POPULARITY
On today's episode I chat with Senior Grants Consultant Michelle Frank all about NSF CAREER! We are taking your questions - from the impacts of DEI language, to what makes educational activities 'pop,' to whether or not an NIH R01 is competitively prohibitive for CAREER. Follow me on Twitter!Interested in Hanover helping you with your grants? Check out our website for more information.
We are pleased to invite you to a LIVE distinguished YouTube panel discussion on Strategies for Securing Early Career Awards
Neuromorphic computing is a powerful tool for identifying time-varying patterns, but is often less effective than some AI-based techniques for more complex tasks. Researchers at the iCAS Lab directed by Ramtin Zand at the University of South Carolina, work on an NSF CAREER project to show how the capabilities of neuromorphic systems could be improved by blending them with specialized machine learning systems, without sacrificing their impressive energy efficiency. Using their approach, the team aims to show how the gestures of American Sign Language could be instantly translated into written and spoken language.
The cone penetration test (CPT) is a standard tool for geotechnical engineers; it's used for measuring soil sheer strength, stress history and type. Leveraging her NSF CAREER award, Portland State U researcher Diane Moug plans to improve the CPT, so engineers can make better interpretations of CPT data. Moug will employ NHERI at UC Davis centrifuges, numerical modeling, and lab experimentation.
Claire chatted to Pratap Tokekar from the University of Maryland about how teams of robots with different capabilities can work together. Pratap Tokekar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland, and an Amazon Scholar. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the GRASP lab of University of Pennsylvania and later, an Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech. He has a degree in Electronics and Telecommunication from the College of Engineering Pune in India and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. He received the Amazon Research Award in 2022, and the NSF CAREER award in 2020. Join the Robot Talk community on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ClaireAsher
Episode 140I spoke with Professor Jacob Andreas about:* Language and the world* World models* How he's developed as a scientistEnjoy!Jacob is an associate professor at MIT in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as well as the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research aims to understand the computational foundations of language learning, and to build intelligent systems that can learn from human guidance. Jacob earned his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, his M.Phil. from Cambridge (where he studied as a Churchill scholar) and his B.S. from Columbia. He has received a Sloan fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, MIT's Junior Bose and Kolokotrones teaching awards, and paper awards at ACL, ICML and NAACL.Find me on Twitter for updates on new episodes, and reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions. Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (00:40) Jacob's relationship with grounding fundamentalism* (05:21) Jacob's reaction to LLMs* (11:24) Grounding language — is there a philosophical problem?* (15:54) Grounding and language modeling* (24:00) Analogies between humans and LMs* (30:46) Grounding language with points and paths in continuous spaces* (32:00) Neo-Davidsonian formal semantics* (36:27) Evolving assumptions about structure prediction* (40:14) Segmentation and event structure* (42:33) How much do word embeddings encode about syntax?* (43:10) Jacob's process for studying scientific questions* (45:38) Experiments and hypotheses* (53:01) Calibrating assumptions as a researcher* (54:08) Flexibility in research* (56:09) Measuring Compositionality in Representation Learning* (56:50) Developing an independent research agenda and developing a lab culture* (1:03:25) Language Models as Agent Models* (1:04:30) Background* (1:08:33) Toy experiments and interpretability research* (1:13:30) Developing effective toy experiments* (1:15:25) Language Models, World Models, and Human Model-Building* (1:15:56) OthelloGPT's bag of heuristics and multiple “world models”* (1:21:32) What is a world model?* (1:23:45) The Big Question — from meaning to world models* (1:28:21) From “meaning” to precise questions about LMs* (1:32:01) Mechanistic interpretability and reading tea leaves* (1:35:38) Language and the world* (1:38:07) Towards better language models* (1:43:45) Model editing* (1:45:50) On academia's role in NLP research* (1:49:13) On good science* (1:52:36) OutroLinks:* Jacob's homepage and Twitter* Language Models, World Models, and Human Model-Building* Papers* Semantic Parsing as Machine Translation (2013)* Grounding language with points and paths in continuous spaces (2014)* How much do word embeddings encode about syntax? (2014)* Translating neuralese (2017)* Analogs of linguistic structure in deep representations (2017)* Learning with latent language (2018)* Learning from Language (2018)* Measuring Compositionality in Representation Learning (2019)* Experience grounds language (2020)* Language Models as Agent Models (2022) Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe
Graph learning has gained prominent traction from the academia and industry as a solution to detect complex cyber-attack campaigns. By constructing a graph that connects various network/host entities and modeling the benign/malicious patterns, threat-hunting tasks like data provenance and entity classification can be automated. We term the systems under this theme as Graph-based Security Analytics (GSAs). In this talk, we first provide a cursory view of GSA research in the recent decade, focusing on the academic side. Then, we elaborate a few GSAs developed in our lab, which are designed for edge-level intrusion detection (Argus), subgraph-level attack reconstruction (ProGrapher) and storage reduction (SEAL). In the end of the talk, we will review the progress and pitfalls along the development of GSA research, and highlight some research opportunities. About the speaker: Zhou Li is an Assistant Professor at UC Irvine, EECS department, leading the Data-driven Security and Privacy Lab. Before joining UC Irvine, he worked as Principal Research Scientist at RSA Labs from 2014 to 2018. His research interests include Internet Security, Organizational network security, Privacy Enhancement Technologies, and Security and privacy for machine learning. He received the NSF CAREER award, Amazon Research Award, Microsoft Security AI award and IRTF Applied Networking Research Prize.
At this week's Round Table, Hannah, Inyoo, and Preena spoke with Professor Robert Ghrist, the Andrea Mitchell PIK Professor of Mathematics and Electrical & Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. With an impressive background and a wealth of knowledge in Applied Algebraic Topology, Professor Ghrist joins us to share his expertise and perspectives on the intersection of mathematics, technology, and education. In this episode, we dive deep into Professor Ghrist's groundbreaking work in applied mathematics. From his early academic journey—earning his BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Toledo and his MS and PhD in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University—to his influential roles at esteemed institutions like the University of Texas, Georgia Tech, and the University of Illinois, Ghrist's career is a testament to his dedication to the field. We explore his significant contributions to applied algebraic topology, particularly in sensor networks, robotics, signal processing, data analysis, and optimization. Professor Ghrist shares insights into his award-winning research and discusses the impact of his acclaimed textbook, Elementary Applied Topology. We also touch on his role in managing large Department of Defense grants and his recognition with prestigious awards such as the NSF CAREER and Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow awards. Beyond his research, we delve into Professor Ghrist's passion for education and communication. His innovative teaching methods, including the popular YouTube series featuring the Calculus BLUE Project and his Coursera course, showcase his commitment to making complex mathematical concepts accessible and engaging. Additionally, we discuss Professor Ghrist's involvement in the AI field, his optimistic view on the future of artificial intelligence, and his recent initiatives in AI education, including teaching an AI course and helping launch the AI major at UPenn. Join us for a thought-provoking conversation that bridges mathematics, technology, and creative expression. Whether you're a student, educator, or simply curious about the cutting edge of applied mathematics, this episode offers valuable insights and inspiration. Thanks for listening!
"Understanding the problem is sometimes more important than getting to a solution." In this episode, Dr. Eileen Martin, winner of the 2024 J. Clarence Karcher Award, shares actionable advice and resources to help you make a positive impact in your professional environment. In this episode, we talk about: > The definitions of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in the context of geophysics > The mission statement of the JEDI Committee and its guiding principles > The challenges and opportunities of a volunteer-driven organization > The JEDI Ambassadors program and its role in promoting JEDI principles > How to question biases and actively support colleagues from underrepresented backgrounds > Practical ways to foster inclusion and belonging in professional settings > The importance of recognizing and nominating diverse talent for awards In this conversation with host Andrew Geary, Eileen Martin elaborates on the JEDI Committee's initiatives, including the JEDI Ambassadors program, which aims to integrate JEDI principles across various SEG committees. Listeners will learn practical steps for promoting justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion within their organizations and the broader geophysics community. This episode offers actionable advice and resources to help you make a positive impact in your professional environment. GUEST BIOGRAPHY Dr. Eileen Martin is an associate professor at Colorado School of Mines jointly appointed in geophysics and applied math and statistics. At Mines, she is a part of two industry-aligned consortia: Center for Wave Phenomena and Center to Advance the Science of Exploration to Reclamation in Mining. She earned her PhD from the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford in 2018, where she was a member of the Stanford Exploration Project group and an affiliate in the geophysics department at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. She holds an MS in geophysics from Stanford and a BS with a double major in math and computational physics from UT-Austin. She has earned an NSF CAREER grant (2021), the SIAM Activity Group on Geosciences Early Career Prize (2023), and the SEG J. Clarence Karcher Award (2024). LINKS * Visit https://seg.org/podcasts/episode-229-from-barriers-to-belonging-building-strong-companies-teams-in-geophysics/ for links to the Geoscientists Around the Globe series and the complete interview transcript. SHOW CREDITS Andrew Geary at TreasureMint hosted, edited, and produced this episode. The SEG podcast team comprises Jennifer Cobb, Kathy Gamble, and Ally McGinnis. Transcription and episode summary support provided by Headliner. If you have episode ideas or feedback for the show or want to sponsor a future episode, email the show at podcast@seg.org.
Are you a graduate student struggling to maintain your focus amidst a barrage of digital distractions? In this episode of Beyond the Thesis with Papa PhD we dive deep with into the secrets of optimizing your focus and attention. Gloria Mark, PhD in psychology and Chancellor's Professor Emerita at UC Irvine. Discover how like meta awareness and identifying your attentional rhythms can help you make the most of your graduate school journey. Don't miss out on expert advice that promises to alleviate your anxiety and skyrocket your productivity—essential listening for anyone looking to take control of their academic success in an age of constant interruptions. Gloria Mark is Chancellors Professor Emerita at the University of California, Irvine, and also spent ten years as a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research. She received her PhD from Columbia University in psychology. For over two decades she has researched the impact of digital media on people's lives, studying how using our devices affect our multitasking, distractions, mood and behavior. She has published over 200 papers in the top journals and conferences in the field of human-computer interaction, has received numerous paper awards, and was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2017 in recognition for her contribution to the field. She has also been a Fulbright scholar and has received the prestigious NSF Career grant. Her work has been widely recognized outside of academia: she has appeared on The Ezra Klein show, NPRs Hidden Brain, Sanjay Guptas CNN Chasing Life, CBS Sunday Morning, Dax Shepards Armchair Expert, among many others. Her work has been featured in the popular media, e.g. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Atlantic, BBC, and others. She has been invited to present her work at SXSW and the Aspen Ideas Festival. Her recent book is Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, named by The Globe and Mail as the #1 Best Business and Management book of 2023, and chosen as the Season 20 selection of the Next Big Idea Book Club. What we covered in the interview: The power of meta awareness - how to gain the upper hand over the constant pull of smartphones and social media. Curbing thesis-related anxiety - cutting through the pressure with strategic decision-making tips. Halt the multitasking madness – how "monotasking" can turbocharge your productivity and lower your stress. Recharging in nature's embrace - Gloria's recommendation for a 20-minute nature break as a key to unlocking greater creativity. This episode's resources: Gloria Mark | Website Gloria Mark | Twitter / X The Future of Attention | Substack Thank you, Gloria Mark! If you enjoyed this conversation with Gloria, let her know by clicking the link below and leaving her a message on Linkedin: Send Gloria Mark a thank you message on Linkedin! Click here to share your key take-away from this interview with David! Leave a review on Podchaser ! Support the show ! You might also like the following episodes: Jessica Schleider –Dealing With Mental Unrest in Graduate School Sheena Howard – How to Leverage Academic Branding Amal Abuzeinab – Flourishing in Your PhD and Beyond Melissa Gismondi – The Power of Graduate InternshipsAs always, if you find value in Papa PhD and in the content I bring you every week, click on one of the buttons below and send some of that value back to me by becoming a supporter on Patreon or by buying me a coffee :) Support the show on Patreon ! Or buy me a coffee :)
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit rethinkingwellness.substack.comIn this bonus episode, psychologist and ATTENTION SPAN author Gloria Mark returns to discuss what to do when stress leads to difficulty focusing, how to reclaim your attention from your inbox, how to help kids cultivate attentional well-being, and more.Gloria Mark is Chancellor's Professor Emerita at the University of California, Irvine, and also spent ten years as a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research. She received her PhD from Columbia University in psychology. For over two decades she has researched the impact of digital media on people's lives, studying how using our devices affect our multitasking, distractions, mood and behavior. She has published over 200 papers in the top journals and conferences in the field of human-computer interaction, has received numerous paper awards, and was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2017 in recognition for her contribution to the field. She has also been a Fulbright scholar and has received the prestigious NSF Career grant. Her work has been widely recognized outside of academia: she has appeared on The Ezra Klein show, NPR's Hidden Brain, Sanjay Gupta's CNN Chasing Life, CBS Sunday Morning, Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert, among many others. Her work has been featured in the popular media, e.g. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Atlantic, BBC, and others. She has been invited to present her work at SXSW and the Aspen Ideas Festival. Her recent book is Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, named by The Globe and Mail as the #1 Best Business and Management book of 2023, and chosen as the Season 20 selection of the Next Big Idea Book Club. Find her at gloriamark.com and on Substack.This episode is for paid subscribers. Listen to a free preview here, and sign up for a paid subscription to hear the full episode!Get Christy's book The Wellness Trap now for a deeper dive into the topics we cover on the pod, and strategies to support true well-being.If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course.
Psychologist and ATTENTION SPAN author Gloria Mark joins us to discuss the connection between attention and well-being, the technologies manipulating our attention (and why social-media algorithms are just the tip of the iceberg), why modern life isn't “causing” ADHD, the individual and societal changes needed to improve attentional well-being, how to discover your own personal rhythm of attention, and more. Gloria Mark is Chancellor's Professor Emerita at the University of California, Irvine, and also spent ten years as a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research. She received her PhD from Columbia University in psychology. For over two decades she has researched the impact of digital media on people's lives, studying how using our devices affect our multitasking, distractions, mood and behavior. She has published over 200 papers in the top journals and conferences in the field of human-computer interaction, has received numerous paper awards, and was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2017 in recognition for her contribution to the field. She has also been a Fulbright scholar and has received the prestigious NSF Career grant. Her work has been widely recognized outside of academia: she has appeared on The Ezra Klein show, NPR's Hidden Brain, Sanjay Gupta's CNN Chasing Life, CBS Sunday Morning, Dax Shepard's Armchair Expert, among many others. Her work has been featured in the popular media, e.g. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Atlantic, BBC, and others. She has been invited to present her work at SXSW and the Aspen Ideas Festival. Her recent book is Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, named by The Globe and Mail as the #1 Best Business and Management book of 2023, and chosen as the Season 20 selection of the Next Big Idea Book Club. Find her at gloriamark.com and on Substack.If you like this conversation, subscribe to hear lots more like it! Support the podcast by becoming a paid subscriber, and unlock great perks like bonus episodes with our guests, subscriber-only Q&As, full access to our archives, commenting privileges and subscriber threads where you can connect with other listeners, and more. Learn more and sign up at rethinkingwellness.substack.com.Christy's second book, The Wellness Trap, is available wherever books are sold! Order it online or ask for it in your favorite local bookstore. If you're looking to make peace with food and break free from diet and wellness culture, come check out Christy's Intuitive Eating Fundamentals online course. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rethinkingwellness.substack.com/subscribe
Claire chatted to Kris Dorsey from Northeastern University all about wearable soft robots, healthcare and rehabilitation. Kris Dorsey is an associate professor in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physical Therapy, Movement, and Rehabilitation Sciences and a core faculty member at the Institute for Experiential Robotics at Northeastern University. Her current research interests include reconfigurable, novel morphology, and active soft sensors and the design of soft sensors for soft robot actuators and wearable medical and rehabilitation devices. Kris' work has been recognized by an NSF CAREER award and the Emerging Leader ABIE Award in honor of Denice Denton. Win a Robot Talk T-shirt For a chance to win your very own organic cotton Robot Talk t-shirt, all you have to do is share your favourite episode on social media and tag us @RobotTalkPod. One lucky winner will be randomly selected each month. Find out more: https://www.robottalk.org/t-shirt-competition/.
Dr. Gabriel Loh is a Senior Fellow at AMD Research and Advanced Development. Gabe is known for his contributions to 3D die-stacked architectures, memory organization and caching techniques, and chiplet multicore architectures. His ideas have influenced multiple commercial products and industry standards. He is a recipient of ACM SIGARCH's Maurice Wilkes Award, is a Hall of Fame member for MICRO, HPCA, ISCA, and a recipient of the NSF CAREER award.
In Episode 74, Patrick and Ciprian speak with returning guest Dr. Fred Chong and first time guest, Dr. Teague Tomesh of Infleqtion.The is a very exciting discussion about an awarded project from Wellcome Leap to explore hybrid quantum algorithms to find cancer biomarkers in multi-modal data. The team also discusses solving real problems within the Quantum timeline, and matching hardware to applications.Fred Chong is the Seymour Goodman Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago and the Chief Scientist for Quantum Software at Infleqtion. He is also Lead Principal Investigator for the EPiQC Project (Enabling Practical-scale Quantum Computing), an NSF Expedition in Computing. Chong is a member of the National Quantum Advisory Committee (NQIAC) which provides advice to the President on the National Quantum Initiative Program. In 2020, he co-founded Super.tech, a quantum software company, which was acquired by Infleqtion (formerly ColdQuanta) in 2022. Chong received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1996 and was a faculty member and Chancellor's fellow at UC Davis from 1997-2005. He was also a Professor of Computer Science, Director of Computer Engineering, and Director of the Greenscale Center for Energy-Efficient Computing at UCSB from 2005-2015. He is a fellow of the IEEE and a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, and 15 best paper awards.Teague Tomesh is a Quantum Software Engineer at Infleqtion working on the co-design of quantum algorithms and hardware. The goal of this work is to minimize the time to practical quantum computing by developing and compiling applications which are tailored to the details and properties of the quantum hardware. Tomesh received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 2023 and is a recipient of the Siebel Scholars award as well as four best paper awards.
Changhyun Kwon is an Associate Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at KAIST. His research aims to advance computational optimization methods for efficient transportation and logistics systems. His current focus is to improve the efficiency of heuristic and exact algorithms using machine-learning approaches to solve large-scale vehicle routing problems and mobility service operations problems. He received a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering in 2008 from Penn State and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from KAIST in 2000. His research has been published in Operations Research, Transportation Science, Transportation Research Part B, INFORMS Journal on Computing, etc. Before joining KAIST, he was a faculty member at the University at Buffalo and the University of South Florida. Currently, he is on the Editorial Boards of Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, and the Transportation Network Modeling Committee of TRB. He was the Chair of the Urban Transportation SIG of the INFORMS TSL Society and is the current International Liaison for Asia/Oceania. He wrote the book "Julia Programming for Operations Research," and he is a member of the JuMP steering committee, an open-source community for developing mathematical optimization tools in Julia. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2014, and his research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the National Research Foundation of Korea.
Rebecca McLaughlin is joined by Max Riesenhuber to have a conversation about the ethics and morality of artificial intelligence.Questions Covered in This Episode:What first interested you about neuroscience?Can you talk about recent advancement in AI and where we might go?Do we have a moral responsibility to artificial intelligence beings?What do you say to scientists who say that humans are just computers in a flesh case?What is moral truth?Do you think we need to be concerned about the ethical direction that AI's are taking us?What is the good side of artificial intelligence?How did you become a Christian?Guest Bio:Max Riesenhuber is a Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Georgetown University Medical Center and Co-Director of the CNE. His research uses computational modeling, brain imaging and EEG to understand how the brain makes sense of the world, and how these insights can be translated to neuromorphic AI and augmented cognition applications. Max obtained his Master's degree in physics from the University of Frankfurt, Germany, and his PhD in computational neuroscience from MIT. He has received several awards, including Technology Review's “TR100”, one of the “100 innovators 35 or younger whose technologies are poised to make a dramatic impact on our world” and an NSF CAREER award.Resources Mentioned:“Klara and the Sun” by Kazuo Ishiguro“The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” by Mark A. NollSponsors:To learn more about our sponsors please visit our website.Follow Us:Instagram | TwitterOur Sister Shows:Knowing Faith | The Family Discipleship Podcast | Starting Place | Tiny TheologiansConfronting Christianity is a podcast of Training the Church. For ad-free episodes and more content check out our Patreon.
How is computer vision being used to spot autism symptoms much earlier in children? What is augmented cognition? And how can you use AI to make data models work even with small data sets? We will learn those answers and more in this episode with Dr. Sarah Ostadabbas. Dr. Ostadabbas is an associate professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University, where she is also the director of the Augmented Cognition Laboratory (ACLab), which works at the intersection of computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning. Before joining Northeastern, she was a post-doctoral researcher at Georgia Tech and earned her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Dallas. A renowned expert in the field, her research focuses on the goal of enhancing human information-processing capabilities through the design of adaptive interfaces based on rigorous models using machine learning and computer vision algorithms. With over 100 peer-reviewed publications, Professor Ostadabbas has received recognition and awards from prestigious government agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Defense (DoD) as well as several private industries. In 2022, she received an NSF CAREER award to use artificial intelligence for the early detection of autism, which she is working on with Oracle for Research. http://www.oracle.com/research --------------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00;00;00;00 - 00;00;26;15 How are computer vision and contactless techniques spotting signs of autism much earlier in children? What is augmented cognition and how can you use AI to make data models work, even with small datasets? We'll find all that out and more in this episode of Research in Action. Hello and welcome back to Research in Action, brought to you by Oracle for Research. 00;00;26;15 - 00;00;50;10 I'm Mike Stiles, and today we have with us Dr. Sarah Ostadabbas, an Associate Professor in the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department Northeastern University, where she's also director of the Augmented Cognition Laboratory (ACLab), which works at the intersection of computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning. Before joining Northeastern, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech and got her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Dallas. 00;00;50;13 - 00;01;24;04 Her research looks at how we can enhance human information processing capabilities by designing adaptive interfaces based on rigorous models using machine learning and computer vision algorithms. With over 100 peer reviewed publications. Professor Ostadabbas has received recognition and awards from government agencies like the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense and several private industries. In 2022, she received an NSF career award to use AI for early detection of autism, and she's working on that with Oracle for Research. 00;01;24;04 - 00;01;43;26 Dr. Ostadabbas, thank you so much for being with us today. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here and feel free to call me Sarah. Well, listeners, get ready because we're going to get all into computer vision, machine learning, augmented cognition and wherever else I can get nosy about. But first, let's hear about you, Sarah, and your background. 00;01;43;26 - 00;02;12;08 Your passion for technology and physics kind of started back in childhood, right? Yes, that's correct. Actually, physics was my favorite subject in middle school and high school. I was so passionate about it that I even went through the whole volume of Fundamentals of Physics by David Halliday and Robert Resnick in I believe it was in 10th year of my high school, and I was seriously considering to pursue the continuous PhD in physics even before graduating from high school. 00;02;12;10 - 00;02;39;09 And alongside my love for physics, I was always also fascinated by technology, especially computers and programing. I started coding in a language called Basic, which some of your audience may not even heard about that. Why I was in middle school and loved it. Data Analytics capabilities of computer and how computers are giving advanced processing power to human no matter where they are. 00;02;39;11 - 00;03;12;14 I was still living in Iran at the time and experiencing technological advances at that time, such as Internet and cell phone, and they were all very much interesting. And fast forward, all of this led me to pursue a natural combination of my interests, which was an electrical and computer engineering degree with a double majoring in biomedical engineering. And now when I look back, it's actually heartwarming to see one that one seemed to be diverse. 00;03;12;14 - 00;03;41;17 Interesting collection of interests now have shaped my academic journey so far. Was it unusual for someone, you know, at your age, at that early age of middle school, to be coding and thinking about technology and physics and looking that far into the future? I was actually going to date if school, middle school and high school at that time was designed for for math and science. 00;03;41;17 - 00;04;06;00 So no, I had a lot of of my classmates going and exploring different science topics. So it wasn't unusual. I mean, it was unusual when I was taking these heavy books to my gathering at parties, at my family, but not at the school. So I'm glad. And it was 200 of us, 200 girls at and now all of us are all around the world. 00;04;06;06 - 00;04;28;02 Most of us have PhDs. And yeah, it wasn't unusual, but it, it was something that I cherish. Yeah, it's great that you had a school that focused on things like that. So let's kick things off with your NSF CAREER Award focused on developing machine learning algorithms towards the early detection of autism. Tell me if I get this wrong. 00;04;28;02 - 00;04;53;08 But this is about using computer vision to predict autism a lot earlier in children. And what does what does that research involve and what does Oracle for Research have to do with it? You're certainly right. As I mentioned, my academic background revolves around electrical and computer engineering, focusing on data processing. And these data sources can be signals, images and videos. 00;04;53;11 - 00;05;21;06 How might a specific focus a work on computer vision began when I joined Northeastern University as an assistant professor in 2016. As you may know and have heard of over the past decade, deep learning models have been driving advancements in many AI topics, including computer vision. But these algorithms often require a large amount of training data. They are very data hungry. 00;05;21;08 - 00;05;48;24 So my National Science Foundation CAREER Award aims to leverage this advancement in computer vision for a specific health related domain that suffera from limited data. And I'm in particularly focusing on detecting autism in infant even before the first birthday. And this is true processing videos that is collected from them when they are doing daily activities, which is not a lot of things that they do. 00;05;49;01 - 00;06;16;13 They are sleeping, playing or eating. And as I mentioned, my algorithm, they are designed to be data deficient because I'm working on the area that the there are not a lot of data due to this privacy and security reason, but adapting these complex networks, these complex neural networks which are which are building blocks of deep learning necessitates powerful computing resources. 00;06;16;20 - 00;06;44;25 And that's where our collaboration with Oracle become highly valuable, allows me to make this model adapted to this specific application. So you have videos, video cameras, monitoring the kids and kind of like an in the wild get capturing of data. And then the computing power is needed to crunch all that video and that pulls out certain patterns that reveal autism earlier. 00;06;44;25 - 00;07;07;14 Is that how it works? Yeah. I mean, you can say that you put that on the simpler words. Yes, exactly. I'm a simple man. No, no, no. I'm just it's a good I mean, it's a good, good way to describe that. Yes, that's correct. So what we do, we actually leverage these computer vision techniques and contactless video processing algorithm to predict autism, as I mentioned, from daily activities. 00;07;07;19 - 00;07;35;17 And these are daily activities captured by commercial video recording messages. Imagine like a baby monitor or even parent's cell phone cameras. Every parent's love to record videos from the day of their child. So they focus on this specific developmental sign. How will that that relates to motor function, which means that relates to infants posture, muscle tone, body symmetry, and they balance and range of movement. 00;07;35;18 - 00;08;04;05 So these are specific markers that actually has been shown to be early visible warning signs of more developmental disorders such as autism. And they appear actually interestingly, long before the core feature of autism that you may have heard of and these are actually very known, such as social or communication difficulties as well as repetitive behavior. So we are focusing on these early signs. 00;08;04;08 - 00;08;29;11 However, currently the standard approach to monitor this motor function is through visits to child doctor, pediatrician and how is it, unfortunately, over half of these visits are missed. You could imagine often due to the lack of transportation, for parents, it's hard to take time off from work and also lack of child care for other other kids set at home. 00;08;29;13 - 00;09;12;29 So half of these visits are missed and a lot of this early sign has been overlooked. So to address this in equitable access to actually to clinical assessment and a lot of practical constraints, we are trying to to make a home based a I guided in monitoring tools that can track early motor function development very unobtrusively, like just a video that is watching like a baby monitor is rolling and then be the process this video on the back end and track this specific developmental sign and hopefully be we help for the early detection of autism. 00;09;13;02 - 00;09;40;15 I want to also point the fact that it's actually important, very important and crucial to have timely detection in the autism case, because early intervention, it's actually shown that is most effective before the age of four. Yet the average age of autism diagnosis is still around four and a half. So we are hoping to make a clear detection tools better intervention outcome. 00;09;40;18 - 00;10;00;06 It's really interesting to me that body symmetry is a hallmark of development. I guess my question is why would that be and how is Body Cemetery being addressed in your research? That's a very good question. So we are as I mentioned, a motor development is very important. If early signs offer any visible sign of something that may not working out right. 00;10;00;09 - 00;10;32;14 So one interesting aspects of motor function that has been identified as an indicator of neurodevelopmental health is body symmetry. You can imagine that symmetrical movements and posture are crucial for supporting independent movements such as sitting, crawling and walking, especially infant. Then an infant is typically developing movement posture. Actually, you start asymmetric and then gradually they become more symmetrical as our sensorimotor coordination develops. 00;10;32;16 - 00;11;05;06 And during the first year of life, infants could go through the various milestones, such as days rolling over, sitting up, standing so little by little watching, and all of these movement progressed from less symmetric to more symmetric movement and then also study, they have been looking at the infant movement. They have a map showing that the position is symmetry in their movement can be indication of disorders like autism. 00;11;05;09 - 00;11;28;09 However, if we want to have motor functional function assessment in infant, especially body symmetry in larger scale for a long period of time, our for health care provider is going to be very expensive. I mean, somehow impossible and very challenging because imagine if you have 10 hours of videos, how long does it take for you to watch that? 00;11;28;09 - 00;11;54;10 10 hours. I mean, it's going to take 10 hours. But what we want to do, we want to have these computer vision tools apply on these videos to automatically evaluate them all to a function and is start having something in home that people can use and start escorting to one of the mutual developmental indicators, escorting them the symmetry. 00;11;54;12 - 00;12;23;06 So the idea is that we are actually using infant pose estimation algorithms that we have already developed in the lab to assess postural asymmetry based on differences in joint angle between opposing the arms, between the left side and right side. So the effect the the difference is more than 45 degrees, which has been suggested by Esposito in this study in 2009, in the we can call it asymmetric. 00;12;23;12 - 00;12;50;15 We have also come up with our own measure, which is a data learned based assessment on using Bayesian assets to collect aggregation that we could actually come up with two different angles. But how that these are all allows us to do to process the beat you automatically. And then the video is called the whole movement of the infants based based on all of this processing symmetric or asymmetry. 00;12;50;15 - 00;13;12;01 And then physicians can look at that and see that it is something alarming or not. And then as the process of the science and research goes on, well, I've talked to enough researchers to know that recruiting is usually a challenge for any experiment. But with this, the target population is children like babies. How did you manage to get your patient population? 00;13;12;01 - 00;13;39;15 Were there any privacy, access or ethical concerns? It's a very good question and also absolutely an important matter. When recruiting for our experiment, we noticed that the challenge of targeting infants subject under the age of one, parents are already overworked, sleep deprived, and imagine asking them to to be part of yet another task. So it's very hard, however, to be able to overcome this this problem. 00;13;39;18 - 00;14;16;20 We leverage the fact that many parents already are using baby monitoring systems, so they just want to wash them. I mean, a lot of these baby monitors, even the one that they call smart, they don't do anything. It's just a trigger. If the mat the baby's crying or they are moving. So we are aiming to develop this normal system that not only allow the parents to observe the child, but also offers this long term monitoring capability to track the child's developmental process and provides alert if some abnormalities are detected. 00;14;16;26 - 00;14;38;14 So this may be a good incentive for for parents to take part in our study. And as one of the points that you mention about the privacy and ethical concern, we have taken several measures to make sure to address these concerns. We are collaborating with health care professional that they are more familiar with to dealing with the human subject. 00;14;38;17 - 00;15;15;14 And also we are working closely with a Northeastern Institutional Review board known as IAB to make sure our data collection protocol has strict security and privacy standard. We make sure that the parents that they are participating in our study are fully informed about the purpose of the research. And also we get they consent to to use some some part of these data for public use and public release for scientific and technological advancement, because a lot of them these days, how to win is shared in other a study can be built on top of that. 00;15;15;14 - 00;15;37;19 So but we make sure that parents are that the parents that they are part of this study, they are they are aware, fully aware of that. And I want to emphasize that our priority is to preserve the privacy and confidentiality of them, the participant to out the whole process, although they are looking and working on very important and impactful research. 00;15;37;19 - 00;16;05;12 QUESTION But this is also very important at the top of our list. Yes, security and privacy data for data that is important. Is that why a tech concern like Oracle Cloud that obsesses over things like privacy and security kind of speeds up the research? That's very good. Good point that you brought up. That's true. As I mentioned, security and privacy of the data, especially in our field based on the sensitive nature of data that we are collecting, is important. 00;16;05;16 - 00;16;50;21 We are working with them with personal health related information. So we required some sort of robust measure to to protect confidentiality and prevent unauthorized access. And working alongside part industry partners like Oracle ensures that we are actually having a huge safeguard on our sensitive information. The team that I am working with, Oracle has this huge expertise in data management and security practices, and this allows us to then when we are storing, processing and analyzing data in a in a protected environment, we can focus on our research objective while having a partner that gives us confidence in the security and privacy of the data that they are handling. 00;16;50;21 - 00;17;22;04 So it's a very useful and necessary collaboration. So your lab Augmented Cognition Laboratory or the A.C. Lab works with Computer Vision and machine learning. How did that lab come to be and what exactly is augmented cognition? This is actually brings back many fond memories for me, I think. Tell you the story behind the name, Why I was interested in physics, computers, math, and even literature. 00;17;22;04 - 00;17;53;11 I mean, this is specific. Interest by itself can be another podcast session, but not now. I always had a vision of becoming a university professor and leading my own research lab. I remember clearly that I wasn't seen earlier for my Ph.D. when I started to look at look for names for my future lab to reflect the into intersection of engineering inspired artificial intelligence because I was farming, doing school and data analytics. 00;17;53;18 - 00;18;28;25 But also I wanted to emphasize the positive impact of A.I. in human life rather than replacing them. So I came up with the name Augmented Cognition. Augmented Cognition. I actually represent the core idea that I have about enhancing human information processing capability through the design of adaptive interfaces guided by A.I. algorithm, especially machine learning and computer vision. This is specific definition is actually opening of my my web page when I started at my my position at Northeastern University. 00;18;28;28 - 00;18;59;00 This also highlights my focus on utilizing these advanced tools to augment human ability, especially in the data processing domain. Imagine what I'm doing here as part of my NSF CAREER and what I want to to give physician parents the power of processing hours and hours of data and then let them to extract the information that is needed to to make sure to make the informed decisions. 00;18;59;02 - 00;19;23;13 I often have this phrase that at the ACLab we use artificial intelligence or AI to do human intelligence amplification or IEEE. So I do more Iot and A.I.. Your work relies a lot on machine learning and computer vision as tools to generate truly augmented intelligence solutions. How do you leverage the recent advancement of AI in your work? 00;19;23;13 - 00;20;02;06 Because you've probably been watching it for years, but for most of the public, this A.I. thing came on like a tidal wave. So how does that get applied to computer vision? That's true. I mean, I it's the main wave, and I believe in my my opinion that the main a wave and also success is started from with the introduction of deep learning in 2012 2015 and the actually expand the recent advancement in AI to tackle challenges in understanding and predicting human behaviors from vision sources. 00;20;02;06 - 00;20;43;22 As I said, images or videos, I am focused my my work focus on representation learning in visual perception problems such as object detection, tracking and action recognition and using all of these these tools, we want to estimate the physical, physiological or even emotional states of the individual under study. So to be able to do a robust estimation, the algorithms that we are developing at the Sea Lab utilizes this concept called Pose, which is a low dimensional embedding that captures the essential information in the state of the human that we are monitoring. 00;20;43;28 - 00;21;10;14 For example, body pose, facial pose. You could imagine that you could from that to you can get body symmetry, you can get the emotional feeling of the the human. So help me that I want to emphasize the fact that many of these human data focus application that I work on belong to this small data domain. But the data collection and labeling are limited or restricted, such as healthcare application or even military application. 00;21;10;21 - 00;21;42;26 So to address the data limitation, my algorithm also integrate explicit domain knowledge into the learning process through the use of a generative AI model. We actually built our genitive AI model that this model, they are all data efficient machine learning while incorporating valuable insight from domain experts. So this allows us to to use less data. But on the other hand, we have all of these backing from from the experts that allows us to to make our model work. 00;21;43;04 - 00;22;18;24 This means collaborating with professionals from various fields such as physicians, psychologists, even physicians and neuroscientists are very much important and ensures the practical relevance of many of the models that we are developing in the lab. I definitely see use cases for improving health care and data analysis and augmentation. But for the clinical space, are you a let's go for it person when it comes to AI or more of a cautious person and there is a responsible way to apply, I think that your question comes from all of these debates happening. 00;22;18;24 - 00;22;43;25 Is AI for good or for bad? I mean, what we do, to be honest as a researcher working at the intersection of AI and health, I have been trying to keep a balanced perspective on this overall impact of AI. I am an optimistic optimist when it comes to the potential benefit of AI for health care, particularly for the data analysis and intelligence augmentation. 00;22;43;25 - 00;23;05;06 As the name of my lab, we then come back. I believe that A.I. has the potential to change the healthcare and improve diagnosis, personalized treatment, enhancing patient care, and expanding access to care, as I mentioned. I mean, you can actually make an air power system at your home and get the monitoring and the diagnosis that that you need. 00;23;05;08 - 00;23;35;10 And it can help clinician to make more accurate and timely decision leading to better outcomes for patient health. There is not that I'm just only say is the best and now we don't need to to think about other aspects. I also approach the use of AI in the clinical space, especially with caution. We have to be concerned and to address this concern related to privacy, security and ethical use. 00;23;35;12 - 00;24;02;29 We have to be transparent and accountable and ensure that a AI system are fair, unbiased and trustworthy. These are useful for on on human subject. So proper validation and rigorous testing are necessary to make sure these models are reliable and robust. Also, it's very essential to involve health care professionals, patient and other a stakeholder in the development process. 00;24;03;05 - 00;24;29;20 It cannot be inside AI sitting the lab and come up with something as okay, this is perfect. Let's so let's put that in every baby monitor around the world. We have to make sure the system is safe. A specific needs in inside the health care domain. So in one sentence, I believe that with responsible development and implementation, AI has the potential to significantly improve improved health care outcome. 00;24;29;22 - 00;24;59;11 And I'm hoping this balance will that of you, especially in the clinical setting, allows us to to work more to make better and stronger and more robust AI model while addressing the concern and challenges that comes with its use in the clinical space. Well, I know based on what you said, and because I cheated and researched you before you came on the show, that you you believe that AI, as long as it's good, should be able to augment our capabilities. 00;24;59;11 - 00;25;24;04 And again, you're saying not replace human capability, but augment capabilities. So as you mentioned, the average age of detection for autism is about four and a half years olds. How much and you mentioned about one year old, that's how much sooner than that you think the research could detect autism. And if you do detect it that much earlier, then what Can we actually improve developmental growth? 00;25;24;06 - 00;25;54;17 So before I proceed, I want to make it clear that I don't have any formal academic training in the health care domain. Power through my extensive collaboration and engagement, I have come to understanding the significance of the early detection in neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism, and also how timely intervention can improve the developmental outcome. So as you mention and that's right, the current average age of autism detection is around four and a half years. 00;25;54;20 - 00;26;27;02 But through our research, we want to aim to significantly reduces this age and we are hoping to make it on the age of one because we are able to detect this specific neurodevelopmental model signs unobtrusively, automatically and long term using our computer vision algorithm. And let's remember that the fact that the brain exhibits its highest level of neural plasticity during the first year of life. 00;26;27;04 - 00;27;14;09 So intervening during this sensitive window can have profound impact on long term. So the sooner that we can catch some of these not neurodevelopmental disorder, then the rehabilitation can start. And also intervention can be much more accurate. Also detecting a system that can track and quantify infant development aside from autism can can be used to detect and test other hypotheses related to a motor function hypothesis that based on my collaboration with other health care professionals related to this, a liberal policy congenital tool to coalesce list out that all of this stuff that has some motor representations, but they are not catch early. 00;27;14;09 - 00;27;43;09 You know, because infants are at home. Parents are especially new. Babies have a lot of work so they they missed a sign and then the number of visit is very limited if not missed. So by advancing the age of detection and enabling early intervention, I am not only hoping to have the individual outcome, but also the whole idea is studying other and testing other hypotheses in their developmental science. 00;27;43;09 - 00;28;12;17 So hopefully that would be a tool that empower researcher, physician parents in the field to study these motor related developmental condition much earlier and less expensive and much more on up to the CV. Well, research does need data for exploration and reproducibility, but a lack of data sharing in the research community is kind of a hot topic. There are several people that just doesn't want our collective knowledge to collect. 00;28;12;20 - 00;28;48;13 So why is data sharing vital to advancing science and getting to new discoveries and treatments? For sure, I'm not among those group that they don't share. I think I believe the data sharing plays a very important role in advancing scientific research. So essential for reproducibility, transparency and collaboration. So by sharing data research, it can not only validate what you have done, reproduce that, but also they can build upon your finding and start building new and new discoveries. 00;28;48;15 - 00;29;14;03 So rather than everybody start from scratch. So sitting on your data and not sharing that, it's I don't see that is a scientific manner. This is very fundamental. We do, we do actually share the data on both the data and code in our lab, in the computer science and engineering field is is known that people share data. They could, but in the medical domain, this data is very protected. 00;29;14;06 - 00;29;44;06 And it's I understand all of their privacy consent. But in our data collection procedure, we make sure that we inform at the participant about the value of data sharing. So we get they consent to share these data is pieces of the video that they are collecting. And then I am hoping that collectively we can add best knowledge, at least address complex challenges related to data specific types of a question that we are addressing. 00;29;44;06 - 00;30;16;28 And ultimately we want to improve human health and well-being well-being and enhance the quality of life for everybody. Do you think some of that reluctance has to do with concerns about intellectual property and researchers thinking about, you know, the marketability of what they're doing? Absolutely. Absolutely. That's the case. But I have a counter argument for that. So this is not 2000 years ago that we we come up with an idea and write it down and then buried so nobody can find it after after us. 00;30;17;00 - 00;30;40;22 So I think by sharing with the acknowledgment of that there the research and who came up with that is important. But if we keep this strain of sharing thoughts, sharing ideas, sharing data, which data nowadays holds a lot of intelligence insight inside that, then we can actually build and everybody get into the training of the is Discovery new discovery. 00;30;40;29 - 00;31;13;07 So if we want to keep that it's possible and then in industry because now the line between industry and academy is not as the strict as before because there are a lot of collaboration happen which we're very much I admire. But yeah, we have to to make sure to acknowledge both sides, industry and academics, to acknowledge their contribution, but then share the data and see and be happy on the growth, be happy about advancing the knowledge and the complex problem cannot be solved if we just keep it to ourselves. 00;31;13;09 - 00;31;41;09 Well, our audience of researchers is pretty bright. So is there anything else you'd kind of like them to know or for them to think about that we haven't touched on yet? Just something that you wish people paid a little bit more attention to. Oh, thanks for asking. Yes, I think that this in this podcast you talk about my research related to the use of AI in computer vision for for autism. 00;31;41;11 - 00;32;07;08 A study, as I said, that I don't have any any health care background. However, in my my lab doesn't only work on the autism patients, we are actually interested in developing computer vision and machine learning solution for a wide range of application dealing with the small data problem. The data, it's the the bread and butter of us because the intelligence, especially in the era of deep learning, it's all hidden in the data. 00;32;07;10 - 00;32;34;07 So I work on the rehabilitation, animal monitoring, even autonomous driving scenarios that is hard to collect. Data is expensive, is dangerous to collect data or is impossible. Sometimes, for example, it's very hard to to collect data from animal in this specific pose or conditions. So that's one thing that's enabling these advancements, especially advancement in computation and machine learning in this small little domain is important. 00;32;34;09 - 00;33;05;00 So rather than to do not be afraid or shy, if you think that, okay, this specific application needs a lot of detail, we don't have that. So let's not use let's abandon all of these advancement that we have because we don't have a lot of data. No, it's possible. And in our lab we are working on that to enable these advancement in the domain that rather than having millions and millions of sample, you have only 100 samples, you have only 20 samples of that in Central and all that. 00;33;05;02 - 00;33;28;04 So in my lab we are looking at the problem time to size. First we want to see that if we can make our machine work with less amount of data as I mentioned earlier, how we can do that, we should actually make research a space for the parameters of the model, make it more constrained by bringing some outside domain knowledge inside the model. 00;33;28;07 - 00;33;47;08 So rather than be say that, look, I don't want to hear anybody else's idea. I just want to look at the data and see what's happening. We only take them. They are data driven models. We are putting in some understanding of about the physics, about this specific phenomenal behind that, about the specific types of movement that we are looking for into the model. 00;33;47;13 - 00;34;15;21 So to make the model work with a less amount of data. On the other hand, we we were thinking about this in digital expanded this data is called synthetic data generation. So we are looking at a lot of simulators, even game engines, to see that if we can use them and make an avatar of infant, for example, fall from the bit better than looking at videos or waiting for infant fall of the bit, we actually see that picture can be simulated. 00;34;15;21 - 00;34;35;10 These data can be simulated driving in a very low trouble stability environment rather than asking actually a driver to go to do that. So these are also use of their simulators and synthetic data generation. So we expand the data as much as we can in the synthetic domain. And also we make our model to work with less amount of data. 00;34;35;16 - 00;34;55;27 So hopefully in future we are not abandoning this specific application and the use of AI in there because we don't have data. And if our audience does want to learn more about you or your research or the lab, is there any way they can do that or get in touch with you? Yes. My email, I'm actually very fast and responding to email. 00;34;56;00 - 00;35;41;19 You can find my email at my web page. And also you can find me a LinkedIn, send me a message there we we share our news in different platform but yeah the best way contacting me send me an email we do have them also even high schooler at our school right now that I'm talking with you Mike I have three high schooler they are collecting data from an avatar in fact in completely virtual world and they are just we are we want to use that to train our model to detect how intense to reach and grasp. 00;35;41;21 - 00;38;06;24 Gosh, that's great. So, Sarah, thank you so much for being on the show with us today. And to help people find you, I'm just going to spell your last name for them. It's Ostadabbas. So that's the way you can look up Sarah. And if you are interested in how Oracle can simplify and accelerate your research, check out Oracle dot com slash research and join us next time on Research in Action.
Bryce Hughes is an associate professor of education at Montana State University. He holds a Ph.D. in education from UCLA, an MA in student development administration from Seattle University, and a BS in general engineering from Gonzaga University. His work highlights the disproportionate rates at which LGBTQ students leave STEM fields. His recent NSF CAREER award focuses on understanding the experiences of LGBTQ students in STEM majors, investigating students' social networks, degree completion rates, and science and engineering identity. His research has garnered recognition from the American Society for Engineering Education and the American Society for Engineering Management.Data suggests that LGBTQIA+ undergraduate students are less likely to continue or finish a STEM major than their counterparts. A 2016 study from Queer in STEM identified that approximately less than 60% of queer scientists are openly out. Diverse perspectives and ideas are needed within STEM fields to ensure new ideas and perspectives can contribute to the next important discovery. More data and research is needed to truly understand the impact of LGBTQIA+ individuals studying STEM undergraduate majors.Learn more about CITI Program: https://about.citiprogram.org/Resources: https://www.stemwomen.com/lgbtq-plus-in-stemhttps://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe0933
David Tse received the BASc degree in systems design engineering from University of Waterloo in 1989, and the MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991 and 1994 respectively. From 1994 to 1995, he was a postdoctoral member of technical staff at A.T. & T. Bell Laboratories. From 1995 to 2014, he was on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently the Thomas Kailath and Guanghan Xu Professor at Stanford University. David Tse was elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2018. He was the recipient of the IEEE Claude E. Shannon Award in 2017 and the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 2019. Previously, he received a NSF CAREER award in 1998, the Erlang Prize from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society in 2000 and a Gilbreth Lectureship from the National Academy of Engineering in 2012. He received multiple best paper awards, including the Information Theory Society Paper Award in 2003, the IEEE Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Awards in 2000, 2013 and 2015, the Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2012 and the IEEE Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Prize in 2013. For his contributions to education, he received the Outstanding Teaching Award from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at U.C. Berkeley in 2008 and the Frederick Emmons Terman Award from the American Society for Engineering Education in 2009. He is a coauthor, with Pramod Viswanath, of the text Fundamentals of Wireless Communication, which has been used in over 60 institutions around the world. He is the inventor of the proportional-fair scheduling algorithm used in all third and fourth-generation cellular systems, serving 2.7 billion subscribers around the world. He is a member of the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research. David Tse'sTwitter: @dntse Babylonchain Website: https://babylonchain.io/ Logan Jastremski's Twitter: @Loganjastremski Frictionless Capital: https://frictionless.fund/
Dr. Andrew Alleyne is the Ralph and Catherine Fisher Professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as the Director of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center on Power Optimization for Electro-Thermal Systems (POETS) headquartered there. He is an engineer who works on control systems, which provide an automated way of making decisions. They take in relevant information and use algorithms to make correct decisions based on the information gathered. Andrew's group designs algorithms that make the best decisions possible with the information available to keep systems stable and performing well. When not doing science, he spends much of his time with his wife and two sons. This translates to a lot of driving back and forth to soccer games, but also going on road trips and having fun together. Andrew grew up in Jamaica and came to the United States when he was in high school. He received his B.S. in Engineering degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University. He went on to study Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley where he was awarded his M.S. in Engineering and Ph.D. degrees. In 1994, Andrew joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he remains today. Andrew has received many awards and honors throughout his career, including an NSF CAREER award, the Xerox Award for Faculty Research, a Fulbright Fellowship, and the SAE International Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award. In addition, Andrew was also named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and he has received their Gustus Larson Award, Charles Stark Draper Award for Innovative Practice, and Henry Paynter Outstanding Investigator Award. Andrew has joined us today to talk about his experiences in life and research.
Future Squared with Steve Glaveski - Helping You Navigate a Brave New World
Gloria Mark is a Chancellor's Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. She's been a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft Research since 2012 and is a recipient of the Google Research Award and the NSF Career award. She's the author of the new book, Attention Span: Finding Focus for a Fulfilling Life, which unpacks how our brains operate in the digital world, why we can't focus, and how we can take back control to find more success in our careers but also more health and wellness in our lives. We unpacked myriad topics, including: The anatomy of attention The forces of distraction Attentional states and how focused attention differs from flow Why our attentional resources diminish over the course of a day Night owls v early birds Task switching The nature of digital agency Managing our attentional rhythms What organizations, leaders, and individuals can do to reclaim attention spans And so much more. Show notes: www.gloriamark.com Attention Span book: https://www.amazon.com/Attention-Span-Finding-Fighting-Distraction/dp/1335449418
Helping engineering instructors become aware of the Hidden Curriculum is an important pedagogical step toward building learning environments that support diversity and belonging. Dr. Idalis Villanueva Alarcón talks to us about practical ways of increasing awareness and recognition of hidden messages in the classroom and help mentor and professionally develop students in engineering.Reference(s) mentioned in this episode:1. I. Villanueva, T. Carothers, M. Di Stefano, & M.T.H. Khan. (2018). “There is never a break”: The hidden curriculum of professionalization for engineering faculty. Education Sciences, 8 (4), 157: doi.org/10.3390/educsci8040157. p.1-21.2. I. Villanueva, M. Di Stefano, L. Gelles, K. Youmans, & A. Hunt. (2020). Development and Assessment of a Vignette Survey Instrument to Identify Responses due to Hidden Curriculum among Engineering Students and Faculty. International Journal of Engineering Education, 36(5), p. 1549–1569.3. R.J. Downey & I. Villanueva Alarcón. (2022). Reading the world of engineering education: An exploration of active and passive hidden curriculum awareness. American Society of Engineering Education, Liberal Education, Engineering & Society Division, St. Paul, Minneapolis, MN, June 26-29, 2022, Paper ID 37254, p. 1-12.4. I.Villanueva Alarcón & C. Elizabeth Sunny & (2022). Engineering students' conceptions of the hidden curriculum in different institution types: A comparative study. American Society of Engineering Education, Minorities in Engineering Division, St. Paul, Minneapolis, MN, June 26-29, 2022, Paper ID 36562, p. 1-17.5. V. Sellers & I. Villanueva. (2021). What strategies do diverse women in engineering use to cope with situational hidden curriculum? Proceedings of the American Society of Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition (virtual), Women in Engineering Division, Long Beach, CA, June 27-30, 2021, Paper ID #32762, p. 1-16.6. L. Gelles, K. Youmans, & I. Villanueva. (2019). Sparking Action: How Emotions Fuel or Inhibit Advocacy around Hidden Curriculum in Engineering, European Society of Engineering Education (SEFI), Budapest, Hungary, September 16-19, 2019, p.1-10.7. I. Villanueva, M. Di Stefano, L. Gelles, & K. Youmans. (2018). Hidden curriculum awareness: a qualitative comparison of engineering faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. World Engineering Education Forum, November 12-16, 2018, Albuquerque, NM. p.1-6.Bio:Dr. Villanueva Alarcón is an Associate Professor of Engineering Education in the University of Florida. In 2019, she received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) award for her NSF CAREER project on hidden curriculum in engineering. She has a B.S. degree is in Chemical Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez and a M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Chemical and Biological Engineering from the University of Colorado-Boulder. Also, she completed her postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institutes of Health in Analytical Cell Biology in Bethesda, Maryland and worked as a lecturer for 2 years before transitioning to a tenure-track in engineering education. Her experiences as a first-generation engineer, Latinx, woman of color, introvert, and mother has shaped the lens and approaches that she uses in her research and practice. She hopes her work will not only challenge normative ways of knowing but also challenge new ways of research scholarship and practice.
Dr. Rumi Chunara is an Associate Professor at New York University, where she is jointly appointed at the School of Global Public Health (in Biostatistics and Epidemiology) and the Tandon School of Engineering (in Computer Science). Her PhD is from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and her BSc is from Caltech. Her research focuses on the design and development of data science and machine learning methods to address challenges related to data and public and population health goals, as well as fairness and ethics in the design and use of data and algorithms embedded in social systems. She is one of the MIT Technology Review Innovators under 35, NSF Career, Facebook Research and Max Planck Sabbatical award winner. In this episode, Rumi talks about the importance of data science and machine learning in the world of public health alongside launching the NYU-Moi Data Science for Social Determinants Training Program initiative which is a collaboration with NYU and Moi university in Kenya. To learn more about the NYU School of Global Public Health, and how our innovative programs are training the next generation of public health leaders, visit publichealth.nyu.edu.
There's rarely an expected path in science. This week's episode, produced in partnership with The Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, features two stories from scientists of their cutting-edge research institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who took unexpected journeys to get where they are today. Part 1: After a troubling personal experience with the health care system, Heng Ji decides to try to fix it. Part 2: When Brendan Harley is diagnosed with leukaemia in high school, it changes everything. Heng Ji is a professor at Computer Science Department, and an affiliated faculty member at Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also an Amazon Scholar. She received her B.A. and M. A. in Computational Linguistics from Tsinghua University, and her M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University. Her research interests focus on Natural Language Processing, especially on Multimedia Multilingual Information Extraction, Knowledge Base Population and Knowledge-driven Generation. She was selected as "Young Scientist" and a member of the Global Future Council on the Future of Computing by the World Economic Forum in 2016 and 2017. She was named as part of Women Leaders of Conversational AI (Class of 2023) by Project Voice. The awards she received include "AI's 10 to Watch" Award by IEEE Intelligent Systems in 2013, NSF CAREER award in 2009, PACLIC2012 Best paper runner-up, "Best of ICDM2013" paper award, "Best of SDM2013" paper award, ACL2018 Best Demo paper nomination, ACL2020 Best Demo Paper Award, NAACL2021 Best Demo Paper Award, Google Research Award in 2009 and 2014, IBM Watson Faculty Award in 2012 and 2014 and Bosch Research Award in 2014-2018. She was invited by the Secretary of the U.S. Air Force and AFRL to join Air Force Data Analytics Expert Panel to inform the Air Force Strategy 2030. She is the lead of many multi-institution projects and tasks, including the U.S. ARL projects on information fusion and knowledge networks construction, DARPA DEFT Tinker Bell team and DARPA KAIROS RESIN team. She has coordinated the NIST TAC Knowledge Base Population task since 2010. She was the associate editor for IEEE/ACM Transaction on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, and served as the Program Committee Co-Chair of many conferences including NAACL-HLT2018 and AACL-IJCNLP2022. She is elected as the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) secretary 2020-2023. Her research has been widely supported by the U.S. government agencies (DARPA, ARL, IARPA, NSF, AFRL, DHS) and industry (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Bosch, IBM, Disney). Heng Ji is supported by NSF AI Institute on Molecule Synthesis, and collaborating with Prof. Marty Burke at Chemistry Department at UIUC and Prof. Kyunghyun Cho at New York University and Genetech on using AI for drug discovery. Dr. Brendan Harley is a Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research group develops biomaterial that can be implanted in the body to regenerate musculoskeletal tissues or that can be used outside the body as tissue models to study biological events linked to endometrium, brain cancer, and stem cell behavior. He's a distance runner who dreams of (eventually) running ultramarathons. Follow him @Prof_Harley and www.harleylab.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Assistant professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, Chenhao Tan joins us to share his research on language and persuasion. Chenhao obtained his PhD degree in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University and bachelor's degrees in computer science and in economics from Tsinghua University. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, he was an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and a postdoc at the University of Washington. His research interests include human-centered AI, natural language processing, and computational social science. His work has been covered by many news media outlets, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. He also won an NSF CAREER award, an NSF CRII award, a Google research scholar award, a Salesforce research award, an Amazon research award, a Facebook fellowship, and a Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges award.
Order the Leading Equity Book Today! Kelly J. Cross, Ph.D. Dr. Kelly Cross, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at University of Nevada Reno, is a data-informed, transformational mission-focused culturally responsive practitioner, researcher, and educational leader. She earned her Bachelors of Science in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University in 2007 and Masters of Science in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Cincinnati in 2011. Cross completed her doctoral program in the Engineering Education department at Virginia Tech in 2015 and worked as a post-doctoral researcher with the Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Dr. Cross worked in the Department of Bioengineering working to redesign the curriculum through the NSF funded Revolutionizing Engineering Departments (RED) grant. She is a member of the ASEE Leadership Virtual Community of Practice (LVCP) that organizes and facilitates Safe Zone Training workshops. Dr. Cross has conducted workshops on managing personal bias in STEM, online and in-person, in addition to faculty training on power and privilege. Her research interests include diversity and inclusion in STEM, intersectionality, teamwork and communication skills, assessment, and identity construction. Her teaching philosophy focuses on student centered approaches such as problem-based learning and culturally relevant pedagogy. Dr. Cross' complimentary professional activities promote inclusive excellence through collaboration. She is an NSF CAREER awardee, delivered multiple distinguished lectures, and has received a national mentoring award. Show Highlights DEI support for queer individuals in STEM Engineering Education and the Queer Community Faculty and staff support Connect with Kelly Email Cross, K.J., Farrell, S. & Hughes, B. (Ed.). (2022). Queering STEM Culture in US Higher Education: Navigating Experiences of Exclusion in the Academy, published by Routledge an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. eBook: 978-1-003-16925-3 Cross, K.J., Gaskins, W.B., & Coley, B.C (2022) We Cannot Address What We Do Not Acknowledge: An Autoethnography in 2020. Special Issue titled "All #BlackLivesMatter" by Understanding & Dismantling Privilege (UDP), (ISSN 2152-1875), Volume XII, Issue 1. www.wpcjournal.com. Duckworth, M & Cross, K.J. (2022). Antiracist Holistic Change in “STEM” Higher Education. In Ruth, B.J., Blithe, S. & Bauer, J. Badass Feminist Politics, published by Rutgers University Press. rutgersuniversitypress.org Jensen, K. & Cross, K. (2021). Engineering Stress Culture: Relationships between Mental Health, Engineering Identity, and Sense of Inclusion. Journal of Engineering Education. http://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20391 *Cross, K.J. (2020), Racism is the manifestation of White supremacy and antiracism is the answer. J Eng Educ. doi:10.1002/jee.20362 (Top downloaded JEE article) Additional Resources Book Dr. Eakins Watch The Art of Advocacy Show Learn more about the Advocacy Room Free Course on Implicit Bias 20 Diversity Equity and Inclusion Activities FREE AUDIO COURSE: Race, Advocacy, and Social Justice Studies
She is Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Southern California, and an Associate Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society. Prior to joining USC, she was a lecturer in the Operations Research and Statistics Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a postdoctoral research associate in the Operations Research Center at MIT. She holds a PhD degree in Operations Research and an MEng degree in Electrical & Electronic Engineering, both from Imperial College London. Through her research, she aims to advance integer, stochastic, and robust optimization, and their interface with machine learning, causal inference, and economics to enable the design of predictive and prescriptive models that are robust, interpretable, and fair, being suitable to deploy in high-stakes settings. In particular, she aims to directly apply the methods and tools she creates in her work to make a positive impact on society, especially supporting undeserved and marginalized communities. She is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award and the USC Viterbi Junior Research Award and, jointly with her students, she earned the INFORMS Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Ambassador Program Award. Since 2019, Phebe is serving as a member of the ad hoc INFORMS AI Strategy Advisory Committee. She is an elected member of the Committee on Stochastic Programming, which is the governing body of the Stochastic Programming Society. Phebe is also the VP of Communications for the Section on Public Sector OR at INFORMS. In addition, she is an Associate Editor for Computational Management Science and for Operations Research Letters.
In this episode we talk with Maria Holland, Assistant Professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Notre Dame. We talked about the implications of different properties of the brain and how we can apply biomechanics to study brain growth such as changes in folding and cortical thickness. Thank you to our sponsors! SageMotion: sagemotion.com Support BOOM on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/biomechanicsonourminds Connect with Maria! Lab website: https://commandlab.nd.edu/ Twitter: @mholla_back Biomechanics in the wild: https://sites.nd.edu/biomechanics-in-the-wild/ Connect with BOOM! Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook: @biomechanicsonourminds LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/biomechanicsoom/ YouTube: Biomechanics On Our Minds Website and shop: biomechanicsonourminds.com Resources More info about the NSF Career award: https://beta.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/faculty-early-career-development-program-career Papers on cortical thickness: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hbm.25776 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10237-020-01400-w https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjst/e2020-000001-6
On today's very spooky Friday the 13th episode of the Grant Rant, Managing Grants Consultant Rob Guroff and Senior Grants Consultant Melissa Cornish join us to chat about NSF CAREER! We cover why CAREER is so competitive, when you should apply, how much money you should ask for, and whether or not we should start a parody band! Listen and subscribe!Also, ask us about our new Grants Learning Center, which includes training modules on NSF CAREER!RESOURCES: NSF CAREER Solicitation: https://beta.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/faculty-early-career-development-program-careerNSF CAREER Webinar and FAQs: https://beta.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/faculty-early-career-development-program-career/announcements/career-0
William Yeoh is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and a co-director of the Division of Computational and Data Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests are in optimization, heuristic search, and planning under uncertainty, especially in the context of multi-agent systems. He is an NSF CAREER recipient and was named in IEEE's AI's 10-to-Watch list in 2015. He currently serves on the editorial board of the Artificial Intelligence Journal, on the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Board of Directors, and on the Symposium on Combinatorial Search Council. He has served on the committees of numerous AI-related conferences including AAAI, AAMAS, ICAPS, and IJCAI. He was also a conference co-chair of the 2019 Symposium of Combinatorial Search (SoCS 2019) and is a program co-chair of the 2022 International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2022).
Google is one of the most prominent corporations in history. Since its founding in 1998, it's gone from a scrappy startup in Silicon Valley to the portal through which most people access the internet. How do you even begin to design compute infrastructure that massive? This week on Moore's Lobby, Dave talks with TWO Google Senior VPs of Engineering, Google Fellows Luiz Barroso and Amin Vahdat. In this conversation, you'll hear about the early days of Google, back when their data centers were barely more than broom closets and the team was "unencumbered by expertise" in data center design. You'll hear about the off-the-wall iterations of their early data center ideas (like that time Google put their data centers into shipping containers, which is way more reasonable than it may sound at first). You'll hear about the incredible promise of the applications Google's tackling today—and the costs that come with that world-changing power. On the way, you'll learn more about two electrical engineers who came from very different backgrounds, pursued different specialties in academia, and yet ended up working together on some of the most extraordinary challenges facing compute in the modern era. This episode will illuminate the past and future of Google from the engineering side and how “healthy hubris” leads to "a healthy disregard for the impossible.” Meet Luiz Barroso and Amin Vahdat Luiz Barroso Luiz André Barroso is a Google Fellow leading the office of Cross-Google Engineering (XGE) from where he coordinates key technical initiatives that span multiple Google products. Over his two decades at Google he has worked as a VP of Engineering in the Core and Maps teams, and was a technical leader in areas such as Google Search and the design of Google's computing platform. Luiz has published several technical papers and has co-authored “The Datacenter as a Computer”, the first textbook to describe the architecture of warehouse-scale computing systems, now in its 3rd edition. Luiz is a Fellow of the ACM and the AAAS, and holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica of Rio de Janeiro and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California. Recently he was awarded the 2020 Eckert-Mauchly Award. Amin Vahdat Amin Vahdat is a Google Fellow and Technical Lead for networking at Google. He has contributed to Google's data center, wide area, edge/CDN, and cloud networking infrastructure, with a particular focus on driving vertical integration across large-scale compute, networking, and storage. In the past, he was the SAIC Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego and the Director of UCSD's Center for Networked Systems. Vahdat received his PhD from UC Berkeley in Computer Science, is an ACM Fellow and a past recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Duke University David and Janet Vaughn Teaching Award.
Giáo sư, Tiến sĩ Vũ Ngọc Tâm tốt nghiệp Ðại học Bách khoa Hà Nội và nhận bằng tiến sỹ ngành Khoa học máy tính tại Đại học Rutgers (Mỹ). Năm 2013, Vũ Ngọc Tâm được mời về làm việc tại Đại học Colorado với vai trò là nhà sáng lập và giám đốc phòng thí nghiệm MNS tại trường. Anh từng đạt giải thưởng NSF Career, 2 lần được trao giải thưởng "Google Faculty Research Award" của Google. Sáng lập Earable đã đăng ký 22 bằng phát minh tại cục sở hữu trí tuệ Mỹ và sáng lập 2 công ty là Now Vitals và Earable tại Mỹ. Dự án vừa nhận mức tài trợ tối đa 10 tỷ đồng của VinTech Fund trong đợt tài trợ đầu tiên trị giá 86 tỷ đồng cho 12 dự án nổi bật về khoa học, công nghệ. Lắng nghe những kinh nghiệm khi điều hành hai startup giữa dịch Covid-19 trong podcast số 15.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers immense promise to solve some of the world's biggest problems at scale. But advances come with significant challenges that perpetuate and amplify society's underlying structural inequities. To address this challenge directly, the NYU Center for Responsible AI (R/AI) is designed to be a comprehensive applied research and tool production laboratory for accelerating responsible AI practices that arise from real world collaborations.Julia StoyanovichCo-Founder & Director of R/AIJulia Stoyanovich is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Tandon School of Engineering, and the Center for Data Science at NYU. She is a recipient of an NSF CAREER award and of an NSF/CRA CI Fellowship. Julia's research focuses on responsible data management and analysis practices: on operationalizing fairness, diversity, transparency, and data protection in all stages of the data acquisition and processing lifecycle. She established the Data, Responsibly consortium, and serveds on the New York City Automated Decision Systems Task Force (by appointment by Mayor de Blasio). In addition to data ethics, Julia works on management and analysis of preference data, and on querying large evolving graphs. She holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Columbia University, and a B.S. in Computer Science and in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.Steven KuyanCo-Founder & Director of R/AI Managing Director, at Future LabsSteven Kuyan is the director of entrepreneurship at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, co-founder/managing director of the NYU Tandon Future Labs, and co-founder/director of the NYU Center for Responsible AI. The Future Labs support entrepreneurs in technology-specific fields, such as: artificial intelligence, machine learning, augmented/virtual reality, video and virtual machines and has graduated more than 145 companies – 31 as acquisitions totaling more than $600 million – for a combined portfolio valuation of graduates exceeding $2B billion. The NYU Center for Responsible AI is a first of its kind lab designed to be a comprehensive applied research and tool production laboratory for accelerating responsible AI practices that arise from real world collaborations. Steve also oversees entrepreneurship across the campus, including programs commercializing university IP into companies, which includes dozens of success stories that have raised over $100M in venture funding, university wide curricula development, and IP collaborations amongst NYU schools.Resources from this episode:Center for Responsible AI at NYUData Responsibly, Comics: "Mirror, Mirror"Is AI Effective If It Isn't Equitable and Responsible? from Chronicle of Higher EducationNYU Future Labs See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Dr. Jeremi London (Virginia Tech) discusses her recently awarded NSF CAREER grant, but also some of the challenges she experienced leading up to this success.
Also on Youtube Max Tegmark is a physicist, cosmologist, and artificial intelligence - machine learning researcher. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute. He has been my mentor and friend for a LONG time :-) Professor Tegmark’s research is focused on precision cosmology, e.g., combining theoretical work with new measurements to place sharp constraints on cosmological models and their parameters. Early on, this challenge has lead him to work mainly on cosmology and quantum information. Although he’s continuing his cosmology work with the HERA collaboration, the main focus of his current research is on the physics of intelligence: using physics-based techniques to better understand biological and artificial intelligence (AI). Ultimately, this could culminate in what he calls an "AI Physicist" https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/11/01/1895/an-ai-physicist-can-derive-the-natural-laws-of-imagined-universes/ A native of Stockholm, Tegmark left Sweden in 1990 after receiving his B.Sc. in Physics from the Royal Institute of Technology (& a B.A. in Economics from the Stockholm School of Economics). His first academic venture beyond Scandinavia brought him to California, where he studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley, earning his PhD. in 1994. Tegmark is an author on more than 200 technical papers, and has been featured in dozens of science documentaries. He has received numerous awards for his research, including a Packard Fellowship (2001-06), Cottrell Scholar Award, an NSF Career grant. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. His work with the SDSS collaboration on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year: 2003.” His book "LIFE 3.0" was an instant New York Times Best Seller and one of Mark Cuban and Barack Obama's favorite books of 2017. Life 3.0 asks the question: "How will Artificial Intelligence affect crime, war, justice, jobs, society and our very sense of being human?" The rise of AI has the potential to transform our future more than any other technology—and there’s nobody better qualified or situated to explore that future than Max Tegmark. How can we grow our prosperity through automation without leaving people lacking income or purpose? What career advice should we give today’s kids? How can we make future AI systems more robust, so that they do what we want without crashing, malfunctioning or getting hacked? Should we fear an arms race in lethal autonomous weapons? Will machines eventually outsmart us at all tasks, replacing humans on the job market and perhaps altogether? Will AI help life flourish like never before or give us more power than we can handle? Read Life 3.0 https://amzn.to/2YTDg9L 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:09 Disagreement with Noam Chomsky and the challenge of the Imitation Game 00:04:16 Will AI exceed human intelligence? 00:07:04 Should we fear AI? Are we being to passive? 00:09:02 Should we trust AI? What we should worry about. 00:11:21 Were you born tooearly to make good use of AI? Could AI avert war? 00:12:45 AI may have a democratizing impact. 00:17:55 The "Improve The News" experiment 00:26:19 What do you think about exponential change? Will tech solve humanity's problems? 00:30:31 What is your ethical will?
Welcome back to the Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning podcast, episode #100—this episode is a very special one, that comes full circle for all of the listeners who have ever wondered, “what exactly is the neuroscience of social and emotional learning?”You can watch the interview on YouTube here. Today, this question will be solved with Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, who is a Professor of Education, Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California and Director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE)[i]. She studies the psychological and neurobiological development of emotion and self-awareness, and connections to social, cognitive and moral development in educational settings. What I find to be powerful about Dr. Mary Helen is that although she is a former public junior-high-school science teacher, who went on to earn her doctorate at Harvard University and has received numerous awards for her work and research, she is able to set us straight when it comes to understanding how the emotions we have with others, and our social interactions can change our brain, and literally shape who we are, with powerful findings that she can prove with FMRI scans.Welcome Mary Helen, it’s beyond incredible to finally have this opportunity to speak with you, after studying your work when I first started on this mission to learn and understand the basics of neuroscience back in 2015 when an educator urged me to take this path to integrate neuroscience into the programs I had developed for the school market. I’m sure I first saw you speaking somewhere with Dr. Daniel Siegel, who we had on with episode #28[ii] on “Mindsight: The Basis of Social and Emotional Intelligence” then when I saw you come on his PEPP MWE UP Community Chats this past July[iii], I immediately reached out to speak with you when I saw that your life’s work provides the evidence for the powerful connection with neuroscience and social and emotional learning.Thank you so much for being here today. Dr. Daniel Siegel said this, and I have to repeat it, because your research truly has shown incredible pioneering and achievement when it comes to showing through your social-emotion experiments, how what we think, feel and the emotions that we have—can physically change the structure of our brains. I am so grateful to have you here today and after writing your questions, I decided that it made perfect sense to have your interview as the 100th episode, to show the impact that we can have when we connect neuroscience to social and emotional learning.Q1: You said it really well on Dan’s event, and I have put this link in the show notes so you don’t have to repeat what you said there, but can you share how you started to look at the connection with the social and emotional brain. You mention that in 2001/2002 there wasn’t much out there on culture and the brain, and then when you looked at emotion, it was just some basic stuff about the amygdala lighting up with certain emotions, and the social brain was still in its infancy. Where did this idea begin to work with Antonio Damasio[iv] measuring brain activity and connecting our relationships and emotions to our future results?My thoughts: When I was urged by a school administrator to write another book that included the most current brain research to the programs I was offering schools in Arizona through a Character Education Grant, I began to look for those who were out in the world, teaching educational neuroscience. I found Judy Willis, and Dan Siegel, David Sousa who was showing how the brain learns to read, and some others, but wanted to find those who saw how neuroscience connected to social and emotional learning (the name of the podcast) because I saw how these social skills were changing the results of students, I just wasn’t measuring their brains in FMRI scanners. Your work really is bringing the research to re-think the next generation’s educational experience.Q2: I watched one of your earlier presentations from 2012 called “We Feel, Therefore We Learn”[v] where you talk about some of your early social-emotion experiments. Can you share in a nutshell how our brain changes when we feel inspired or compassionate towards another human being? I found this fascinating! My thoughts: It’s interesting to me because I worked with high school students with Character Ed Grant and one of the activities was to write out who they wanted to be in 10 years, create a vision for themselves. They found this activity really difficult and as I started to study and read more about the teenage brain, I thought that their prefrontal cortex is not fully developed yet, so this planning activity might take them some time. Out of a class of 30 students, maybe 5 could quickly write out their path of where they are now, and where they wanted to go. After some time, they all had a plan created, but I wonder what you are seeing with your work with students in the classrooms that you are measuring now. Is this something they could easily tell you?Q3: We all want our children (if we are parents) or students (if we are educators) to be successful, and you have some research that shows how a child reacts to an unfair situation can predict certain things about their brain. Can you explain concrete talk vs abstract talk, and how they are associated with a specific developmental trajectory of the brain?My Thoughts: We’ve all heard of the marshmallow experiment[vi], and how delaying gratification predicted future success in children. When I heard this, of course I did the experiment with my children and am always working on this skill with them. Do you think that these findings would make a case for integrating this thinking into classroom work for improved function of the brain?WE WILL ADDRESS THESE QUESTIONS IN EPISODE #101 since we ran out of time here. Q4: You talk about how the brain networks rework at different stages in our life, like in adolescence with hormonal shifts that coincide with puberty, and relationships as well as how our brains change as we transition to parenting. Can you explain how our brains were designed to support us at these different life stages?My thoughts: It’s interesting when life is just happening and then you have an experience with a life-changing moment, as a parent, where you seem to gear down and get a bit more serious. I would like to understand what’s happening on the brain level to make this occur.Q5: What is your vision for the research you are doing? What changes do you think are possible to help our future generations think more deeply, more abstract, and reach higher levels of capability?My thoughts: The Pandemic disrupted at a time when change was past due, for many years. How can school admin/parents/teachers take your research and make improvements to what wasn’t working before? What about educational publishers? How can your work be integrated into mainstream curriculum? (I see brain-boost boxes being added in the margins of teacher manuals with tips for how this activity is impacting the brain).Mary-Helen, I want to thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me today. I find your work fascinating, and really am grateful to have found you all those years ago. Thank you for pioneering the way in this field, and for sharing your work so graciously. I will continue to follow your work, and see the vision you are creating for a better world for student learning.BIODr. Mary Helen Immorindo-Yang is a Professor of Education, Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Southern California. A former public junior-high-school science teacher, she earned her doctorate at Harvard University. She holds an NSF CAREER award and is serving on the NAS committee writing How People Learn II. In 2015-2016 she was chosen as one of 30 scholars to participate in the AERA’s Knowledge Forum initiative. She has received numerous national awards, is the inaugural recipient of the International Mind, Brain and Education Society (IMBES) award for Transforming Education through Neuroscience and was elected 2016-2018 IMBES president.A former urban public junior high-school science teacher, she earned her doctorate at Harvard University in 2005 in human development and psychology and completed her postdoctoral training in social-affective neuroscience with Antonio Damasio in 2008. Since then she has received numerous awards for her research and for her impact on education and society, among them an Honor Coin from the U.S. Army, a Commendation from the County of Los Angeles, a Cozzarelli Prize from the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences editorial board, and early career achievement awards from the AERA, the AAAS, the APS, the International Mind, Brain and Education Society (IMBES), and the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences Foundation (FABBS). Immordino-Yang is a Spencer Foundation mid-career fellow.Dr.Mary Helen is currently the Director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE) is to bring educational innovation and developmental affective neuroscience into partnership, and to use what is learned to guide the transformation of schools, policy, and the student and teacher experience for a healthier and more equitable society.RESOURCES:Jul 24, 2017 Nova Episode featuring Mary Helen Immordino Yang on PBS on “School of the Future.” https://rossier.usc.edu/improving-learningBuilding Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Douglas R Knecht
Almost a decade ago the Higgs Boson, once referred to as the God Particle, was discovered at CERN. In this podcast we ask one of the leading researchers at CERN, Dr. Aaron Dominguez, does God care about the Higgs Field? We pose this question to Dr. Dominguez because as a professor at The Catholic University of America he believes science and religion should co-exist and compliment each other.Aaron Dominguez is the provost and an ordinary professor of physics at The Catholic University of America. His main area of research is in using particle colliders to search for new physics, including the recently discovered Higgs boson. His area of expertise is in instrumentation — designing, building and using silicon charged particle trackers as precision tools to reconstruct the complicated interactions taking place in these collisions.He received his undergraduate degrees from Whitman College and Caltech, his Ph.D. in physics from UC San Diego and was a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 2005, he was the recipient of the NSF CAREER award. He has played numerous leadership positions in the L3, CDF and CMS particle physics experiments at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland and Fermilab in Chicago. Specifically, he is currently deputy project leader for the upgrades of CMS, and is the principal investigator of an NSF project that is funding the U.S. efforts of nine universities to improve the silicon pixel detector, hadron calorimeter and trigger in preparation for high luminosity runs of the LHC in coming years. He has mentored seven postdoctoral researchers, three graduate students to completion, three currently in progress, and numerous undergraduates. He sits on several advisory boards, including QuarkNet, and is an author on more than 1,100 papers in experimental high energy physics and instrumentation.As we explore the question, does God care about the Higgs Field we will perhaps gain some insight into the relationship between religion and reason.
Collectively, we will explore questions like -- : Why is people's knowledge so important and relevant for rural development? : How can we use technology to build systems to support people's knowledge? What are some challenges and limitations? : What does a life of "service" mean when it comes to people's own knowledge and expertise? Anil Kumar Gupta is the founder of the Honey Bee Network, SRISTI, NIF and GIAN . He is a visiting faculty at IIM Ahemdabad & IIT Bombay and an independent thinker, activist for the cause of creative communities and individuals at grassroots, tech institutions and any other walk of life committed to make this world a more creative, compassionate and collaborative place. He was awarded the Padma Shri in the year 2004, and is seen as a pioneer in the field of grassroots innovations, in which his contribution includes documenting people's knowledge with the help of teams of volunteers spread across India. He helps grassroots innovators and communities build on their knowledge systems by providing help in filing patents, promoting scientific validation of these innovations by involving government scientific institutes and private individuals and bodies and facilitating tie-ups with entrepreneurs and industrial groups. Gupta is also known for crafting innovative courses for students at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. One of his most popular courses included shodh yatra, under which he took management students to different parts of the country to learn from local communities and study their knowledge systems. It started in May 1998 in the western Indian province of Gujarat. Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya is a first generation technology entrepreneur and renowned rural markets, digital financial services & agriculture sector expert working on financial inclusion, supply chain and market access issues of rural communities. In last 20 years, Vijay’s work has focussed on rural India, enabling access to markets, agriculture value chain, financial and enterprise services for rural businesses, financial inclusion, farmer-producers and artisans. Vijay is CEO of ekgaon. Having co-founded ekgaon 15 years back, he has built the company as a network-integrator providing real-time platform where service providers compete for the under-served consumer services markets. ekgaon platforms ensure cost effective service delivery by using mobile phone apps to transmit verified and secured transaction information, traceability, impacting in cost savings as well as enhancing productivity across the farm value chain. The talk will be moderated by Tapan Parikh. Tapan is an Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell Tech in New York City. His research interests include human-computer interaction and the design and use of information technologies for supporting youth and community development. He currently leads the Milstein Program at Cornell Tech, which bridges technological innovation with human interests through collaboration with humanities scholars and local arts and culture organizations. He also teaches the Remaking the City course at Cornell Tech, which connects graduate students with civic organizations to work on service learning and design projects for local impact. Previously, he was one of the founders of the field of Information and Communications Technologies and Development (ICTD), and helped start several international social enterprises working in this area. He has received the NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Fellowship, a UW Diamond Early Career Award and was named Technology Review magazine's Humanitarian of the Year in 2007.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
What direction does time point in? None, really, although some people might subconsciously put the past on the left and the future on the right, or the past behind themselves and the future in front, or many other possible orientations. What feels natural to you depends in large degree on the native language you speak, and how it talks about time. This is a clue to a more general phenomenon, how language shapes the way we think. Lera Boroditsky is one of the world’s experts on this phenomenon. She uses how different languages construe time and space (as well as other things) to help tease out the way our brains make sense of the world.Support Mindscape on Patreon.Lera Boroditsky received her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Stanford University. She is currently associate professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego. She serves as Editor in Chief of the journal Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. She has been named one of 25 Visionaries changing the world by the Utne Reader, and is also a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell scholar, recipient of an NSF Career award, and an APA Distinguished Scientist lecturer.Web siteUC San Diego web pageGoogle Scholar publicationsWikipediaTalk on How Language Shapes the Way We ThinkTwitter
Support these videos: http://pgbovine.net/support.htmhttp://pgbovine.net/PG-Podcast-55-Laurel-Schwulst.htm- [Laurel's webpage](http://laurelschwulst.com)- [Philip's old webpages](http://pgbovine.net/oldpages.htm)- [HTML Editor for Gmail](https://www.html-editor-for-gmail.com/)- [Instagram hacks](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QY09lB7_KmEVJ1tYhjgqahWKEcikvuIKCnMe1Xz8uyE/edit?usp=sharing) google doc- [special.fish](https://special.fish/)- [Gossip's Cafe](http://gossips.cafe/)- [Hidden Cities](https://nadiaeghbal.com/hidden-cities)- [The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet](https://onezero.medium.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-7dc3e68a7cb1)- [An app can be a home-cooked meal](https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/)- [Situated software](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situational_application) by Clay Shirky ([original archived post](https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situatedsoftware.html))- [Mastadon](https://joinmastodon.org/)- [PG Vlog #173 - Knowledge is Hyperlocal](http://pgbovine.net/PG-Vlog-173-knowledge-is-hyperlocal.htm)- [p5.js](https://p5js.org/)- [PG Vlog #318 - teaching HCI and UX design without using code](http://pgbovine.net/PG-Vlog-318-teaching-hci-without-code.htm)- [The web's grain](https://frankchimero.com/writing/the-webs-grain/)- [Why Is CSS So Weird?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHUtMbJw8iA) video- [Maria Popova podcast](https://onbeing.org/programs/maria-popova-cartographer-of-meaning-in-a-digital-age-feb2019/) about how the web is a self-perfecting medium- [Impro](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/306940.Impro) book- [In 2020, I'd like to write 100 posts](https://carolynzhang.com/2020/01/02/in-2020-id-like-to-write-100-posts), by Carolyn Zhang- [Horseland](https://www.horseland.com/)- [Laurel's essay about Horseland](http://allmyfriendsatonce.com/#50)- [Earth Sandwich](http://www.zefrank.com/sandwich/)- [fruitful.school](http://www.fruitful.school/)- [School for Poetic Computation](https://sfpc.io/)- [PG Vlog #379 - learning unwritten rules](http://pgbovine.net/PG-Vlog-379-unwritten-rules.htm)- [Example NSF CAREER proposals (including my own annotated one)](http://pgbovine.net/NSF-CAREER-proposal.htm)- [Pomera writing device](https://www.kingjim.co.jp/pomera/)- [Why Restaurant Websites Are Good and We're All Going to Miss Them](https://www.are.na/blog/restaurant-websites)Recorded: 2020-02-18
In this episode, Dr. Jennifer Wilcox, who is the James H. Manning Chaired Professor of Chemical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a former Stanford Professor and acclaimed TED speaker shares her research findings on how we could remove CO2 from the air to help fight against the global climate crisis. “We have the capability to build synthetic forests that have the potential to remove some of the CO2 that is emitted into the atmosphere each year, ” Dr. Wilcox said. “Ideally, we avoid CO2 emissions to begin with, but we are not doing that at the scale required to meet our climate goals and so now we have to start pulling CO2 out of the air to avoid reaching a climate change tipping point.” In addition to honorable awards received such as the NSF Career award and authoring the first carbon capture textbook, according to Google Scholar, Dr. Jennifer Wilcox’s work has been cited close to 7,000 times (and growing). Tune in to get the full conversation and learn about: Global climate crisis Climate change Global warming Carbon capture Removing CO2 from the air Greenhouse gases Dr. Jennifer Wilcox's biography: PhD Chemical Engineering University of Arizona 2004 MA Physical Chemistry University of Arizona 2004 BA Mathematics Wellesley College 1998 Jennifer Wilcox works on ways to test and measure methods of trace metal and carbon capture, to mitigate the effects of fossil fuels on our planet. Jennifer Wilcox is the James H. Manning Chaired Professor of Chemical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Having grown up in rural Maine, she has a profound respect and appreciation of nature, which permeates her work as she focuses on minimizing negative impacts of humankind on our natural environment. Wilcox's research takes aim at the nexus of energy and the environment, developing both mitigation and adaptation strategies to minimize negative climate impacts associated with society's dependence on fossil fuels. This work carefully examines the role of carbon management and opportunities therein that could assist in preventing 2° C warming by 2100. Carbon management includes a mix of technologies spanning from the direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to its capture from industrial, utility-scale and micro-emitter (motor vehicle) exhaust streams, followed by utilization or reliable storage of carbon dioxide on a timescale and magnitude that will have a positive impact on our current climate change crisis. Funding for her research is primarily sourced through the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy and the private sector. She has served on a number of committees including the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society to assess carbon capture methods and impacts on climate. She is the author of the first textbook on carbon capture, published in March 2012. Connect with Dr. Jennifer Wilcox: Website Twitter TED Talk * * * Full Transcription: Jennifer Wilcox: It’s only going to get worse if we continue not to act in a way that we need to. Now we’re at a point where it’s like avoiding CO2 is just no longer enough, and now we need to also remove it from the atmosphere. Tanya: That’s Dr. Jennifer Wilcox, the James H. Manning Chaired Professor of Chemical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, former Stanford professor, and acclaimed TED speaker who’s actively working to remove CO2 from the air to help fight against the global climate crisis. In her TED Talk, which has been viewed by millions, she proposes different solutions to help produce global warming in a hopes to save our beloved planet. In addition to honorable awards such as the NSF CAREER Award and authoring the first carbon capture textbook, according to Google scholar, Dr. Jennifer Wilcox’s work has been cited close to 7,000 times and growing. You were brought up in Maine,
Support these videos: http://pgbovine.net/support.htmhttp://pgbovine.net/PG-Vlog-379-unwritten-rules.htm- [Example NSF CAREER proposals (including my own annotated one)](http://pgbovine.net/NSF-CAREER-proposal.htm)- [My faculty job application materials](http://pgbovine.net/faculty-job-application-materials.htm)- [PG Vlog #53 - Being a Serious Contender](http://pgbovine.net/PG-Vlog-53-serious-contender.htm)Recorded: 2019-10-03
Support these videos: http://pgbovine.net/support.htmhttp://pgbovine.net/PG-Vlog-297-voracious-learner.htm- [Example NSF CAREER proposals (including my own annotated one)](http://pgbovine.net/NSF-CAREER-proposal.htm)- [PG Vlog #189 - what to watch out for when learning or getting advice online](http://pgbovine.net/PG-Vlog-189-online-learning-and-advice.htm)- [How to effectively ask for help as a student or junior employee](http://pgbovine.net/how-to-ask-for-help.htm)Recorded: 2019-04-20
It is not unusual to have a Nobel Prize winner write a book. But what about those who lose the Nobel Prize? Not too many write that book. Dr. Brian Keating did. He is an astrophysicist who teaches at the University of California at San Diego. He almost won the Nobel Prize, but not quite. Professor Brian Keating is an astrophysicist with UC San Diego’s Department of Physics. He and his team develop instrumentation to study the early universe at radio, microwave and infrared wavelengths. He is the author of over 100 scientific publications and holds two U.S. Patents. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2006 and a 2007 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers at the White House from President Bush for a telescope he invented and deployed at the U.S. South Pole Research Station called “BICEP". Professor Keating became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016. He co-leads the Simons Array and Simons Observatory Cosmic Microwave Background experiments in the Atacama Desert of Chile, and is the author of Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science's Highest Honor.
Professor Brian Keating is an astrophysicist with UC San Diego’s Department of Physics. He and his team develop instrumentation to study the early universe at radio, microwave and infrared wavelengths. He is the author of over 100 scientific publications and holds two U.S.Patents. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2006 and a 2007 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers at the White House from President Bush for a telescope he invented and deployed at the U.S. South Pole Research Station called “BICEP" Professor Keating became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016. He co-leads the Simons Array and Simons Observatory Cosmic Microwave Background experiments in the Atacama Desert of Chile. Have a question for Connor? Check out our Facebook Page and join the community. For more information about ManTalks or to join a ManTalks Mastermind: Click Here Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | Stitcher Radio | Android For more episodes visit us at ManTalks.com Facebook | Instagram | Twitter Did you enjoy the podcast? If so please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. It helps our podcast get into the ears of new listeners, which expands the ManTalks Community! Editing & Mixing by: Aaron The Tech
“Everyone wants to be a cowboy, but no one wants to ride the range.” A dream of unraveling the mystery of the birth of universe led astrophysicist and author Brian Keating to "saddle up" and head to a frozen ocean of snow at the bottom of the world. Keating joins Rushkoff to talk about science, religion, questions that lead to more questions, and the "background noise” of the cosmos that may just be the key to understanding how this all began.Rushkoff begins today's show commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Are we suffering the effects of HAL computer-like programming on Facebook? "I know everything hasn't been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it's going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do." HAL 9000 or Mark Zuckerberg?Learn more about our guest, Brian Keating:Professor Brian Keating is an astrophysicist with UC San Diego’s Department of Physics. He and his team develop instrumentation to study the early universe at radio, microwave and infrared wavelengths. He is the author of over 100 scientific publications and holds two U.S.Patents. He received an NSF CAREER award in 2006 and a 2007 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers at the White House from President Bush for a telescope he invented and deployed at the U.S. South Pole Research Station called “BICEP". Professor Keating became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016. He co-leads the Simons Observatory Cosmic Microwave Background experiments in the Atacama Desert of Chile, and is the author of Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science's Highest Honor, selected as one ofAmazon.com’s Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Month.This show features music thanks to Fugazi and Dischord Records as well as a sample of Throbbing Gristle by TH 68 guest Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.You can sustain this show via Patreon. And please leave us a review on iTunes. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li, the Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google joins Melanie and Mark this week to talk about how Google enables businesses to solve critical problems through AI solutions. We talk about the work she is doing at Google to help reduce AI barriers to entry for enterprise, her research with Stanford combining AI and health care, where AI research is going, and her efforts to overcome one of the key challenges in AI by driving for more diversity in the field. Dr. Fei-Fei Li Dr. Fei-Fei Li is the Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. She is also an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford, and the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. Dr. Fei-Fei Li's main research areas are in machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and cognitive and computational neuroscience. She has published more than 150 scientific articles in top-tier journals and conferences, including Nature, PNAS, Journal of Neuroscience, CVPR, ICCV, NIPS, ECCV, IJCV, IEEE-PAMI, etc. Dr. Fei-Fei Li obtained her B.A. degree in physics from Princeton in 1999 with High Honors, and her PhD degree in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005. She joined Stanford in 2009 as an assistant professor, and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2012. Prior to that, she was on faculty at Princeton University (2007-2009) and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2005-2006). Dr. Li is the inventor of ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge, a critical large-scale dataset and benchmarking effort that has contributed to the latest developments in deep learning and AI. In addition to her technical contributions, she is a national leading voice for advocating diversity in STEM and AI. She is co-founder of Stanford's renowned SAILORS outreach program for high school girls and the national non-profit AI4ALL. For her work in AI, Dr. Li is a speaker at the TED2015 main conference, a recipient of the IAPR 2016 J.K. Aggarwal Prize, the 2016 nVidia Pioneer in AI Award, 2014 IBM Faculty Fellow Award, 2011 Alfred Sloan Faculty Award, 2012 Yahoo Labs FREP award, 2009 NSF CAREER award, the 2006 Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship and a number of Google Research awards. Work from Dr. Li's lab have been featured in a variety of popular press magazines and newspapers including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune Magazine, Science, Wired Magazine, MIT Technology Review, Financial Times, and more. She was selected as a 2017 Women in Tech by the ELLE Magazine, a 2017 Awesome Women Award by Good Housekeeping, a Global Thinker of 2015 by Foreign Policy, and one of the “Great Immigrants: The Pride of America” in 2016 by the Carnegie Foundation, past winners include Albert Einstein, Yoyo Ma, Sergey Brin, et al. Cool things of the week Terah Lyons appointed founding executive director of Partnership on AI article & site Fully managed export and import with Cloud Datastore now generally available blog How Color uses the new Variant Transforms tool for breakthrough clinical data science with BigQuery blog & repo Google Cloud and NCAA team up for a unique March Madness copmetition hosted on Kaggle blog Interview AI4All site, they are hiring and how to become a mentor Cloud AI site Cloud AutoML site Cloud Vision API site and docs Cloud Speech API site and docs Cloud Natural Language API site and docs Cloud Translation API site and docs Cloud Machine Learning Engine docs TensorFlow site, github and Dev Summit waitlist ImageNet site & Kaggle ImageNet Competition site Stanford Medicine site & Stanford Children's Hospital site Additional sample resources on Dr. Fei-Fei Li: Citations site Stanford Vision Lab site Fei-Fei Li | 2018 MAKERS Conference video Google Cloud's Li Sees Transformative Time for Enterprise video Past, Present and Future of AI / Machine Learning Google I/O video Research Symposium 2017 - Morning Keynote Address at Harker School video How we're teaching computers to understand pictures video Melinda Gates and Fei-Fei Li Want to Liberate AI from “Guy with Hoodies” article Dr. Fei-Fei Li Question of the week Where can I learn more about machine learning? Listing of some of the many resources out there in no particular order: How Google does Machine Learning coursera Machine Learning with Andrew Ng coursera and Deep Learning Specialization coursera fast.ai site Machine Learning with John W. Paisley edx Machine Learning Columbia University edx International Women's Day March 8th International Women's Day site covers information on events in your area, and additional resources. Sample of recent women in tech events to keep on radar for next year: Women Techmakers site Lesbians Who Tech site Women in Data Science Conference site Where can you find us next? Mark will be at the Game Developer's Conference | GDC in March.
Dr. Andrew Alleyne is the Ralph and Catherine Fisher Professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as the Director of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center on Power Optimization for Electro-Thermal Systems (POETS) headquartered there. Andrew grew up in Jamaica and came to the United States when he was in high school. He received his B.S. in Engineering degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University. He went on to study Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley where he was awarded his M.S. in Engineering and Ph.D. degrees. In 1994, Andrew joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he remains today. Andrew has received many awards and honors throughout his career, including an NSF CAREER award, the Xerox Award for Faculty Research, a Fulbright Fellowship, and the SAE International Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award. In addition, Andrew was also named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and he has received their Gustus Larson Award, Charles Stark Draper Award for Innovative Practice, and Henry Paynter Outstanding Investigator Award. Andrew has joined us today to talk about his experiences in life and research.
How can policymakers balance consumers' need for targeted, relevant content against such consumers' desire for privacy? Anindya Ghose (@aghose) is a Professor of Information, Operations and Management Sciences and a Professor of Marketing at New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business. He is the Director of the Center for Business Analytics at NYU Stern, and the co-Chair of the NYU-AIG Partnership on Innovation for Global Resilience. He is the NEC Faculty Fellow and a Daniel P. Paduano Fellow of Business Ethics at NYU Stern. He has been a Visiting Associate Professor at the Wharton School of Business. He also serves as the main Scientific Advisor to 3TI China . He was recently named by Business Week as one of the "Top 40 Professors Under 40 Worldwide" and by Analytics Week as one the "Top 200 Thought Leaders in Big Data and Business Analytics". His rise from assistant to full professor in 8.5 years at NYU Stern is widely regarded as one of the fastest in the history of the entire Information Systems and Marketing academic disciplines in business schools globally. He has consulted in various capacities for Berkeley Corporation, CBS, Dataxu, Facebook, NBC Universal, OneVest, Samsung, and 3TI China, and collaborated with Alibaba, China Mobile, Google, IBM, Indiegogo, Microsoft, Recobell, Travelocity and many other leading Fortune 500 firms on realizing business value from IT investments, internet marketing, business analytics, mobile marketing, digital analytics, social media, and other areas. He has published more than 75 papers in premier scientific journals and peer reviewed conferences, and has given more than 200 talks internationally. He is a frequent keynote speaker in executive gatherings and thought leading events globally. His research has received 12 best paper awards and nominations. He is a winner of the NSF CAREER award and has been awarded 14 grants from Google, Microsoft and several other corporations. His research analyzes the economic consequences of the Internet on industries and markets transformed by its shared technology infrastructure. He has worked on product reviews, reputation and rating systems, digital marketing, sponsored search advertising, wearable technologies, mobile commerce, mobile advertising, crowdfunding, and online markets. He also plays a senior advisory role to several start-ups in the Internet space. He has been interviewed and his research has been profiled numerous times in the BBC, Bloomberg TV, CNBC, China Daily, The Economist, Financial Times, Fox News, Forbes, Knowledge@Wharton, Korean Broadcasting News Company, Los Angeles Times, Marketplace Radio, MSNBC, National Public Radio, NBC, Newsweek, New York Times, New York Daily, NHK Japan Broadcasting, Reuters, Time Magazine, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Xinhua,and elsewhere. He teaches courses on social media, digital marketing, business analytics and IT strategy at the undergraduate, MBA, EMBA, MSBA, and Executive Education level in various parts of the world including the US, India, China, and South Korea. He is on the Research Council of the Wharton Customer Analytics Institute, a faculty affiliate with the Marketing Science Institute and the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing at the University of California, Riverside. He serves as an Associate Editor of Management Science and a Senior Editor of Information Systems Research. Before joining NYU Stern, Dr. Ghose worked in GlaxoSmithKline, as a Product Manager in HCL-Hewlett Packard, and as a Senior E-Business Consultant with IBM. He has a B. Tech in Engineering from the Regional Engineering College (NIT) in Jalandhar, and an M.B.A in Finance, Marketing and Systems from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business. In this episode, we discussed: the 9 key forces shaping the mobile economy that entrepreneurs and policymakers alike need to know. the future of mobile technology as a key driver of marketing. how policymakers should balance privacy policy against consumers' desire for targeted and relevant content. Resources Tap: Unlocking the Mobile Economy by Anindya Ghose (MIT Press: 2017) Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance (Ecco: 2017) NEWS ROUNDUP The Federal Communications Commission released the text of its proposal to undo the Obama-era net neutrality rules. The rules classify internet service providers as "common carriers", thus bringing ISPs within the FCC's jurisdiction. The rules also outlaw blocking, throttling and paid prioritization of site traffic. Comments are due to the Commission by August 17th--they even seek comment on whether such rules are necessary--which, of course, the Commission settled on two years ago when it pulled together countless comments from members of the public who said, "yes--they are necessary"--So it's like we're just going around and around--net neutrality is the gift that keeps on giving--for lobbyists, that is. President Trump released his fiscal year 2018 budget request last week, which calls for numerous cuts to entitlement programs, as well as education. However, the budget calls for $228 million to modernize the federal government's IT--or phase out clunkier technologies in favor of technologies that are more secure and efficient. That $228 million amount is significantly less than the $3.1 billion called for by the Obama administration. Billy Mitchell covers this story in FedScoop. Apple reported last week that the federal government's requests for user data skyrocketed in the second half of 2016 to almost double what it was in the first half of the year. Apple reports on the number of requests using ranges instead of revealing the exact number of data requests. In the first half of 2016, the federal government made between 2,750 and 2,999 data requests. However, during the second half of 2016 the number of requests jumped to between 5,750 and 5,999. Joe Uchill reports in the Hill. Private drone users will no longer need to register their drones with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). This is following a DC Circuit Court of Appeals decision to overturn the rules. The court held that the rules violated another statute that precluded the FAA from promulgating rules pertaining to model aircraft. Tim Wright covers this in Air & Space. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the American Civil Liberties Union and Wikimedia Foundation can indeed pursue a lawsuit the two parties brought against the National Security Agency. They argue that the NSA violated Wikimedia's First and Fourth Amendment rights when the agency tapped into Wikimedia's backbone network because Wikimedia has such a large footprint, tapping into just a part of it can have constitutional implications. Adi Robertson has the story in The Verge. Finally, big box retailer Target has settled with 47 states in connection with a widespread data breach in 2015 in which hackers obtained the credit card information of millions of customers. The settlement amount was $18.5 million and is being distributed based on each state's size.Wyoming, Wisconsin and Alabama don't appear to be part of the settlement. The terms of the settlement also require Target to separate cardholder data from the rest of its computer network, as well as undergo an independent assessment of its data security practices. Rachel Abrams has the story in The New York Times.
This week on IAQ Radio we have finally synced schedules and welcome Dr. Glenn Morrison. Dr. Morrison is a professor of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Dr. Morrison graduated with his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999 after working for 6 years as a chemical engineer in research and development of catalysts. Has over 25 years of chemical and environmental engineering experience, most of that focusing on chemistry and transport phenomena in indoor environments. An NSF Career award winner and the current President of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate, his research has included ozone surface chemistry, building forensics, sensor development, pollutant movement in buildings, aerosol transport of SVOCs, exposure implications of smog reactions with human surfaces and hair, methamphetamine contamination of residences, design of indoor surfaces for improved air quality and related projects. He has been responsible for over $2.8 M in research funding from NSF, EPA, NIST, NIOSH, the California Air Resources Board, Missouri Research Board and the Green Building Council. He and his students have published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers and reports. We will ask to discuss the major themes and some specific presentations he attended at Healthy Buildings America 2015 and we want to discuss the current emphasis on SVOCâ??s plus much more with one of the most prolific IEQ researchers in the country. LEARN MORE this week on IAQ Radio!
This week on IAQ Radio we have finally synced schedules and welcome Dr. Glenn Morrison. Dr. Morrison is a professor of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Dr. Morrison graduated with his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999 after working for 6 years as a chemical engineer in research and development of catalysts. Has over 25 years of chemical and environmental engineering experience, most of that focusing on chemistry and transport phenomena in indoor environments. An NSF Career award winner and the current President of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate, his research has included ozone surface chemistry, building forensics, sensor development, pollutant movement in buildings, aerosol transport of SVOCs, exposure implications of smog reactions with human surfaces and hair, methamphetamine contamination of residences, design of indoor surfaces for improved air quality and related projects. He has been responsible for over $2.8 M in research funding from NSF, EPA, NIST, NIOSH, the California Air Resources Board, Missouri Research Board and the Green Building Council. He and his students have published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers and reports. We will ask to discuss the major themes and some specific presentations he attended at Healthy Buildings America 2015 and we want to discuss the current emphasis on SVOCâ??s plus much more with one of the most prolific IEQ researchers in the country. LEARN MORE this week on IAQ Radio!
In Episode 19, Bryony DuPont, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Oregon State University, guest hosts with Jon to discuss NSF CAREER proposals, which both just submitted. We get sidetracked (in a good way!) discussing outreach and STEM encouragement for K-12 girls. We also share our likes and dislikes for the CAREER proposal. Bryony is available via her research website, email, or on twitter @bryony_dupont. Let us know what you think. The podcast can be at www.academictrax.com or via email at academictrax@gmail.com. Jon can be reached on twitter @profgears. If you like Academic Trax, please leave us a comment on our website and also on iTunes.
The University of Texas website describes Andrea Thomaz, Ph.D., thusly: Shownotes: From the University of Texas website: “Andrea Thomaz is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. Prof. Thomaz joined Texas Electrical and Computer Engineering in January 2016 after serving as an Associate Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 2007-2016. She earned a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1999, and Sc.M. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT in 2002 and 2006. Andrea is published in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Human-Robot Interaction. Her research aims to computationally model mechanisms of human social learning in order to build social robots and other machines that are intuitive for everyday people to teach. Prof. Thomaz received an NSF CAREER award in 2010 and an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2008. She was named to Popular Science magazine's Brilliant 10 List in 2012. In 2009, she was named to the MIT Tech Review Top Young Innovators Under 35.“ Links: 1. Dr. Thomaz’s UT webpage 2. Google Scholar webpage 3. TED Talk 4. Dr. Thomaz’s book, Robot Learning From Human Teachers
Privacy is a critical challenge for mobile application development. Mobile applications are easy to build and distribute, and can collect diverse personal data. US policy approaches to data protection in the mobile ecosystem rely on privacy by design: approaches that encourage developers to proactively implement best-practice privacy features to protect sensitive data. But we don’t know what factors motivate developers to implement privacy features when faced with disincentives such as longer development timelines, markets for personal data, and tensions between data protection and data-enabled services. This project begins to identify these factors by investigating how mobile developers talk about and deal with privacy challenges. Interviews with developers and analysis of posts on developer forums reveal that developers are actively grappling with privacy issues. This talk will describe how developers define and legitimate privacy, and describe how knowledge of how to approach privacy problems is disseminated. Understanding the development of privacy as a professional practice can help us shape better guidelines for privacy by design, and broach challenges to the widespread adoption of privacy by design principles. Katie Shilton is an assistant professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research explores ethics and policy for the design of information collections, systems and technologies. Current research projects include an investigation of ethics in mobile application development; a project focused on the values and policy implications of Named Data Networking, a new approach to Internet architecture; surveys of consumer privacy expectations in the mobile data ecosystem; and investigating researchers’ ethical beliefs and practices when using online open data sets. Her work has been supported by a Google Faculty Award and several awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation, including an NSF CAREER award. Katie received a B.A. from Oberlin College, a Master of Library and Information Science from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in information studies from UCLA.
David Brumley President & DirectorCarnegie Mellon Univeristy’s CyLab Checking the World's Software for Exploitable Bugs Follow along with the slide show here. To Carnegie Mellon University’s David Brumley, hacking is “not something just bad guys do.” Brumley, a professor and director of the CyLab Institute at Carnegie Mellon University will discuss the important science behind hacking at Carnegie Science Center’s next Café Scientifique on Monday, Oct. 5, from 7 – 9 pm. Brumley and his team at Carnegie Mellon’s CyLab (cyber security lab) envision a world in which software is automatically checked for exploitable bugs, giving people the ability to trust their computers. The demand for cybersecurity professionals is growing, and Carnegie Mellon University is working to train students interested in the field. Brumley is an associate professor who focuses on software security, with appointments in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Computer Science Department. He is the faculty mentor for the CMU Hacking Team Plaid Parliament of Pwning (PPP), which is ranked internationally as one of the top teams in the world. Brumley’s honors include a 2010 NSF CAREER award, a 2010 United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President Obama, the highest award in the U.S. for early career scientists, and a 2013 Sloan Foundation award. Brumley is the 2015 winner of the Carnegie Science Award in the University/Post-Secondary Educator category. He was lauded for recognizing the need for novel approaches to STEM education, leading him to spearhead picoCTF, a national cyber security game and contest targeted at exciting young minds about computer security. Brumley attended the University of Northern Colorado for his bachelor’s degree in mathematics, Stanford University for his master’s degree in computer science, and, most recently, CMU for his PhD in computer science. At Stanford, he worked as a computer security officer, solving thousands of computer security incidents in a four-year span. Recorded on Monday, October 5, 2015 at Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, PA.
This week on IAQ Radio we have finally synced schedules and welcome Dr. Glenn Morrison. Dr. Morrison is a professor of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Dr. Morrison graduated with his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999 after working for 6 years as a chemical engineer in research and development of catalysts. Has over 25 years of chemical and environmental engineering experience, most of that focusing on chemistry and transport phenomena in indoor environments. An NSF Career award winner and the current President of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate, his research has included ozone surface chemistry, building forensics, sensor development, pollutant movement in buildings, aerosol transport of SVOCs, exposure implications of smog reactions with human surfaces and hair, methamphetamine contamination of residences, design of indoor surfaces for improved air quality and related projects. He has been responsible for over $2.8 M in research funding from NSF, EPA, NIST, NIOSH, the California Air Resources Board, Missouri Research Board and the Green Building Council. He and his students have published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers and reports. We will ask to discuss the major themes and some specific presentations he attended at Healthy Buildings America 2015 and we want to discuss the current emphasis on SVOC's plus much more with one of the most prolific IEQ researchers in the country. LEARN MORE this week on IAQ Radio!
This week on IAQ Radio we have finally synced schedules and welcome Dr. Glenn Morrison. Dr. Morrison is a professor of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Dr. Morrison graduated with his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1999 after working for 6 years as a chemical engineer in research and development of catalysts. Has over 25 years of chemical and environmental engineering experience, most of that focusing on chemistry and transport phenomena in indoor environments. An NSF Career award winner and the current President of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate, his research has included ozone surface chemistry, building forensics, sensor development, pollutant movement in buildings, aerosol transport of SVOCs, exposure implications of smog reactions with human surfaces and hair, methamphetamine contamination of residences, design of indoor surfaces for improved air quality and related projects. He has been responsible for over $2.8 M in research funding from NSF, EPA, NIST, NIOSH, the California Air Resources Board, Missouri Research Board and the Green Building Council. He and his students have published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers and reports. We will ask to discuss the major themes and some specific presentations he attended at Healthy Buildings America 2015 and we want to discuss the current emphasis on SVOC's plus much more with one of the most prolific IEQ researchers in the country. LEARN MORE this week on IAQ Radio!
Dr. Keivan Stassun is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University. He is also director of the Vanderbilt Initiative in Data-Intensive Astrophysics and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Fisk University in Nashville. Keivan received his PhD in Astronomy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He then served as assistant Director of the NSF-funded GK-12 program at UW-Madison, connecting STEM graduate students with public K-12 schools both to enhance K-12 science teaching and to provide leadership development for STEM graduate students. Next, Keivan served for two years as a NASA Hubble Space Telescope postdoctoral research fellow before joining the Vanderbilt faculty in 2003. Keivan has received many awards and honors during his career. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was awarded the American Physical Society Nicholson Medal for Human Outreach, was named a Fletcher Foundation Fellow for his work advancing race relations, and received an NSF Career award and a Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation. Keivan is here with us today to tell us about his journey through life and science.
Lada Adamic is a visiting scholar at the UC Berkeley School of Information and an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information and Center for the Study of Complex Systems. She is also affiliated with EECS. Her research interests center on information dynamics in networks: how information diffuses, how it can be found, and how it influences the evolution of a network's structure. Her projects have included identifying expertise in online question and answer forums, studying the dynamics of viral marketing, and characterizing the structure in blogs and other online communities. She has received an NSF CAREER award, and best paper awards from Hypertext'08, ICWSM'10 and '11, and the most influential paper of the decade award from Web Intelligence'11.
Coordinated attacks, such as botnets, present a major threat to today's computing infrastructures. They are able to evade traditional detection techniques by using zero-day and polymorphic exploits, partitioning misbehavior, and encrypting communications. I will discuss our work that aims to identify coordinated activity itself by analyzing the patterns of network communication and inferring information via the available side information. First, I will discuss the detection of linked network flows that relay traffic across compromised computers, called stepping stones. We use statistical techniques to locate timing correlation between flows, aided by active perturbation of network delays to insert a specialized pattern, called a watermark. I will show that the use of watermarks provides superior detection performance over passive correlation and present two watermark designs: RAINBOW, a low-overhead watermark for enterprise-level stepping stone detection, and SWIRL, a scalable design that can be used in the wide area.I will then discuss our work on using community detection to locate groups of computers organized into a structured peer-to-peer topology. Our tool, BotGrep, finds tightly connected components in communication graphs using several graph-theoretic metrics and heuristics. It is designed to scale to very large data sets, allowing large core ISPs to detect previously unknown peer-to-peer botnets. About the speaker: Nikita Borisov is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are network security and online privacy. He is the co-designer of the ``off-the-record'' (OTR) instant messaging protocol and was responsible for the first public analysis of 802.11 security. He is also the recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2010. Prof. Borisov received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005 and a BMath from the University of Waterloo in 1998.
Third Generation (3G) cellular networks utilize time-varying andlocation-dependent channel conditions to provide broadband services. They employ opportunistic scheduling to efficiently utilize spectrum under fairness or QoS constraints. Opportunistic scheduling algorithms rely on collaboration among all mobile users to achieve their design objectives. However, we demonstrate that rogue cellular devices can exploit vulnerabilities in opportunistic scheduling algorithms, such as Proprotional Fair (PF), to usurp the majority of time slots in 3G networks. Our simulations show that only five rogue device per 50-user cell can use up to 90% of the time slots, and can cause 2 seconds of end-to-end inter-packet transmission delay on VoIP applications for every user in the same cell, rendering VoIP applications useless. To defend against these attacks, we explore several detection and prevention schemes, including modifications to the PF scheduler and a secure handoff procedure.This is a joint with with Denys Ma, Radmilo Racic, and Xin Liu. About the speaker: Hao Chen is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. His primary research interest is computer security, with an emphasis on wireless security, Web security, and software security. He received an NSF CAREER award for supporting his research on wireless security in 2007. More information is available at:http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~hchen/
Abstract 1:Real-time logic (RTL) is useful for the verification of a safety assertion with respect to the specification of a real-time system. Since the satisfiability problem for RTL is undecidable, the systematic debugging of a real-time system appears impossible. With RTL, each propositional formula corresponds to a verification condition. The number of truth assignments of a propositional formula can help us determine the specific constraints which should be added or modified to derive the expected solutions. This talk describes this debugging approach and how it can be embedded into autonomous systems. We have implemented a tool called ADRTL for automatic debugging of RTL specifications. The confidence of our approach is high as we have effectively evaluated ADRTL on several existing industrial applications, including the NASA X-38 Crew Return Vehicle avionics.Abstract 2:Embedded systems are becoming ubiquitous and are increasingly interconnected or networked, making them more vulnerable to security attacks. A large class of these systems such as SCADA and PCS has real-time and safety constraints. Therefore, in addition to satisfying these requirements, achieving system security emerges as a critical challenge to ensure that users can trust these embedded systems to perform correct operations. One objective in a secure system is to identify attacks by detecting anomalous system behaviors. This part of the talk describes the challenges in the design and implementation of such intrusion detection system (IDS), addressing (1) accuracy: the IDS identifies no or as few false positives as the resource (time, space, power, etc.) and/or policy constraints allow, and no or as few false negatives as the resource and/or policy constraints allow; (2) efficiency/timeliness: the IDS does not violate the host embedded system's application deadlines and has a reasonable space overhead; (3) scalability: the IDS can scale to work with large embedded systems; and (4) power-awareness: the IDS does not significantly reduce the operational period of battery-powered embedded systems. We conclude with an outline of one of several promising embedded IDS approaches under investigation. This approach is based on automatic rule-base generation and semantic analysis. About the speaker: Albert M. K. Cheng received the B.A. with Highest Honors in Computer Science, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, the M.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Electrical Engineering, and the Ph.D. in Computer Science, all from The University of Texas at Austin, where he held a GTE Foundation Doctoral Fellowship. Dr. Cheng is currently a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Houston, where he is the founding Director of the Real-Time Systems Laboratory. He has served as a technical consultant for several organizations, including IBM, and was also a visiting faculty in the Departments of Computer Science at Rice University (2000) and at the City University of Hong Kong (1995).Dr. Cheng is the author/co-author of over 100 refereed publications in real-time/embedded systems and related areas, and has received numerous awards, including the U.S. National Science Foundation Research Initiation Award (now known as the NSF CAREER award). His recent paper titled ``Automatic Debugging of Real-Time Systems Based on Incremental Satisfiability Counting'' in the July 2006 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Computers has been selected as its Featured Article. He has been invited to present seminars, tutorials, and panel positions at over 30 conferences, has given invited seminars/keynotes at over 30 universities and organizations. He is and has been on the technical program committees of over 100 conferences, symposia, workshops, and editorial boards (including the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 1998-2003). Currently, he is on the TPC of RTSS, RTAS, RTCSA, ESO, EC, ICEIS, ICINCO, SE, SEA, AIA, CNIS, CCN, ISC, and PDCN, and is the Program Chair of the 10th International Conference on SOFTWARE ENGINEERING AND APPLICATIONS (SEA), November 2006, Dallas, Texas. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE. Dr. Cheng is the author of the new senior/graduate-level textbook entitled Real-Time Systems: Scheduling, Analysis, and Verification (John Wiley & Sons), 2nd printing with updates, 2005.
Music and engineering, mathematical models of music, Expression Synthesis Project. Dr. Elaine Chew's research research includes collaborative projects in music information retrieval, distributed immersive performance, and musical expression synthesis. She also developed a course on computational methods for music perception and cognition. In 2004, Dr. Chew was honored with an NSF Career award for her proposal on performer-centered approaches to computer-assisted music making, in which she stated that her purpose was to establish engineering music research as a core academic discipline and to promote the use of computational research in music processing by humans as a basis for creating and improving human-computer interaction in computer music systems.
Music and engineering, mathematical models of music, Expression Synthesis Project. Dr. Elaine Chew's research research includes collaborative projects in music information retrieval, distributed immersive performance, and musical expression synthesis. She also developed a course on computational methods for music perception and cognition. In 2004, Dr. Chew was honored with an NSF Career award for her proposal on performer-centered approaches to computer-assisted music making, in which she stated that her purpose was to establish engineering music research as a core academic discipline and to promote the use of computational research in music processing by humans as a basis for creating and improving human-computer interaction in computer music systems.
Black Hat Briefings, Las Vegas 2005 [Video] Presentations from the security conference
The ability to check memory references against their associated array/buffer bounds helps programmers to detect programming errors involving address overruns early on and thus avoid many difficult bugs down the line. Because such programming errors have been the targets of remote attacks, i.e., buffer overflow attack, prevention of array bound violation is essential for the security and robustness of application programs that provide service on the Internet. This talk proposes a novel approach called CASH to the array bound checking problem that exploits the segmentation feature in the virtual memory hardware of the X86 architecture. The CASH approach allocates a separate segment to each static array or dynamically allocated buffer, and generates the instructions for array references in such a way that the segment limit check in X86's virtual memory protection mechanism performs the necessary array bound checking for free. In those cases that hardware bound checking is not possible, it falls back to software bound checking. As a result, CASH does not need to pay per-reference software checking overhead in most cases. However, the CASH approach incurs a fixed set-up overhead for each use of an array, which may involve multiple array references. The existence of this overhead requires compiler writers to judiciously apply the proposed technique to minimize the performance cost of array bound checking. This talk will describe the detailed design and implementation of the CASH compiler, and a comprehensive evaluation of various performance tradeoffs associated with the proposed array bound checking technique. For the set of production-grade network applications we tested, including Apache, Sendmail, Bind, etc., the latency penalty of CASH's bound checking mechanism is between 2.5% to 9.8% when compared with the baseline case that does not perform any bound checking. Dr. Tzi-cker Chiueh is a Professor in the Computer Science Department of Stony Brook University, and the Chief Scientist of Rether Networks Inc. He received his B.S. in EE from National Taiwan University, M.S. in CS from Stanford University, and Ph.D. in CS from University of California at Berkeley in 1984, 1988, and 1992, respectively. He received an NSF CAREER award in 1995, and has published over 130 technical papers in refereed conferences and journals in the areas of operating systems, networking, and computer security. He has developed several innovative security systems/products in the past several years, including SEES (Secure Mobile Code Execution Service), PAID (Program Semantics-Aware Intrusion Detection), DOFS (Display-Only File Server), and CASH.
Black Hat Briefings, Las Vegas 2005 [Audio] Presentations from the security conference
The ability to check memory references against their associated array/buffer bounds helps programmers to detect programming errors involving address overruns early on and thus avoid many difficult bugs down the line. Because such programming errors have been the targets of remote attacks, i.e., buffer overflow attack, prevention of array bound violation is essential for the security and robustness of application programs that provide service on the Internet. This talk proposes a novel approach called CASH to the array bound checking problem that exploits the segmentation feature in the virtual memory hardware of the X86 architecture. The CASH approach allocates a separate segment to each static array or dynamically allocated buffer, and generates the instructions for array references in such a way that the segment limit check in X86's virtual memory protection mechanism performs the necessary array bound checking for free. In those cases that hardware bound checking is not possible, it falls back to software bound checking. As a result, CASH does not need to pay per-reference software checking overhead in most cases. However, the CASH approach incurs a fixed set-up overhead for each use of an array, which may involve multiple array references. The existence of this overhead requires compiler writers to judiciously apply the proposed technique to minimize the performance cost of array bound checking. This talk will describe the detailed design and implementation of the CASH compiler, and a comprehensive evaluation of various performance tradeoffs associated with the proposed array bound checking technique. For the set of production-grade network applications we tested, including Apache, Sendmail, Bind, etc., the latency penalty of CASH's bound checking mechanism is between 2.5% to 9.8% when compared with the baseline case that does not perform any bound checking. Dr. Tzi-cker Chiueh is a Professor in the Computer Science Department of Stony Brook University, and the Chief Scientist of Rether Networks Inc. He received his B.S. in EE from National Taiwan University, M.S. in CS from Stanford University, and Ph.D. in CS from University of California at Berkeley in 1984, 1988, and 1992, respectively. He received an NSF CAREER award in 1995, and has published over 130 technical papers in refereed conferences and journals in the areas of operating systems, networking, and computer security. He has developed several innovative security systems/products in the past several years, including SEES (Secure Mobile Code Execution Service), PAID (Program Semantics-Aware Intrusion Detection), DOFS (Display-Only File Server), and CASH.
Cryptology is typically defined as cryptography (the construction of cryptographic algorithms) and cryptanalysis (attacks on these algorithms). Both are important, but the latter is more fun. Cryptographic hash functions are one of the core building blocks within both security protocols and other application domains. In the last few decades a wealth of these functions have been developed, but the two in most widespread usage are MD5 and SHA1. Recently, there has been a great deal of activity regarding the cryptanalysis of MD5. We survey the recent attacks on the MD5 hash function from the modest progress in the mid 90s to the startling recent results instigated by Xiaoyun Wang. We will look at the details of these attacks, some recent improvements, two applications, and discuss the current outlook on cryptographic hashing. About the speaker: John Black is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Black's research interests lie primarily in cryptography and cryptanalysis, particularly in the construction of fast and provably-secure algorithms and in the analysis of cryptography applied to networks and computer systems. Dr. Black received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Davis in 2000. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and a check from Donald Knuth for $2.56.
Quantum criticality, high-temperature superconductors, single-molecule electronics, magnetic transistors. Professor Qimiao Si works in the field of theoretical condensed matter physics. He is particularly well known for his theory of quantum criticality. Professor Si is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He has published more than 70 scientific articles and has given over 140 invited talks on his research. Professor Doug Natelson is a condensed matter experimentalist, with research interests largely focused on electronic and magnetic investigations of nanostructured systems. Professor Natelson received an NSF CAREER award in 2004. He has published more than 30 scientific articles, and has given more than 50 invited talks on his research.
Quantum criticality, high-temperature superconductors, single-molecule electronics, magnetic transistors. Professor Qimiao Si works in the field of theoretical condensed matter physics. He is particularly well known for his theory of quantum criticality. Professor Si is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He has published more than 70 scientific articles and has given over 140 invited talks on his research. Professor Doug Natelson is a condensed matter experimentalist, with research interests largely focused on electronic and magnetic investigations of nanostructured systems. Professor Natelson received an NSF CAREER award in 2004. He has published more than 30 scientific articles, and has given more than 50 invited talks on his research.