Category Archives: Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science Executive Education and TalentSprint to create global DevOps experts – Business Wire
BENGALURU, India--(BUSINESS WIRE)--TalentSprint, a global edtech company and a market leader in transformational deeptech programs, today announced a multi-year and multi-program partnership with Carnegie Mellon Universitys (CMU) School of Computer Science (SCS), Executive & Professional Education Worlds #1 Computer Science School. The Advanced Certificate Program in DevOps, first to be launched under this partnership, aims at fulfilling a growing need for new-age DevOps professionals in the APAC region.
Most impacted by digital transformation, industries like BFSI, IT, Healthcare, Retail, Media and Entertainment are creating enormous opportunities for DevOps specialists globally. These market dynamics positions CMUs well-researched Advanced Certificate Program in DevOps as a significant addition in the upskilling journey of the aspirants.
On this prestigious association, Santanu Paul, CEO of TalentSprint, said This partnership has further strengthened our presence in the United States. CMUs School of Computer Science is iconic and this association is a validation of our success in path-breaking programs with leading institutes and global tech organizations in India and the US. Our first program with CMU aims at creating world-class DevOps specialists.
Commenting on the launch, Ram Konduru, Director of Executive Education at the CMU-SCS said, We were exploring international markets like India, Middle East and Southeast Asian markets that have a growing demand for tech professionals. We wanted to collaborate with a serious edtech company that could align with our core competencies and help us reach out to new geographies. We are happy to announce our association with TalentSprint and launch our first program in DevOps.
The Advanced Certificate Program in DevOps will help participants with in-depth knowledge of various new-age DevOps tools. The 6-month high-impact program, designed and taught by the expert faculty of CMU-SCS, who are globally renowned thought leaders in DevOps such as Professor Len Bass, and research scientists Hasan Yassar and Joseph Yankel. On successful completion, participants will receive CMUs globally recognized certificate. The program will be delivered on TalentSprints digital platform ipearl.ai. Applications for this program are open. To know more, applicants can visit the Program page cmu.talentsprint.com/devops
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Improving accessibility on campus – Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Sarika Chawla, A.B. '23 and co-founder of the Harvard Undergraduate Disability Justice Club.
Getting into Harvard shouldve been a joyous moment for Sarika Chawla, now a rising fourth-year computer science student at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). Instead, Chawla, who uses a wheelchair, found the experience marred by ableist comments about her acceptance.
Talk spread throughout the school and the community, among many students and parents, that I had only gotten into Harvard because of my wheelchair and not on my merit, she said. That really hurt, and it made me realize how much ableism is ingrained in our society.
That experience could have devastated Chawla, but instead she used it as inspiration to be an activist for the disabled community. As a high school senior, she gave a TEDx talk on changing the perceptions of disability, and upon arrival at Harvard quickly joined the Harvard College Disability Alliance.
When that club disbanded, Chawla and several other former members founded the Harvard Undergraduate Disability Justice Club (HUDJ) at the beginning of the 2021-22 school year.
It was a cause that I wanted to fight for because it not only affects my life, but so many peoples lives, she said. At the very least I want to raise awareness and stop all this ignorance.
Last year, HUDJ offered multiple in-person and remote programs. In the fall, it held a series of group discussions on disability-related issues to create, in Chawlas words, a safe space where other disabled people could talk about their experiences with each other and also find people they could relate to. In the spring, programming expanded to social gatherings and conversations with disabled people working in Hollywood and the federal government.
The club has even bigger plans for this coming school year, including regular meetings with administrative teams at Harvard to address issues such as COVID and fire safety policies for disabled students, the accessible van service, and accessibility considerations for the ongoing dorm renovation project. HUDJ is even considering a comedy night featuring disabled comedians. Chawla also wants to encourage more academic programming in disabled studies, building on HIST15M: Disability in American History, which will be offered in the fall.
That new course is really great, she said. Were looking forward to that, and we hope to use that to push this campaign forward even more and show theres a need, demand and interest for disability studies at Harvard.
Beyond serving as co-president and co-founder, Chawlas specific responsibilities with HUDJ include managing its social media channels, sharing content created by disabled members of the Harvard community, and building on the same advocacy strategy she has used with her personal social media channels.
Im still very much a social media activist, because thats a good way to reach a lot of people, she said. I can share not only my experiences, but the experiences of those with different disabilities than me. When COVID hit, social media activism was even more important, because we couldnt go anywhere.
Chawla puts her computer science education to work as manager of the HUDJ website. Before Harvard, she considered studying biology and spent one summer interning at an MIT research lab. That lab experience helped her reframe how she saw her disability, as she said in her TEDx talk, but it also clarified some of the challenges she might face as a biology major.
Physically, biology was not the most accessible choice, she said. There were so many things I couldnt reach, or Id have to carry a beaker with one hand and wheel with my other hand, and it wasnt the safest situation. So, I wanted to do something that was more accessible, as well as something that aligned more with my interests. Senior year I took AP java, and I really liked the coding and logic of that class. My parents also studied computer science in college, and because of those things and because computer science is accessible, it made me decide on CS.
This summer, Chawla is working as a software development engineering intern at Amazon.
Between the Disability Alliance disbanding and COVID forcing students into remote learning, Chawla needed several years to really find the disabled community on campus. Through her efforts, the HUDJ email list has already grown into the triple digits, and will hopefully continue to grow next year.
The disability community really grew during my junior year, and I think it was in part because the incoming freshman class had a lot more disabled people than normal, she said. It really grew from there once we all found each other. I have now found a disabled community at Harvard, and its been really fulfilling.
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Improving accessibility on campus - Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Quincy College to offer bachelors degree in computer science – The Boston Globe
Students at Quincy College can soon earn a four-year degree in computer science.
The Massachusetts Department of Higher Education recently approved the Bachelor of Science degree, which also needs sign-off from the New England Commission of Higher Education. The college plans to begin enrolling students in the program in January of 2023, according to a statement.
Its the second time the two-year college has been approved to grant a four-year degree.
Quincy College received permission to offer a Bachelor of Science degree in business management in 2021, and has been enrolling students in that program since January of 2022.
This is an example of building on success, said Servet Yatin, the colleges provost and chief academic officer. After the successful launch of our bachelors in science in business management, we owed it to our students and our community to expand our baccalaureate offerings into the high-demand computer science field.
She added that the two programs were designed to be complementary and to multiply students opportunities in the job market.
According to the statement, wages for people with four-year degrees in computer science ranged from $91,470 to $121,7000, with thousands of open positions in the state.
Quincy College President Richard DeCristofaro said scholarships will be available for students to participate in the program.
We continue to be committed to the ideals of access and affordability, and are equally committed to making the dream of a bachelors degree a reality for increasing numbers of students, he said.
Quincy College offers 37 associate degrees and 27 certificate programs. Founded in 1958, it is a municipally affiliated college serving approximately 3,500 students at campuses in Quincy and Plymouth.
Johanna Seltz can be reached at seltzjohanna@gmail.com.
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Quincy College to offer bachelors degree in computer science - The Boston Globe
The ambitious quest to map every cell in our body – BBC
So to tackle the issue, a consortium of scientists (co-led by Teichmann as part of the as part of the Human Cell Atlas project) analysed around 70,000 cells from the placenta and lining of the womb from women who had terminated their pregnancy at between six and 14 weeks.
The placenta is the organ where nutrients and gases pass back and forth between the mother and developing baby. It was once thought the mother's immune system must be switched off in the lining of the womb where the placenta embeds, so that the placenta and foetus weren't attacked for being "alien" (like an unmatched transplant) on account of half the foetus's genes coming from the father. But this view turned out to be wrong or too simple at the very least.
We now know, from a variety of experiments including this analysis, that in the womb, the activity of the mother's immune cells is somewhat lessened, presumably to prevent an adverse reaction against cells from the foetus, but the immune system is not switched off. Instead, the immune cells we met earlier, natural killer cells, well known for killing infected cells or cancer cells, take on a completely different, more constructive job in the womb: helping build the placenta.
Furthermore, the scientists' analysis of 70,000 cells has highlighted that all sorts of other immune cells are also important in the construction of a placenta. What they all do, though, isn't yet clear this is at the edge of our knowledge.
Muzlifah Haniffa, a professor in dermatology and immunology at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Newcastle University Biosciences Institute in the UK is one of the three women who led this analysis. Haniffa sees the body from two perspectives on an almost daily basis: as a computational analysis of cells on a screen, and as patients who walk through the door. Both as stones and the arch they make.
Right now, these two views don't easily mesh. But in time, they will. In the future, Haniffa thinks the tools doctors use on a daily basis such as a stethoscope to listen to a person's lungs, or a simple blood count will be replaced by instruments that profile our body's cells. Algorithms will analyse the results, clarify the underlying problem, and predict the best treatment. Other physicians agree with her this has to be what is coming in the future of healthcare.
What this could mean for you
Babies are now routinely born by IVF, organ transplants have become common, and cancer survival rates in the UK have roughly doubled in recent years but all these achievements are nothing to what's coming.
As I've written about in The Secret Body, progress in human biology is accelerating at an unprecedented rate not only through the Human Cell Atlas project but in many other areas too. Analysis of our genes presents a new understanding of how we differ the actions of brain cells give clues to how our minds work; new structures found inside our cells lead to new ideas for medicine; proteins and other molecules found to be circulating in our blood change our view of mental health.
Of course, all science has an ever-increasing impact on our lives, but nothing affects us as deeply or directly as new revelations about the human body. On the horizon now, from all this research, are entirely new ways of defining, screening and manipulating health.
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How to help assembly-line robots shift gears and pick up almost anything – University of Washington
Engineering | News releases | Research | Technology
July 28, 2022
A University of Washington team created a new tool that can design a 3D-printable passive gripper and calculate the best path to pick up an object. The researchers tested this system on a suite of 22 objects, which are shown here.University of Washington
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, car manufacturing companies such as Ford quickly shifted their production focus from automobiles to masks and ventilators.
To make this switch possible, these companies relied on people working on an assembly line. It would have been too challenging for a robot to make this transition because robots are tied to their usual tasks.
Theoretically, a robot could pick up almost anything if its grippers could be swapped out for each task. To keep costs down, these grippers could be passive, meaning grippers pick up objects without changing shape, similar to how the tongs on a forklift work.
A University of Washington team created a new tool that can design a 3D-printable passive gripper and calculate the best path to pick up an object. The team tested this system on a suite of 22 objects including a 3D-printed bunny, a doorstop-shaped wedge, a tennis ball and a drill. The designed grippers and paths were successful for 20 of the objects. Two of these were the wedge and a pyramid shape with a curved keyhole. Both shapes are challenging for multiple types of grippers to pick up.
The team will present these findings Aug. 11 at SIGGRAPH 2022.
We still produce most of our items with assembly lines, which are really great but also very rigid. The pandemic showed us that we need to have a way to easily repurpose these production lines, said senior author Adriana Schulz, a UW assistant professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Our idea is to create custom tooling for these manufacturing lines. That gives us a very simple robot that can do one task with a specific gripper. And then when I change the task, I just replace the gripper.
Passive grippers cant adjust to fit the object theyre picking up, so traditionally, objects have been designed to match a specific gripper.
The most successful passive gripper in the world is the tongs on a forklift. But the trade-off is that forklift tongs only work well with specific shapes, such as pallets, which means anything you want to grip needs to be on a pallet, said co-author Jeffrey Lipton, UW assistant professor of mechanical engineering. Here were saying OK, we dont want to predefine the geometry of the passive gripper. Instead, we want to take the geometry of any object and design a gripper.
For any given object, there are many possibilities for what its gripper could look like. In addition, the grippers shape is linked to the path the robot arm takes to pick up the object. If designed incorrectly, a gripper could crash into the object en route to picking it up. To address this challenge, the researchers had a few key insights.
The points where the gripper makes contact with the object are essential for maintaining the objects stability in the grasp. We call this set of points the grasp configuration,' said lead author Milin Kodnongbua, who completed this research as a UW undergraduate student in the Allen School. Also, the gripper must contact the object at those given points, and the gripper must be a single solid object connecting the contact points to the robot arm. We can search for an insert trajectory that satisfies these requirements.
One of the objects was a blue 3D-printed bunny.University of Washington
When designing a new gripper and trajectory, the team starts by providing the computer with a 3D model of the object and its orientation in space how it would be presented on a conveyor belt, for example.
First our algorithm generates possible grasp configurations and ranks them based on stability and some other metrics, Kodnongbua said. Then it takes the best option and co-optimizes to find if an insert trajectory is possible. If it cannot find one, then it goes to the next grasp configuration on the list and tries to do the co-optimization again.
Once the computer has found a good match, it outputs two sets of instructions: one for a 3D printer to create the gripper and one with the trajectory for the robot arm once the gripper is printed and attached.
The team chose a variety of objects to test the power of the method, including some from a data set of objects that are the standard for testing a robots ability to do manipulation tasks.
We also designed objects that would be challenging for traditional grasping robots, such as objects with very shallow angles or objects with internal grasping where you have to pick them up with the insertion of a key, said co-author Ian Good, a UW doctoral student in the mechanical engineering department.
Play this video to see how a gripper can pick up one of the challenging shapes: a 3D-printed wedge. Credit: University of Washington
The researchers performed 10 test pickups with 22 shapes. For 16 shapes, all 10 pickups were successful. While most shapes had at least one successful pickup, two did not. These failures resulted from issues with the 3D models of the objects that were given to the computer. For one a bowl the model described the sides of the bowl as thinner than they were. For the other an object that looks like a cup with an egg-shaped handle the model did not have its correct orientation.
The algorithm developed the same gripping strategies for similarly shaped objects, even without any human intervention. The researchers hope that this means they will be able to create passive grippers that could pick up a class of objects, instead of having to have a unique gripper for each object.
One limitation of this method is that passive grippers cant be designed to pick up all objects. While its easier to pick up objects that vary in width or have protruding edges, objects with uniformly smooth surfaces, such as a water bottle or a box, are tough to grasp without any moving parts.
Still, the researchers were encouraged to see the algorithm do so well, especially with some of the more difficult shapes, such as a column with a keyhole at the top.
Play this video to see how a gripper can pick up the column with a keyhole at the top. Credit: University of Washington
The path that our algorithm came up with for that one is a rapid acceleration down to where it gets really close to the object. It looked like it was going to smash into the object, and I thought, Oh no. What if we didnt calibrate it right?' said Good. And then of course it gets incredibly close and then picks it up perfectly. It was this awe-inspiring moment, an extreme roller coaster of emotion.
Yu Lou, who completed this research as a masters student in the Allen School, is also a co-author on this paper. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation and a grant from the Murdock Charitable Trust. The team has also submitted a patent application: 63/339,284.
For more information, contact Kodnongbua at milink@cs.washington.edu, Lipton at jilipton@uw.edu, Schulz at adriana@cs.washington.edu, Good at iangood@uw.edu and Lou at louyu27@cs.washington.edu.
Grant number: EEC 2035717
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How to help assembly-line robots shift gears and pick up almost anything - University of Washington
What Women Should Know Before Joining the Cybersecurity Industry – DARKReading
I speak to women in the cybersecurity industry almost every single day, from our own security team, to prospective candidates, female CISOs, and security professionals at our customers' organizations. I ask them all some version of the same question: What do you wish every woman thinking about a career in cybersecurity knew?
After dozens if not hundreds of these conversations, there are three themes that I hear time and time again as the most important things to know for women when evaluating the cybersecurity profession.
Women still are underrepresented in software engineering and IT. And many times, cybersecurity gets lumped together with those, and with that comes the belief that it requires the same skills. And that's simply not the case. At the core, the job of cybersecurity teams is to assess, prioritize, and work to resolve risks; nothing in there requires a STEM background or understanding of software engineering.
Sure, these risks might related to code a developer wrote, or a cloud environment the IT team deployed, but reviewing alerts, assessing the impact to the business and the potential risk, and determining the appropriate course of action those arenot things that require a security professional to be a developer or to moonlight in IT. Computer science skills and backgrounds aren't a barrier to the cybersecurity profession we're a business function, not a technical one.
Over the last few years, we've seen more and more essential services, critical infrastructure, and leisure activities move online. This transformation has changed how we all work and live, and brought every aspect of modern business into the digital world, no matter what team you're on.
Software engineering teams creating new applications, hardware teams developing new mobile and virtual-reality devices, IT and DevOps teams building and maintaining cloud infrastructure, sales and marketing teams using all of these resources to track customer interactions and business metrics everyone has a piece of the digital pie.
If you're on a cybersecurity team, you're tasked with keeping all these teams safe, each and every day. But this isn't something you can do alone. You need help from all of them in order to deliver that protection. This can be anything from asking a team to change their process to support a better security outcome, to requesting a sudden change in priorities to address a critical risk.
Getting this help requires an investment in building relationships, finding the right communication styles for different teams or peers, and focusing on working together to help everyone be safer. Without investments in these skills, you'll find yourself siloed from the very people you're trying to protect every day.
Look, there's no denying cybersecurity is still a male dominated industry. In 2013, women were a mere 11% of the industry. But we're changing that every single day. Today, women are a quarter of the cybersecurity workforce. It took seven years to go from 11% to 20%, but only two years to go from there to 25%. We're closing the gender gap in cybersecurity faster than ever, across all aspects of the organization. And we're doing it together.
There are great organizations and programs out there that champion equality and diversity in cybersecurity, fromWomen in Cybersecurity (WiCyS) andWomen's Society of Cyberjutsu (WSC), to organizations like Cyersity that support all underrepresented groups in the industry. The SANS Institute has an immersion course for women career-changers and college students looking to learn more. There's a plethora of tools, groups, and resources to support you in your journey every step of the way. You won't be alone and every step you take helps us all.
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What Women Should Know Before Joining the Cybersecurity Industry - DARKReading
Quantum bits that exist in two time dimensions – Advanced Science News
Extra time dimensions provide scientists with a new way to think about phases of matter for more stable qubits and robust quantum computers.
Quantum computers are built using qubits, the quantum analogs of classical bits, the function of which is based on two fundamental phenomena at the heart of quantum computing: quantum entanglement and the principle of superposition.
Superposition allows a qubit to exist as both a 0 and 1, unlike a bit, which can only take on one of these values, where entanglement leads to the subtle interactions a type of linking between qubits. Physically, qubits can be realized in a number of ways, for example, as photons with two different polarizations or ions trapped and controlled by electric field.
As a result, these machines are far superior to their conventional counterparts in solving specific types of problems, like analyzing data, simulating drug interactions, or optimizing supply chain logistics. But there is an obstacle to unlocking their full potential: maintaining stable qubits, which are crucial to running a functioning quantum computer, has proven quite the challenge.
These devices are extremely sensitive to external noise and even certain interactions between qubits, which forces them to fall out of their fragile quantum states. As a result, a fully functioning quantum computer has been very hard to build.
Even if you keep all the atoms under tight control, they can lose their quantumness by talking to their environment, heating up, or interacting with things in ways you didnt plan, said Philipp Dumitrescu of Flatiron Institutes Center for Computational Quantum Physics in New York City in an interview.
Dumitrescu is part of a new experimental study published in Nature, where he and his collaborators were able to better preserve the quantum states of qubits based on a previous theory put forth by a group of physicists, which included Demitrescu, Andrew Potter of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Romain Wasser of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Ajesh Kumar of the University of Texas, Austin.
It is known that the interaction of qubits with a periodic electromagnetic pulse, similar to a radio wave, can make the quantum state of qubits more stable. By mathematically analyzing the interaction of qubits with different light pulses without restricting themselves to periodic shape, the theorists derived that a special shape to the pulse could make them more robust. According to the teams computations, the shape should be non-repeating, though ordered, such as the patterns of Penrose tiling in mathematics (feature image) and quasicrystals in physics.
With this quasi-periodic sequence, theres a complicated evolution that cancels out all the errors that live on the edge [or boundary of a system, which in the present case is one-dimensional with point-like boundaries], added Dumitrescu. Because of that, the edge stays quantum-mechanically coherent much, much longer than youd expect.
Their calculations showed that when ions at the ends of a chain of entangled qubits were radiated with the pulse, they retained their quantum properties much longer than without it. This effect was due to the fact that the mathematical description of this pair was as if they lived in one additional time dimension.
[Using an extra time dimension] is a completely different way of thinking about phases of matter, said Dumitrescu. Ive been working on these theory ideas for over five years and seeing them come actually to be realized in experiments is exciting.
To test this prediction, a group of experimentalists led by Brian Neyenhuis of Honeywell Quantum Solutions used Honeywells H1 quantum computer based on ten ytterbium ions.
They shined two laser pulse sequences at the qubits: the first sequence was periodic and the second, the one proposed by the theorists. In the periodic case, the edge qubits preserved the necessary entangled quantum state for around 1.5 seconds, which is very impressive for a quantum computer. But with the quasi-periodic pattern, the qubits stayed in their quantum states throughout the entire experiment, which lasted about 5.5 seconds.
This result demonstrates that the newly discovered qubit state can serve as a more solid foundation for quantum computing. However, researchers still need to understand how to incorporate their discovery into the real quantum computer algorithms.
Such an impressive result has been achieved for a one-dimensional system, but theorists predicted that higher-dimensional quantum systems could be even more error-resilient. The authors of the present study hope that their work will be an important step towards the practical realization of these theoretical studies.
Reference: Philipp T. Dumitrescu, et al., Dynamical topological phase realized in a trapped-ion quantum simulator, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04853-4
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Quantum bits that exist in two time dimensions - Advanced Science News
DiscoverU Harnesses Interdisciplinary Cooperation to Create Mental Health Solution for Youths – University of Denver Newsroom
In its 2022 evaluations of the state of mental health in the U.S., Mental Health America ranks Colorado poorly for access to mental health services, a shortcoming amplified for those of lesser means.
DiscoverU seeks to change that. A project spearheaded by the University of Denvers Graduate School of Professional Psychology (GSPP) and built out by students and faculty from the Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science with market analysis from the Daniels College of Business, it targets teenagers and young adults with a telehealth application and virtual clinic that offers Colorado-themed journeys accessible from anywhere with cell phone service. For young people needing more, the app, scheduled to debut this fall, offers the option for in-person support. Long-term plans call for social support opportunities, building a broader audience and expanding into metro areas across the state.
Shelly Smith-Acua, outgoing dean of GSPP, says the project highlights interdisciplinary work and cooperation among large groups of community members in multiple colleges at the University.
The DiscoverU team has done an amazing job in bringing together expertise in computer science, professional psychology and business to build a very relevant, much-needed product, she says. This project combines the Universitys goals of supporting interdisciplinary work and serving the public good.I have been really impressed with the creativity that has emerged through this teamwork.
Development began with GSPP faculty and doctoral students formulating the journeys, or learning modules, which touch on everything from grief and loss to anxiety and anger management. Early on, the team opted to deliver these journeys via a cell phone app, which not only offers a lower barrier to entry than visiting a clinic, but also provides a more distraction-rich environment. DiscoverU must capture the young person with its content, while not feeding into addictive, gaming or completionist tendencies.
Professor and DU alumna Vicki Tomlin (PhD 94), a longtime K-12 school psychologist, says the target audience of 12- to 21-year-olds makes the platform obvious.
We know that adolescents are very familiar with their phones, and they use them a lot, she says, so why not provide mental health within a vehicle where adolescents are constantly engaged?
DiscoverU feeds into GSPPs broad outreach goals, says professor Laurie Ivey, the PsyD placement director for GSPP. The schools Professional Psychology Clinic offers LGBTQIA-affirming and culturally sensitive services and treatment to a range of clients demonstrating financial need. The clinic not only accepts patients on Medicare and Medicaid, it also applies a sliding-scale system for uninsured patients. And now, thanks to DiscoverU, it can reach a notoriously hard-to-reach population.
With adolescentsespecially underserved adolescentsthat was a gap in our service, she says. This helps address that.
Engaging content and easy access are important but could be rendered useless without strong visuals. Thats why the GSPP team met with a group from the Ritchie School to make their conceptual journeys a reality.
GSPP postdoctoral fellow Kelly Lavin, the project coordinator on DiscoverU, says the marriage of content to app resulted from a thoughtful process that incorporated multiple disciplines and dozens of people, with the ultimate goal of engaging users without hooking them on the app.
We recognize that theres so much developmental growth that goes on in that timespan, and the content and journeys that the psych team are putting together are really relevant topics that this population might be going through. But it needs to be coupled with the computer sciences and the work of how you really engage folks with this information and how you keep them engaged long-term in a way thats healthy. If theres an exemplar of teamwork, its DiscoverU.
At the Ritchie School, professors Dan Pittman and Kerstin Haring, along with graduate teaching assistant Lombe Chileshe, led a team of four software engineering students, with several classes contributing across the development cycle. The work mimicked a professional environment, with students participating in coding sprints and working with GSPP team members, much as they would with a professional client.
Pittman says the projects funding allowed for sustained, interdisciplinary work that gave students marketable, resume-building experience.
A lot of computer science can be theoretical, Pittman says. This not only provides experience, but it teaches them about meaningful, for-the-public-good applications of what they can use computer science for.
With much of the coding and content in place, the development team hopes to launch a beta version of the app over the summer.
Izzy Johnson (BS 22), who served as lead on the projects user experience design team, echoes her former professor and says the work between departments was both challenging and fulfilling.
Every week that we met, we got a little bit closer to speaking the same language, Johnson says. We really wanted to take all this important information and present it in a way that the psych team sees it and the way they conceive it, while also putting it into a workable app.
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Duke Announces Winners of the 2022 DST Spark Seed Grants – Duke Today
The Office for Research and Innovation has awarded funding to nine best-in-class projects for the inaugural Duke Science and Technology (DST) Spark Seed Grant program. This years winners include early- to mid-career faculty from across campus and the School of Medicine who were selected from a pool of 52 finalists for delivering innovative and creative ideas in pursuit of new directions and the enhancement of research and scholarship at Duke.
As new scientific discoveries and breakthroughs continue to surface at Duke, were excited by the novel ideas that our faculty have for tackling the worlds most pressing challenges through research said Jenny Lodge, Dukes vice president for Research & Innovation. The proposals of this years DST Spark Seed Grants winners embody how research can improve lives and we look forward to each PIs accomplishments over the next year.
BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING
Project: Enabling Unbiased Discovery of Force-Sensitive Protein-Protein InteractionsPI: Brenton Hoffman, James L. and Elizabeth M. Vincent Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Brenton Hoffman studies how the cells of the body respond to getting squished or stretched. His team has developed a variety of sensors that measure, on a molecular level, the effect ofsuch forces on specific proteins and their function in living cells. But proteins rarely act alone. With support from a DST Spark Seed Grant, he plans to create technologies that will make it possible, for the first time, to understand how mechanical forces influence the networks of proteins that team up in the molecular machinery of the cell. Hoffman says the work could lead to new treatments for conditions such as cancer and heart disease.
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES ANDPOLICY
Project: New Dimensions in Tropical Ecology: Megafaunal Effects on Biogeochemical Cycling in 3-DPI: John Poulsen, Associate Professor of Tropical Ecology
John Poulsen, an associate professor of tropical ecology, will be using terrestrial lidar scanning to measure forest structure in areas of Gabon that are with and without forest elephants in an attempt to measure the influence large animals have on carbon capture. Two years later, the same measurements will be repeated. The analysis will build connections with faculty in economics and computer science to quantify the value and impact of large herbivores on climate change dynamics.
MARINE SCIENCE AND CONSERVATION
Project: Revenue Positive Carbon Dioxide Removal Enabled by Carbonate Conversion and Marine Algae BioproductsPI: Zackary Johnson, Associate Professor of Molecular Biology in Marine Science
To combat global warming, we need techniques that suck up greenhouse gases, and Dukes Zackary Johnson envisions a way to do that: with tiny algae from the ocean. Johnson has been working on a project to capture carbon dioxide from the smokestacks of power plants and convert it into bicarbonate, which is then added to marine algae to boost their growth. Johnson says that the algae-based system could in turn provide heat, electricity and as much protein as soybeans making them a potential source of animal feed that wouldnt compete for farmland or freshwater. His method is still in the demonstration phase, but the DST Spark Seed Grant will help him take the concept from the lab and show whether it could be commercially viable at larger scales.
BIOSTATISTICS ANDBIOINFORMATICS
Project: Using Deep Learning To Train a Single-molecule DNA Sequencer to Accurately Identify DNA LesionsPI: Raluca Gordan, Associate Professor of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics, Computer Science, and Molecular Genetics and Microbiology
Raluca Gordan is developing machine learning techniques for sequencing damaged DNA, which standard DNA sequencing technologies cant handle. She hopes to use these techniques to better understand how proteins bind to damaged sites within the human genome and inhibit their repair, and whether this binding process gives rise to mutations that can lead to diseases such as cancer.
CELL BIOLOGY
Project: Synchronized Clocks in Zebrafish PatterningPI: Stefano Di Talia, Associate Professor of Cell Biology and Orthopaedics
Stefano Di Talia, an associate professor of cell biology, will be studying oscillations in the activity of a kinase protein called Erk, which appears to be the timekeeper that signals regular patterning of vertebral segments in a developing zebrafishs spine. His group has recently discovered that Erk activity oscillates across the entire notochord and dictates the time at which precursors of the vertebrae begin to form. The group hopes to establish which mechanism controls the Erk oscillations and build enough data from this work in zebrafish to secure greater grant funding.
MOLECULAR GENETICS AND MICROBIOLOGY
Project: Interrogating Subcellular Gene Expression in the Developing BrainPI: Debra Silver, Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology, Cell Biology, and Neurobiology
Debra Silver, an associate professor of molecular genetics and microbiology, will be studying the localization of messenger RNA and localized gene translation in nervous system cells. These processes are key to guiding new connections in a developing brain and are particularly focused in just one part of neural progenitor cells. The project will be trying to develop a new technology to measure and control gene expression in just one part of the cell. Developing a new technology is not typically funded by NIH, but mastering the technique could open up many new grant opportunities and be valuable for understanding local gene expression in systems beyond the brain.
NEPHROLOGY
Project: Harnessing Female Resilience Factors to Promote Renal RepairPI: Tomokazu Souma, Assistant Professor of Medicine
Tomokazu Souma, MD, an assistant professor of nephrology and affiliate of the Duke Regeneration Center, will be using human-derived kidney organoids organs in a dish to identify new therapies to improve kidney repair and regeneration. Specifically, his lab hopes to follow up on a recent finding that females have greater resistance to acute kidney injury. They would like to see if these female resistance factors could be harnessed to treat kidney disease.
BIOLOGY
Project: Integration of Metabolomics and Proteomics Platforms To Resolve Rad6 Roles in Energy Production and Stress ResistancePI: Gustavo Silva, Assistant Professor of Biology
Gustavo Silva, an assistant professor of biology, will be building on his earlier findings in yeast and human cells to better understand the cells response to oxidative stress an overabundance of reactive oxygen molecules. His group identified new links between protein synthesis and energy production during stress, and the elucidation of this process requires tracking changes in the abundance of specific metabolites, which is a completely new direction for his lab. The Spark grant should help them develop new technologies and gather sufficient information for follow-up grant applications.
Project: K-12 Educational Inequality and Public Policy PreferencesPI: Sarah Komisarow, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Economics
When it comes to school funding, education policy expert Sarah Komisarow says more U.S. school districts are considering a new formula: one based on the needs of students. The idea is that some students have more needs than others, and schools that serve students with greater needs -- because they are learning English, or living with a disability, for example -- should get more funds. The DST Spark Seed Grant will allow Komisarow to collect much-needed data on how information about educational inequality affects peoples preferences for different K-12 spending policies, including equity-based approaches that direct more financial resources to disadvantaged students.
To learn more about the Duke Science and Technology (DST) Spark Seed Grant winners, visit research.duke.edu.
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Duke Announces Winners of the 2022 DST Spark Seed Grants - Duke Today
Georgia State Tops Last Year’s Record Fundraising and Sets New Single-Year Mark with $107.7 Million in FY22 – Georgia State University News
ATLANTA Georgia State Universitys supporters powered the institution to a new one-year fundraising record of $107.7 million in the fiscal year that ended June 30.
More than 8,300 donors contributed during the period from July 1, 2021 through June 30, 2022, helping Georgia State surpass its previous one-year fundraising record of $66.7 million set last fiscal year.
I am delighted that through their generosity, our alumni, faculty, staff, students and friends, in record numbers, have demonstrated their commitment to Georgia States mission. This record level of benefaction reflects their and our belief that not only is Georgia State University the place to be, but also that nurturing Panther potential is a great investment, said M. Brian Blake, president of Georgia State University. Their gifts will further fuel our efforts to build on our nationally recognized student success efforts, continue our meteoric growth as a world-class research institute, enhance career readiness and opportunity for all Panthers and create first-of-their-kind campus communities.
Georgia State established new single year fundraising records in gifts and total dollars to the endowment, total number and dollars raised from planned gifts, and funds raised for new scholarships and programmatic support. There was a significant increase in funds raised to create and name endowed professorships, including five newly named in the College of Arts & Sciences.
Georgia State has set new fundraising benchmarks each of the last two years because of the generosity of our supporters both individuals and our corporate and foundation partners and their trust in our mission and belief in our future, said Jay Kahn, vice president of advancement and president of the Georgia State Foundation. Were grateful for the commitment of our donors and thank them for helping us finish President Blakes first year stronger than ever, with significantly increased giving to our endowment and more scholarship and programmatic support for more students than ever before.
The university also set a single-year record for donations from local and national corporations and foundations. Notable gifts include: a $23.6 million gift to fund apartnership between the university and Grady Health System aimed at combatting the national nursing shortage; $5 million from Snap Inc. to the College of Education and Human Development to establish the Snap Inc. Center for Computer and Teacher Education, which will increase diversity in the computer science education field and integrate computer science across curriculums; more than $500,000 from the Mellon Foundation to the universitys Center for Studies on Africa and its Diaspora for a program studying intersectionality and the South; almost $500,000 from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to create the Math Path program, aimed at boosting the pipeline of graduate students in STEM fields from underrepresented groups; and $300,000 from the American Family Insurance Institute for Corporate and Social Impact to expand the Georgia State Prison Education Project and support the Place and Race initiative in the College of Arts & Sciences.
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