating (1 – 1/e)-Approximation for Weighted Stochastic Matching’

    “In the stochastic weighted matching problem, the goal is to find a large-weight matching of a graph when we are uncertain about the existence of its edges. In particular, each edge e has a known weight we but is realized independently with some probability pe. The algorithm may query an edge to see whether it is realized. We consider the well-studied query commit version of the problem, in which any queried edge that happens to be realized must be included in the solution.” Find the paper and the full list of authors at SIAM.

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  • ‘Beating Greedy Matching in Sublinear Time’

    “We study sublinear time algorithms for estimating the size of maximum matching in graphs. Our main result is a (½ + Ω(1))-approximation algorithm which can be implemented in O(n1+ε) time, where n is the number of vertices and the constant ε > 0 can be made arbitrarily small. The best known lower bound for the problem is Ω(n), which holds for any constant approximation.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

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  • ‘Single-Pass Streaming Algorithms for Correlation Clustering’

    “We study correlation clustering in the streaming setting. This problem has been studied extensively and numerous algorithms have been developed, most requiring multiple passes over the stream. For the important case of single-pass algorithms, recent work of Assadi and Wang [8] obtains a c-approximation using Õ(n) space where c > 105 is a constant and n is the number of vertices to be clustered. We present a single-pass algorithm that obtains a 5-approximation using O(n) space.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

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  • ‘Dynamic Algorithms for Maximum Matching Size’

    “We study fully dynamic algorithms for maximum matching. This is a well-studied problem, known to admit several update-time/approximation trade-offs. … It has been a long-standing open problem to determine whether either of these bounds can be improved. In this paper, we show that when the goal is to maintain just the size of the matching (and not its edge-set), then these bounds can indeed be improved.”

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  • ‘Sublinear Algorithms for TSP via Path Covers’

    “We study sublinear time algorithms for the traveling salesman problem (TSP). First, we focus on the closely related maximum path cover problem, which asks for a collection of vertex disjoint paths that include the maximum number of edges. Our analysis of the running time uses connections to parallel algorithms and is information-theoretically optimal up to poly log n factors. Additionally, we show that our approximation guarantees for path cover and (1,2)-TSP hit a natural barrier: We show better approximations require better sublinear time algorithms for the well-studied maximum matching problem.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.

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  • Chowdhury awarded patent for intelligent wi-fi access points

    Professor Kaushik Chowdhury received a patent for work on the “Method and apparatus for access point discovery in dense WiFi networks.” The abstract to the patent offers “Systems, devices, and methods for access point discovery in a wireless network,” which rely on phase shift methods “encoded into bits in selected ones of a plurality of subcarriers.”

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  • Rethinking the source: COVID-19 and global supply chains in 2023

    In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, distinguished professor Nada Sanders tracks “three major shifts in how companies manage their supply chains.” According to her analysis, both customers and businesses will be impacted by the force of: 1) Bringing supply chains home, 2) investments in more technology, and 3) a shift from “just-in-time” thinking to “just-in-case” processes. The goal through all of these changes, Sanders writes, “is to ensure [that companies] can withstand disruptions and maintain business continuity.” To read more about these three forces and their potential impacts on the economy, see her article in The Conversation.

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  • Online ‘oracle reviewers’ serve as bellwethers of success

    Professor of marketing in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business Yael Karlinsky Shichor, with co-author Verena Schoenmueller of the ESADE Business School, have identified “oracle reviewers” in online product reviews, “whose early reviews serve as a signal to various measures of future book success.” The researchers used “unique data of Amazon book reviews” to generate a “reviewer score” that identifies how often a particular reviewer reviewed “successful books early on.” The more of these highly successful “oracle reviewers” appeared in a population of reviews, the more likely a book was to succeed. Read “The Oracles of Online Reviews” in SSRN.

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  • Machine learning at play while ‘Rethinking Bacterial Relationships in Light of Their Molecular Abilities’

    “Determining the repertoire of a microbe’s molecular functions is a central question in microbial genomics. Modern techniques achieve this goal by comparing microbial genetic material against reference databases of functionally annotated genes/proteins or known taxonomic markers such as 16S rRNA. Here we describe a novel approach to exploring bacterial functional repertoires without reference databases.” See the paper and the full list of authors at BioRxiv.

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  • The actual motivations behind Walmart’s controversial Women’s Empowerment Program

    Eileen Otis, professor of sociology in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities, has a new article in Gender & Society teasing apart the “Walmart’s Women’s Empowerment Program,” which some media outlets treated as a cause célèbre. Otis, however, notes that “a closer look at the program reveals a set of actions that are at best insignificant to women working for Walmart, at worst detrimental to women’s status in the workplace.” Read “Walmart… empowering women?” at Gender & Society.

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  • ‘Philosophy of Perception in the Psychologist’s Laboratory’

    “Unlike more general sources of philosophical inspiration, the work described here draws a direct line from a prominent philosophical conjecture or thought experiment about perception to a key test of that question in the laboratory—such that the relevant experimental work would not (and even could not) have proceeded as it did without the preceding philosophical discussion.” Find the paper and the full list of authors at the Association for Psychological Science.

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  • Protein identification methods: Now digestion free

    Whereas sequencing proteins generally involves “digestion into short peptides before detection and identification,” the authors of this paper have “developed a digestion-free method to chemically unfold and ‘scan’ full-length proteins through a nanopore,” they wrote in a summary of this paper. Read “Unidirectional single-file transport of full-length proteins through a nanopore” and see the full list of authors Nature Biotechnology.

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  • Special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies on ‘cultural taxation’ receives introduction co-authored by Northeastern professor

    Tiffany Joseph, professor of sociology and international affairs, writing with Laura Hirshfield of the University of Illinois College of Medicine, have written the introduction to a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies. This issue focuses on the concept of “cultural taxation,” the “extra burdens that stem from faculty of colour’s commitment to campus diversity issues and the lack of legitimacy they experience from colleagues challenging their existence in the academy,” they write.

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  • Untangling single-cell proteins with the Slavov Laboratory

    “Inside Precision Medicine published an article entitled ‘Untangling the Complexities of Single Cell Protein Analysis’ that highlights the latest research from the team of Allen Distinguished Investigator and associate professor of bioengineering Nikolai Slavov.  Read the article and more about the research team at Inside Precision Medicine.

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  • ‘Characterization of Bispecific Antigen-Binding Biotherapeutic Fragmentation Sites’

    “Characterization of the fragmentation pattern of a therapeutic protein is traditionally accomplished using capillary gel electrophoresis with UV detection under both non-reducing and reducing conditions. … Here, we present a novel method to characterize size-based fragmentation variants of a new biotherapeutic kind using microfluidic ZipChip® capillary zone electrophoresis (mCZE) system interfaced with mass spectrometry (MS) to determine the molecular masses of fragments.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in Analyst.

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  • ‘DCVNet: Dilated Cost Volume Networks for Fast Optical Flow’

    “The cost volume, capturing the similarity of possible correspondences across two input images, is a key ingredient in state-of-the-art optical flow approaches. When sampling correspondences to build the cost volume, a large neighborhood radius is required to deal with large displacements, introducing a significant computational burden. To address this, coarse-to-fine or recurrent processing of the cost volume is usually adopted. … In this paper, we propose an alternative by constructing cost volumes with different dilation factors to capture small and large displacements simultaneously.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in IEEE Xplore.

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  • Facial recognition by any memes necessary

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    “As part of ‘JUSTICE,’ an exhibit opening at the Science Gallery Atlanta at Emory University in January 2023,” writes the College of Arts, Media and Design, “professors Derek Curry and Jennifer Gradecki have created the faux surveillance company Boogaloo Bias, a facial recognition tool aimed at finding suspected members of the Boogaloo Bois, an anti-law enforcement militia that emerged from 4chan meme culture and has been present at protests since January 2020. … This interactive artwork and research project highlights some of the known problems with law enforcement agencies’ use of facial recognition technologies.”

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  • ‘In Search of the Miraculous’ in New York art exhibition

    Yulia Pinkusevich, professor of studio art at Mills College, was part of a group exhibition that ran between January and March, 2023. The exhibition was titled “In Search of the Miraculous,” and was held at the Marlborough Gallery, in New York City.

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  • Top 10 in Annals of Internal Medicine: Miller featured with two papers

    Matthew Miller, professor of health sciences and epidemiology, was featured in the Annals of Internal Medicine’s “Best of 2022” list with two articles on firearms research, “Homicide Deaths Among Adult Cohabitants of Handgun Owners in California, 2004 to 2016” and the “Firearm Purchasing During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Results From the 2021 National Firearms Survey.” Find his papers with their full list of authors, and the full best-of list, at Annals of Internal Medicine.

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  • ‘The Rise of Emerging Market Lead Firms in Global Value Chains’

    “Extending the resource-based view that location characteristics influence firms’ resources and internationalization, we argue that the global value chains (GVCs) of lead firms from emerging and advanced economies differ in three dimensions: objectives, trajectory, and governance.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in the Journal of Business Research.

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  • ‘Generating Unified Platforms Using Multigranularity Domain DSE (MG-DmDSE) Exploiting Application Similarities’

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    “Heterogeneous accelerator-rich (ACC-rich) platforms combining general-purpose cores and specialized HW accelerators (ACCs) promise high-performance and low-power streaming application deployments in a variety of domains, such as video analytics and software-defined radio. … A domain platform exploration tool must take advantage of structural and functional similarities across applications by allocating a common set of ACCs. … This article introduces a multigranularity-based domain design space exploration tool (MG-DmDSE) to improve both average application throughput as well as platform generality.” Find the paper and the full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems.

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  • ‘Modeling and Simulation… for an Analog Computing Design Approach With Application to EEG Feature Extraction’

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    “This article presents a design approach for the modeling and simulation of ultralow power (ULP) analog computing machine learning (ML) circuits for seizure detection using electroencephalography (EEG) signals in wearable health monitoring applications. In this article, we describe a new analog system modeling and simulation technique to associate power consumption, noise, linearity and other critical performance parameters of analog circuits with the classification accuracy of a given ML network.” Find the paper and the full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems.

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  • ‘Restructuring of Emergent Grain Boundaries at Free Surfaces—An Interplay Between Core Stabilization and Elastic Stress Generation’

    “Emergent grain boundaries at free surface impact a wide range of material properties but little is known about their atomic-scale behavior. Using scanning tunneling microscopy and calculations, we studied the structure of emergent grain boundaries at the surfaces of planar nanocrystalline copper (111) films and bicrystals. We show that for a wide range of misorientation angles there exists a strong energetic preference for boundary cores to lie along close-packed planes that leads to the restructuring of emergent grain boundaries at free surfaces.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors in Acta Materiala.

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  • Global work and enterprises in the wake of COVID-19

    The authors examine “the future of global work … [for] multinational enterprises” in the wake of “a great ‘reset'” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors apply “a phenomenon-based approach” to cover “the most critical macrotrends shaping the future of global work, their implications for [international human resource management], and global work in the context of MNEs. Specifically, [they] address how these trends have affected the where, how, who, and why of global work.” Read “Global work in a rapidly changing world: Implications for MNEs and individuals” and see the full list of authors in the Journal of World Business.

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  • ‘Multiple Forecast Visualizations (MFVs): Trade-offs in Trust and Performance in Multiple COVID-19 Forecast Visualizations’

    “The prevalence of inadequate SARS-COV-2 (COVID-19) responses may indicate a lack of trust in forecasts and risk communication. However, no work has empirically tested how multiple forecast visualization choices impact trust and task-based performance. The three studies presented in this paper ( N=1299 ) examine how visualization choices impact trust in COVID-19 mortality forecasts and how they influence performance in a trend prediction task.” Read “Multiple Forecast Visualizations (MFVs): Trade-offs in Trust and Performance in Multiple COVID-19 Forecast Visualizations” and see the full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

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  • ‘Image-Text Embedding Learning via Visual and Textual Semantic Reasoning’

    “As a bridge between language and vision domains, cross-modal retrieval between images and texts is a hot research topic in recent years. It remains challenging because the current image representations usually lack semantic concepts in the corresponding sentence captions. To address this issue, we introduce an intuitive and interpretable model to learn a common embedding space for alignments between images and text descriptions.” Read the paper and see the full list of authors IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

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