Title
Topic
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‘L1-ORF1p Nucleoprotein Can Rapidly Assume Distinct Conformations and… Bind More than One Nucleic Acid’
“LINE-1 (L1) is a parasitic retrotransposable DNA element, active in primates for the last 80–120 Myr. L1 has generated nearly one-third of the human genome by copying its transcripts, and those of other genetic elements. … We used optical tweezers to examine ORF1p binding to individual single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) molecules and found that the arrangement of ORF1p on the ssDNA depends on their molar ratio. … Our results suggest that ORF1p displaced from its RNA template during TPRT could bind and destabilize remaining downstream L1 RNP.”Find the paper and full list of authors in Nucleic Acids Research.
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‘Self-Consistent Evaluation of Proximity and Inverse Proximity Effects With Pair-Breaking in Diffusive Superconducting–Normal Metal Junctions’
“We consider a planar superconducting–normal metal junction with both inelastic and spin-flip scattering processes present. …We use a one-dimensional formulation of the Usadel equation to compute the self-consistent energy dependence of the single-particle density of states as a function of distance from the interface on both the superconducting and metallic sides for various spatial profiles of a pair-breaking spin-flip term. The pair-breaking processes fill in the superconducting gap at zero energy, which is reflected in the zero-bias tunneling conductance in scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy experiments, in the vicinity of the junction.” Find the paper and authors in Physical Review B.
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‘Strategies to Stabilize Dalbavancin in Aqueous Solutions; Section-2: The Effects of 2 Hydroxypropyl-β-Cyclodextrin…’
“The effect of 2-hydroxpropyl-β-cyclodextrin (2HPβCD) with or without divalent metal ions (Ca2+, Mg2+, and Zn2+) on the stability of dalbavancin in acetate buffer was investigated. … The stability of the dalbavancin formulations after 4 weeks at 55 °C in 10 mM acetate buffer was significantly improved with 0.6 mM, 5.5 mM, and 55 mM 2HPβCD relative to without 2HPβCD. … 2HPβCD significantly improves the short- and long-term heat stability of dalbavancin in pH 4.5 acetate buffer at and above molar ratios of 1:1.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Pharmaceutics.
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‘The King is Dead — Long Live Who? A Family and Firm Embeddedness Perspective on Succession After the CEO-Owner’s Sudden Death’
“When the CEO-owner of an SME suddenly dies, who should take over? Integrating the social embeddedness perspective with research on crisis management, we theorize that an SME’s financial health gets progressively worse before it stabilizes and recovers, reflecting an inverse U-shaped relationship between time since the CEO-owner’s sudden death and an SME’s financial distress. We then explore how successors’ family and firm embeddedness moderate this relationship. Using a longitudinal sample of Swedish SMEs, we find general support for our theorizing.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Journal of Management Studies.
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‘Keeping in Touch With the Road Not Taken’
Associate professor of biology Javier Apfeld pens an opinion piece on why he’s kept in touch with the field of structural biology, despite having moved on professionally to other fields. “In my case, keeping up with the discoveries others made as they journeyed along paths I didn’t,” he writes, “has allowed me to share in the joy and fulfillment brought by the advancements in knowledge from their journeys.”
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‘Persistent Tissue-Specific Resident Microbiota in Oysters Across a Broad Geographical Range’
“Marine animals often harbour complex microbial communities that influence their physiology. However, strong evidence for resident microbiomes in marine bivalves is lacking, despite their contribution to estuarine habitats and coastal economies. We investigated whether marine bivalves harbour stable, resident microorganisms in specific tissues or if their microbiomes primarily consist of transient members reflecting the environmental microbial pool. … [Our] findings underscore the oyster host’s role in selecting its microbiome and highlight the importance of tissue-specific microbial communities in understanding bivalve-associated microbiomes.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Environmental Biology.
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‘Choroid Plexus Volume Only Increases Early after Traumatic Brain Injury’
“Traumatic brain injury (TBI) affects nearly 2.5 million people each year and results in a cascade of neurometabolic effects, including prolonged inflammatory processes. Choroid plexus (ChP) swelling has been postulated to occur following TBI due to neuroinflammation. However, it is unknown if the ChP swells as a consequence of the post-TBI neuroinflammatory cascade, and it is unknown if swelling could be detectable via human volumetric imaging. Therefore, this study aims to test for the effect of TBI on ChP volume using a case–control study design.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Neurotrauma Reports.
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‘Enhanced Proteomic Profiling of Human Plasma-Derived Extracellular Vesicles Through Charge-Based Fractionation’
“The study introduces a charge-based fractionation method for fractionating plasma-derived extracellular vesicles (EVs) into sub-populations aimed at the improved purification from free plasma proteins to enhance the diagnostic potential of EV sub-populations for specific pathophysiological states. Here, we present a novel approach for EV fractionation that leverages EVs’ inherent surface charges, differentiating them from other plasma components and, thus, reducing the sample complexity and increasing the purity of EVs.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Journal of Extracellular Vesicles.
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‘What I Learned at the White House, or, the Importance of Measurement Researchers Engaging with Policy’
“Computing systems now impact almost every aspect of our daily lives. As these systems evolve and develop, they often raise new challenges to our security and privacy, as well as to our commitments to equity and justice. To identify and mitigate the risks that these new technologies present, it is crucial to have scientific and technological experts participate in the conversation. … In this talk, I’ll reflect on my 18 months serving at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer for Privacy.”
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‘Understanding Cognitive Aging Through White Matter: A Fixel-Based Analysis’
“Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) has been frequently used to examine age-related deterioration of white matter microstructure and its relationship to cognitive decline. However, typical tensor-based analytical approaches are often difficult to interpret due to the challenge of decomposing and (mis)interpreting the impact of crossing fibers within a voxel. We hypothesized that a novel analytical approach capable of resolving fiber-specific changes within each voxel (i.e., fixel-based analysis [FBA])—would show greater sensitivity relative to the traditional tensor-based approach for assessing relationships between white matter microstructure, age, and cognitive performance.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Human Brain Mapping.
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‘Epibiosis by Florida Crown Conch on Green Sea Turtles in a Northern Florida Estuary’
“We report the first observations of Melongena corona (Florida Crown Conch) as an epibiont attached to the carapace of juvenile Chelonia mydas (Green Sea Turtle). The Florida Crown Conch is a carnivorous marine gastropod found in benthic intertidal communities along the coast of Florida, southeastern Alabama, and parts of the Caribbean. … [W]e propose that Green Turtles may be facilitating the northern expansion of the Florida Crown Conch, which would be an important dynamic to account for when designing and implementing conservation, restoration, and aquaculture programs for shellfish areas.” Find the paper and authors list in Southeastern Naturalist.
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‘Ethics and Transparency in Game Data’
“While existing work has discussed ethics and fairness in relation to data generally, and a small number of papers have raised the same issues within games specifically, work on addressing fairness and ethical issues with game data collection and usage is still rare. … Our goal for this workshop is, thus, to bring together researchers and professionals working in the spaces of game human–computer interaction (HCI), game data and AI, and ethics in both games and AI to discuss and identify interdisciplinary research opportunities and devise potential solutions.” Find the paper and list of authors in the CHI PLAY Companion…
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‘A Nominal Approach to Probabilistic Separation Logic’
“Currently, there is a gap between the tools used by probability theorists and those used in formal reasoning about probabilistic programs. On the one hand, a probability theorist decomposes probabilistic state along the simple and natural product of probability spaces. On the other hand, recently developed probabilistic separation logics decompose state via relatively unfamiliar measure-theoretic constructions for computing unions of sigma-algebras and probability measures. We bridge the gap between these two perspectives by showing that these two methods of decomposition are equivalent up to a suitable equivalence of categories.” Find the paper and full list of authors in ArXiv.
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‘Knowledge Transfer from High-Resource to Low-Resource Programming Languages for Code LLMs’
“Over the past few years, Large Language Models of Code (Code LLMs) have started to have a significant impact on programming practice. …Code LLMs produce impressive results on high-resource programming languages that are well represented in their training data (e.g., Java, Python, or JavaScript), but struggle with low-resource languages that have limited training data available (e.g., OCaml, Racket, and several others). This paper presents an effective approach for boosting the performance of Code LLMs on low-resource languages using semi-synthetic data.” Find the paper and full list of authors in ArXiv.
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‘Finding Linear Explanations for a Given Ranking’
“Given a relation and a ranking of its tuples, but no information about the ranking function, we propose RankExplain to solve 2 types of problems: SAT asks if any linear scoring function can exactly reproduce the given ranking. OPT identifies the linear scoring function that minimizes position-based error, i.e., the total of the ranking-position differences over all tuples in the top-k. Our solution consists of linear programs that solve the problems exactly and can be implemented using MILP solvers.” Find the paper and full list of authors in ArXiv.
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‘Formal Model-Driven Analysis of Resilience of GossipSub to Attacks From Misbehaving Peers’
“GossipSub is a new peer-to-peer communication protocol designed to counter attacks from misbehaving peers by controlling what information is sent and to whom, via a score function computed by each peer that captures positive and negative behaviors of its neighbors. The score function depends on several parameters (weights, caps, thresholds) that can be configured by applications using GossipSub. … In this work we take a foundational approach to understanding the resilience of GossipSub to attacks from misbehaving peers.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
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DARPA grant to enhance mixed reality security
“Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Mahdi Imani was awarded a DARPA grant for ‘VeriPro: Verified Probabilistic Cognitive Reasoning for Tactical Mixed Reality Systems.’ This collaborative, multidisciplinary effort includes partners from Penn State University (lead), Design Interactive Inc., Kennesaw State University, George Washington University, and the University of Southern California.”
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‘Gradually Typed Languages Should Be Vigilant!’
“In gradual typing, different languages perform different dynamic type checks for the same program. … This raises the question of whether, given a gradually typed language, the combination of the translation that injects checks in well-typed terms and the dynamic semantics that determines their behavior sufficiently enforce the static type system of the language. … In response, we present vigilance, a semantic analytical instrument that defines when the check-injecting translation and dynamic semantics of a gradually typed language are adequate for its static type system.” Find the paper and authors list inthe ACM Programming Languages proceedings.
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‘Dragonfly Algorithm Application for Solving the Nurse Scheduling Problem’
“Scheduling plays a crucial role in allocating re-sources to tasks in various domains, including healthcare. Nurse scheduling, in particular, presents significant challenges due to the limited number of nurses. This paper illustrates how a novel meta-heuristic model known as Dragonfly Algorithm (DA) is used to efficiently solve the nurse scheduling problem faced by a major hospital in Belgium. The DA, inspired by the swarming behaviours of dragonflies, offers a new approach to solving this problem.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the proceedings of the International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications.
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‘Cloud Load Balancing Algorithms Performance Evaluation Using a Unified Testing Platform’
“Due to its improved response time, availability, and efficiency, load balancing emerged as an essential framework for designing high-performance distributed computing systems. This paper introduces a unified testing platform that objectively compares load balancing algorithms and measures their performance. It employs various request patterns and load types to simulate real-world conditions. We evaluate a selection of static and dynamic algorithms on throughput, response time, and failure rate metrics. The results show that most, but not all, dynamic algorithms perform better than static ones.” Find the paper and list of authors in the International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications proceedings.
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‘Visual Exploration of Machine Learning Model Behavior With Hierarchical Surrogate Rule Sets’
“One of the potential solutions for model interpretation is to train a surrogate model: a more transparent model that approximates the behavior of the model to be explained. Typically, classification rules or decision trees are used due to their logic-based expressions. However, decision trees can grow too deep, and rule sets can become too large to approximate a complex model. … In this paper, we focus on tabular data and present novel algorithmic and interactive solutions to address these issues.” Find the paper and full list of authors in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
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‘RePresent: Enabling Access to Justice for Pro Se Litigants via Co-Authored Serious Games’
“Increasing numbers of people represent themselves in legal disputes—known as pro se litigants. Many lack the skills, experience, or knowledge to navigate legal proceedings without a lawyer. … Serious games may provide an effective, interactive, and engaging way of educating pro se litigants about the law and enabling their access to justice. Through participatory design with legal experts and an authoring tool, we co-designed RePresent, a serious game that helps individuals with limited access to legal support prepare for pro se litigation.” Find the paper and list of authors in the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference proceedings.
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‘Robo-Instruct: Simulator-Augmented Instruction Alignment For Finetuning CodeLLMs’
“Open-weight LLMs are particularly appealing choices to generate training data for fine-tuning Code LLMs on domain-specific service robot applications because they are cost-effective, customizable, and offer better privacy protection. However, unlike proprietary LLMs, open-weight models are more error-prone and often produce programs that violate domain-specific constraints. … In this work, we introduce ROBO-INSTRUCT that preserves the diversity of programs generated by an LLM while providing the correctness of simulator-based checking.” Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.
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‘StudentEval: A Benchmark of Student-Written Prompts for Large Language Models of Code’
“Code LLMs have the potential to make it easier for non-experts to understand and write code. However, current CodeLLM benchmarks rely on a single expert-written prompt per problem, making it hard to generalize their success to non-expert users. In this paper, we present a new natural-language-to-code benchmark of prompts written by a key population of non-experts: beginning programmers. … We use StudentEval to evaluate 12 Code LLMs and find that StudentEval is a better discriminator of model performance than existing benchmarks.” Find the paper and full list of authors in ACL Anthology.
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‘E(2)-Equivariant Graph Planning for Navigation’
“Learning for robot navigation presents a critical and challenging task. The scarcity and costliness of real-world datasets necessitate efficient learning approaches. In this letter, we exploit Euclidean symmetry in planning for 2D navigation, which originates from Euclidean transformations between reference frames and enables parameter sharing. To address the challenges of unstructured environments, we formulate the navigation problem as planning on a geometric graph and develop an equivariant message passing network to perform value iteration.” Find the paper and full list of authors in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
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‘Privacy Norms of Transformative Fandom: A Case Study of an Activity-Defined Community’
“Transformative media fandom is a remarkably coherent, long-lived, and diverse community united primarily by shared engagement in the varied activities of fandom. Its social norms are highly-developed and frequently debated, and have been studied by the CSCW and Media Studies communities in the past, but rarely using the tools and theories of privacy, despite fannish norms often bearing strongly on privacy. We use privacy scholarship and existing theories thereof to examine these norms and bring an additional perspective to understanding fandom communities.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction.
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‘Seamlessly Insecure: Uncovering Outsider Access Risks in AiDot-Controlled Matter Devices’
“Matter is the recently proclaimed standard for seamless interoperability among connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices, seeking to unify the fragmented IoT landscape. In this paper, we analyze a range of Matter-enabled devices, uncovering a critical security flaw within the manufacturer’s implementation of the device commissioning process. This flaw allows the adversary to exploit an unenrolled manufacturer channel on an operational Matter device to enable unauthorized access, without notifying the user or compromising the existing Matter connection.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops.