Category Archives: Computer Science
Faculty Highlights: Recent Grants and Awards | Now – Drexel Now
Last term, Drexel University faculty were recognized for their scholarly research and professional contributions and recognitions. This update offers a snapshot of recent activity, courtesy of the Office of the Provost.
Sponsored Research
Gwen Ottinger, PhD, associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, was awarded a $220,428 grant from the Sloan Foundation to support her project Open Science Hardware practice: Transforming the Politics of Scientific Knowledge Production.
Ezra Wood, PhD, associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences, received a two-year grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for his project Quantification of Ozone Formation Rates in Upper Manhattan. This project is part of a multi-investigator study on air quality in densely populated coastal cities.
College of Computing & Informatics faculty Christopher MacLellan, PhD, assistant professor; Rosina Weber, PhD, associate professor; and Edward Kim, PhD, associate professor, received $999,999 from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to study sparse coding and extraction of ultrasound knowledge for explainable point-of-care ultrasound Artificial Intelligence.
Vasilis Gkatzelis, PhD, assistant professor in the College of Computing & Informatics, received a prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program Award of $599,782 under the title of Optimal Mechanism Design without Monetary Transfers.
Rajashi Ghosh, PhD, associate professor and chair for Policy, Organization and Leadership in the School of Education received a grant of $307,000 from the National Science Foundation to support her research project titled, Towards a Theory of Engineering Identity Development & Persistence of Minoritized Students with Imposter Feelings: A Longitudinal Mixed-methods Study of Developmental Networks.
School of Educations Toni May, PhD, associate professor, and Kristin Koskey, PhD, visiting scholar, received a grant from the National Science Foundation to support their project, Collaborative Research: Developing and Evaluating Assessments of Problem-Solving in Computer Adaptive Testing Environments.
Ivan Bartoli, PhD, associate professor in the College of Engineering, was awarded a Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) grant as part of the Accelerated Marketing Readiness program. The FHWA Cooperative Agreement will provide $499,835 in funding to develop, and eventually commercialize, wireless sensors to be used for enhancing routine and special bridge inspections which ensure the safe operation of our transportation network and performance of bridges. Such information will be critical in prioritizing repairs and maintenance of our aging transportation infrastructure.
James Tangorra, PhD, professor and department head for Engineering Leadership and Society in the College of Engineering, was part of a team to receive a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the Office of Naval Research titled Locomotion and Transitions of an Amphibious System: Biologic to Robotic. The proposed work will build on and extend fundamental studies of the California sea lions swimming mechanism and thrust production capabilities.
Peter Baas, PhD, professor in the College of Medicine, received a two-year, $833,000 NIH grant for Role of Tau in Microtubule Stability in Adult Neurons.
Christian Sell, PhD, associate professor in the College of Medicine, received a one-year, $310,000 NIH grant for Novel Longevity Enhancing Pathways Regulated by mTOR.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has committed a $500,000 grant to Brandywine Workshop & Archives with Drexel as sub-grantee. Faculty members from the Westphal College of Media Arts and Designs Department of Arts & Entertainment Enterprise Julie Goodman, associate professor; Neville Vakharia, associate professor; and Brea Heidelberg, associate professor will collaborate on succession, business planning and evaluation. School of Education Associate Dean of Research and Associate Professor Jennifer Katz-Buonocontro, PhD, along with graduate students, will conduct ethnographic artist interviews. The Lenfest Center for Cultural Partnerships (led by Associate Director Melissa Clemmer) will fund co-ops, manage the collaboration, and produce a white paper on the expanded digital resource Artura.
Guy Diamond, assistant professor in the College of Nursing and Health Professions, received $147,000 for an 18-month contract from CADEkids to develop an electronic survey to assess the needs of Philadelphia school-age youth and families, related to substance use, behaviors and attitudes.
A collaboration between College of Nursing and Health Professions PI Minjung Shim, PhD, assistant research professor, and co-investigators from the Dornsife School of Public Health (Kathleen Fisher, PhD, professor; Sungchul Park, PhD, assistant professor), College of Arts & Sciences (Fengqing Zhang, PhD, associate professor) and College of Nursing and Health Professions (Arun Ramakrishnan, PhD, director of research labs) and others received $74,000 for At-Home Telehealth Mindfulness-based Dance/Movement Therapy for Older Adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment: A Feasibility Study from Commonwealth Universal Research Enhancement 2021 Formula Grant Program.
Alexis Roth, PhD, associate professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health, received a NIH R01 grant for $4.9 million to conduct a randomized control trial to assess HIV prevention interventions over the next five years.
Jana Hirsch, PhD, assistant research professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health, was awarded a five-year, $4.4 million R01 National Institute on Aging grant for Contribution of Longitudinal Neighborhood Determinants to Cognitive Health and Dementia Disparities within a Multi-Ethnic Cohort. This study aims to identify actionable, community-level interventions to address and remediate racial and socioeconomic inequalities derived from the unequal distribution of environmental supports for healthy aging.
The following faculty were named Louis & Bessie Stein Family Fellowship recipients. The endowed Fellowship supports research, exchange, teaching and collaboration with partners in Israel.
Major Gifts, Honors, Recognition
Myrna Shure, PhD, professor emeritus in the College of Arts and Sciences, was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Center for the Promotion of Social & Emotional Learning.
Rebecca Clothey, PhD, associate head of global studies and modern languages in the College of Arts and Sciences and associate professor in the School of Education, was elected to the board of the Comparative and International Education Society.
Sharon Walker, PhD, dean of the College of Engineering, has been named Executive Director of ELATES at Drexel, a national leadership development program designed to advance senior women faculty in academic engineering, computer science, and other STEM fields into effective institutional leadership roles within their schools and universities. Walker will assume this new role in addition to her responsibilities as dean.
College of Medicine faculty members Leon McCrea II, MD, associate professor and senior associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion, and Dennis Novack, MD, professor and associate dean of medical education, received a three-year, $300,000 grant from the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation to spearhead creation of an online learning module on antiracism.
Several faculty from the College on Nursing and Health Professions have been recognized this year for their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Highlights include:
Michael LeVasseur, PhD, assistant teaching professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health, was awarded by the Office of New York State Governor for co-founding COVIDoutlook.info and for his commitment to providing accurate, scientific information to policymakers about the pandemic.
The City Council of Philadelphia honored and congratulated Sharrelle Barber, PhD, assistant professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health, for her appointment as director of The Ubuntu Center on Racism, Global Movements and Population Health Equity at Dornsife with a resolution.
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Faculty Highlights: Recent Grants and Awards | Now - Drexel Now
How an AI finished Beethoven’s last symphony and what that means for the future of music – BBC Focus Magazine
When he died in 1827 aged 56, Ludwig van Beethoven left his 10th symphony unfinished. Only a few handwritten notes briefly detailing his plans for the piece have survived, with most just being incomplete ideas or fragments of themes or melodies.
Now, a multidisciplinary team of computer scientists at Rutgers University-based start-up Playform AI have trained an artificial intelligence to mimic the great composers style and used it to write a complete symphony based on these initial sketches.
We spoke to the lead researcher on the project, Professor Ahmed Elgammal, to find out more.
Beethoven left sketches in different forms, mainly musical sketches, but also some written notes with some ideas in as well. Previously, in 1988 [English musicologist] Barry Cooper used the majority of these sketches, about 250 bars of music, that were meant for a first movement [in his attempt to complete the symphony].
But what was left behind is really very little. So basically, like three bars of music here and four bars of music there and some rough sketches, which sound like basically the starting points of the main themes in the movements that he [Beethoven] wanted to write.
When you look at Beethoven and other classical composers, thats usually the case. I mean, usually they work with a main theme and develop it into a sequence of a couple of minutes and then another theme comes. Thats the traditional way of composing, and thats exactly what the AI needed to learn how Beethoven and other classical composers start with a theme and develop it. Like in the Fifth Symphony da da da dah. And then take that and evolve a whole movement around it.
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The way AI generates music in general is very similar to the way your email, for example, tries to predict the next word for you. So, when you write an email, you find it jumps into suggesting what you might want to write next.
Its the same concept, basically the AI has to learn from a lot of musical data. It asks what would be the next note given what you just wrote? And if you can predict the next note, then you can predict the next note and the next note and so on. Thats the main concept.
But what we soon realise is that if you start picking up the suggestions from the phone for next word and start writing just based on the AIs suggestions, it doesnt really hold for a long time. And thats what happens with music. If you just give it a starting point and leave it to predict, yes, it can predict a couple of notes. But then after that, it becomes nonsense more or less, and is no longer faithful to the main theme.
So that was the main challenge. How can we let the AI stick to the main theme and develop it? So this is where the role of the human expert working with the AI comes in. So we had to work with human experts to annotate and label a lot of music for us to tell the AI what the theme was and where the development of the theme was in a lot of pieces of music. So basically, the AI learnt as a student. That made a big difference because then the AI could really keep sticking to the theme.
Also, the AI had to compose the music in a specific musical form. So if you are composing for a scherzo movement or a trio part of the movement or a fugue etc, each of these musical forms have certain specific structure. The AI also had to learn how to write a fugue, how to write a trio, how to write a fugue, and how to write a scherzo.
It was very challenging because Beethoven only wrote nine symphonies. Thats a very small dataset compared to the scale of what the AI needed to do. So, the way we approached this was to first imagine ourselves like a young Beethoven learning about music. What he would have listened to?
So, we trained our first version of the AI as if it was somebody living in the 18th Century listening to baroque music like Bach, as well as Hayden and Mozart. And so that was the first version of the AI, which basically would be the kind of music anyone living in that era would study to compose. And then we took that and trained it specifically on Beethoven on old Beethoven sonatas, concertos, string quartets and the symphonies as well, so not only symphonies.
We first trained the AI to generate the composition as two lines of music, not as a full symphony, which is a typical way of a composer works by just composing first and then orchestrating. So then, we had another AI that would take that composition and learn how to orchestrate it. I believe this is very similar to the way humans learn you cannot really master fourth-level college without going through the first and second and third levels first. Its always incremental.
The symphony was premiered by The Beethoven Orchestra Bonn on 9 October 2021 Deutsche Telekom
The way we harmonise music is very similar to how we use AI to translate languages. Like when you use Google Translate or another AI to translate a sentence from one language to another. These kind of models used in translation learn a lot of background sentences. So, what is the sentence in German? What is the sentence in English? And from that, they try to learn how to translate them.
So basically, imagine you have these models [for harmonisation]. You put the melody in one side and on the other side you put in how Beethoven would harmonise it so the AI learns how to translate a melody line into harmonised music.
The thing about music is that its very structured and follows a lot of rules. But this is very hard for us to capture and write down. You really have to have a PhD in musicology with a speciality in Beethoven to really understand that. But the machine is able to capture that statistically and mathematically in a very implicit way and be able to use that to give us this harmonisation.
You got it right. That decision is just an extension of the harmonisation. We wanted the machine to translate the composition into multi-track instrumentation, which we also did by training the AI based on how Beethoven and other composers would do so.
Their response is really mixed. There are people who loved this very much, and love the idea of having an AI that understands music and can help you finish your composition or have you explore different musical ideas.
But on the other side of the spectrum, there are people who just reject even the concept of being able to complete a Beethoven symphony using AI. They are afraid of AI taking their jobs and think that it has nothing to do with this kind of thing.
Yeah. I have no doubt about that, we did that in visual art a couple of years ago where we developed an almost autonomous AI artist we had look at, lets say, the last 500 years of western art. The task was basically to generate new artworks that didnt follow any existing style.
If the AI generated an impressionist or a Picasso kind of art or a Renaissance-style artwork, it could realise and so it would have to learn how to create something new.
The challenge with this project was actually the constraints the fact that the AI was not generating music by itself but generating music that is based on Beethovens genius and also following the sketches. This makes it even more difficult. The high bar, of course, of expectation was due to the sketches coming from Beethoven. But when it comes to generating music autonomously I think thats an easier task.
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HSE University researchers explain behaviour of chaotic systems – EurekAlert
image:Illustration of the sandpile cascade view more
Credit: S. Shapoval et al.
Researchers of theLaboratory of Complex Systems Modeling and Controlhave proposed amissing component of the mechanism of self-organized criticality,which will enable the reproduction of power-law patterns observed in the real world. According to the researchers, this can be used to improve ourunderstanding of the the processes leading to strongearthquakes, forest fires, financial marketcrashes, anda suddensynchronization of social networks. The results of the researchwere published in theScientific Reportsjournal.The study was conducted with the support of the Russian Science Foundation.
Complex systems are all around us. From microscopic processes in the human brain to large-scale water flows in the ocean, science can describe the state of each part of asystem, but it is much more difficult to describe its behaviour as a whole. In complex systems, the interactionsbetweenparticular subsystemsare so complex that the overallsystem acquires completely new and unexpected properties that cannot be reduced to those of its individual components.
By controlling such parameters as temperature and magnetization, it is possible tobringa complex system to a critical point thatcauses a phase transition. During aphase transition, the basic properties of a system fundamentally change: for example, water changes from a liquid state into steam, and metal melts and turns into a liquid. The critical point itself is characterized by power-laws. However, there are various examples of processes and systems characterized by power-laws that occur without making anyadjustments: seismic activity indestructive earthquakes, neural and social networks, financial markets, forest fires, etc.
In 1987, scientists Bak, Tang, and Wisenfelddiscovered the phenomenon of self-organized criticality by constructing a mechanism that explains how a system evolves to a critical state without any adjustments to its parameters. Their model, known asthe sandpile or BTW model, is constructed ona square lattice that contains integers interpreted as grains. Once a locally large pile of grainsisformed, an avalanche occurs: grains propagate over the lattice and fall out of it when they reach the edge. The figure shows an avalanche that begins when four grains of sand appear in a cell, andare then transferred to four neighbouring cellsone grain per neighbour. Four new grains are thendistributed according to the same pattern. The video below shows the evolution of the model on a 16x16 lattice; the darker the cell, the more grains it contains. The discovery of self-organized criticality has had a huge impact on the development of entire fields of statistical physics, biophysics, astrophysics, optimization and topology.
Researchers can propose countless implementations of the BTW mechanism. However, out of a wide class of models, it is possible to achieve only a small number of power-laws that arise in a critical state. This stability of the exponents of power laws makes it difficult to apply models of self-organized criticality to real-life problems.
In a paper published in the Scientific Reports journal, researchers of the Laboratory of Complex Systems Modeling and Control established that the clustering of the events in space and time together with the core principles revealed by Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfeld lead to approximately 1/xpower-law in the size-frequency distribution of model events.
1/xsize-frequency relationship has long attracted the attention of researchers with its simplicity, which borders on elegance. The hunt for it has finally ended. The proposed mechanism manifests a fundamental property of the observed systems: the clustering of events in space and time. Therefore, it is natural to think that the mechanism will be in demand in applications, laying the foundation for future research, said Alexander Shapoval, co-author of the paper and Professor of the HSE Faculty of Computer Science.
Video illustrating evolution in a lattice. Different colours correspond to different numbers that appear in the cells. (Author:DayanaSavostyanova(GSSI, Italy)).
Scientific Reports
1/x power-law in a close proximity of the BakTangWiesenfeld sandpile
13-Sep-2021
Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.
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HSE University researchers explain behaviour of chaotic systems - EurekAlert
First lecture in new series to focus on computing for more sustainable future | Penn State University – Penn State News
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. Using computing power to create a better, more sustainable future will be the topic at the first Center for Artificial Intelligence Foundations and Scientific Applications (CENSAI) distinguished seminar. The event will be heldonlineat 4 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 18.
Carla Gomes, the Ronald C. and Antonia V. Nielsen Professor of Computing and Information Science and the director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability at Cornell University, will present a lecture on her work in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and sustainability.
Gomes and her research group are investigating how AI can advance scientific discovery for a sustainable future and, in particular, computational sustainability. Computational sustainability has the overarching goal of developing computational models and methods to help manage the balance between environmental, economic and societal needs for a sustainable future.
The talk will include examples of computational sustainability problems,including biodiversity and wildlife conservation, multicriteria strategic planning of hydropower dams in the Amazon basin, and materials discovery for renewable energy materials. Gomes also will discuss cross-cutting computational themes and challengesfor AI at the intersection of constraint reasoning, optimization, machine learning, multiagent reasoning and citizen science.
Gomes received a doctoral degree in computer science in the area of artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Her research area is AI with a focus on large-scale reasoning, optimization and learning. Gomes is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
CENSAI is housed in the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) that enables Penn State researchers to explore the use of artificial intelligence as a tool to dramatically accelerate the scientific process.
Click here to learn more about the seminar series, or register here.
Carla Gomes, the Ronald C. and Antonia V. Nielsen Professor of Computing and Information Science and the director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability at Cornell University, will present a lecture on artificial intelligence and sustainability.
Last Updated October 12, 2021
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It’s Time for Real-World AI on the Edge – HPCwire
Artificial Intelligence has been a key talking point in the high-performance computing and computer science communities for decades now.
First it was a thought experiment and theoretical discussion point, but in recent years, it has become a practical area of focus for many scientists, researchers, and engineers, as well as businesses, universities, and government agencies. As the shift from theory to practice accelerated, so too did the excitement and scope of the expected impact of this technology on our society.
Autonomous vehicles, just-in-time maintenance, and real-time image processing are just a few of the ways you can apply AI at the edge. These and many other use cases are considered realistic deployments of complex deep learning training and inference models.
Until recently, these technologies have relied on large datacenters and inefficient algorithms to build, train, and run these models. For example, a decade ago, IBMs Watson became famous as one of the first modern AI systems. It required ninety 4U servers to generate 80 TFLOPs of performance. But today, you can beat that performance with just a handful of white box GPU-accelerated servers.
This growth in system efficiency and performance has created an environment in the datacenter where machine learning and deep learning models can thrive. Simultaneously, the barrier to entry into AI workflows is being lowered, opening the doors to new use cases, algorithms, and benefits from AI.
Still, we havent seen the world-altering effects of AI outside of digital experiences like social media and search engines. What is keeping more tangible use cases like autonomous vehicles from wide-scale adoption? Challenges in edge computing.
Historically, datacenter environments have had the distinct advantage of having large amounts of equipment, power, cooling, physical space, data storage, and high-performance networking available to provide ever-increasing levels of performance.
Trying to create similar performance at the edge has been a key challenge because engineers lose the luxuries of large, power-hungry, and loud clusters. Edge devices have environmental, operational, and practical limitations that are not present in the controlled environment of a datacenter.
A well-trained and efficient AI model allows lower-power edge devices to handle inference tasks, but they are unable to also train and improve their own algorithms. Instead, workflows must rely on communication between edge devices and the datacenter.
Machine learning and deep learning rely on huge volumes of data that must be stored and processed. To use these technologies at the edge requires a tiered processing system. This allows data to be uploaded to the datacenter for processing, where algorithms can be further refined and downloaded to the edge device. That device, in turn, becomes better able to act or output in a desired fashion, without having to wait for the datacenter to execute a decision. This positive feedback loop is key to building effective and powerful AI applications that can perform on the edge.
Multiple forces are converging to allow this model to operate practically.
Processing power for AI has always been a limiting factor. Now, however, thanks to GPU acceleration and great advances in CPU performance and efficiency, that has changed. The state-of-the-art has moved so much that traditional chip manufacturers are creating processors that are much faster and more efficient than chips from just a few years ago, making them well-suited for edge applications. Some manufacturers are going so far as to make -specific processors for AI on the edge.
Because of these new capabilities, the overall cost of performance has come down substantially in recent years. This is a critical issue for organizations looking to deploy AI on the edge, since the sheer number of potential edge devices that can run AI far exceeds the number of datacenters.
Another area where historical attempts at AI on the edge have fallen short is in the speed and reliability of communication between the datacenter and the edge. For instance, an autonomous vehicle is responsible for the safety of passengers, pedestrians, and other vehicles. It cannot depend on a slow or unreliable network to operate properly. Fortunately, new 5G wireless, wide-area networks will enable workloads that will drive demand for AI and Compute at the edge.
Just because something is possible does not mean it is practical. Organizations looking to implement AI at the edge often face an uphill battle. Without the proper expertise, developing optimized datacenter systems for machine learning training and designing the necessary edge equipment for inference can be unrealistic for most teams.
Ensuring you have a properly balanced, high-ROI cluster for your AI workload is difficult. But the problem becomes even more challenging when planning for the large amounts of data coming in from hundreds or thousands of edge devices.
Then, if youre able to build that system efficiently, you still need to solve for a completely different technological problem: edge device design. Commercial, off-the-shelf hardware is rarely capable of providing the optimal solution for specific workload needs, let alone the additional environmental and form factor challenges edge clusters face.
For example, what COTS system can operate in extreme temperature or weather conditions? What about safety and security aspects like operating temperatures or data encryption? If you find you need to design a custom device, how do you ensure it has everything you need while meeting regulatory requirements?
These are important things to consider as you plan for an edge AI or inference project. Silicon Mechanics and our partner Comark have many decades of experience in datacenter and ruggedized edge solution design experience between them. Together, weve put together a consideration guide on preparing for 5G edge computing that covers many of the key decisions organizations must make when deploying AI on the edge.
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University of Texas Mourns Passing of Peter J. O’Donnell, Jr. – UT News | The University of Texas at Austin
ODonnell was born near Dallas in 1924. He received a bachelors degree in mathematics from The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, followed by an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Upon graduation, his early path led him into the world of commerce, where he found financial success in the securities industry.
ODonnells formidable intellect and business acumen led him naturally into politics, where he is credited with reshaping the Texas Republican Party during his tenure as the state partys chairman from 1962 to 1969.
During his early 30s, he and Edith founded the ODonnell Foundation, a philanthropic organization focused on higher education support in Texas, which grew to become the fifth largest independent Texan foundation. Over the years they contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to public and private educational institutions, mostly anonymously.
The O'Donnell Foundation focused on four areas: math; science and engineering education; medicine, arts and music education; and K-12 education.
Edith ODonnell was a graduate in psychology from UT Austin. While the two made their impact felt across higher education in Texas, they had special connection to the Forty Acres.
The O'Donnell Foundation and ODonnell family are among the largest donors to UT Austin. Their support included a challenge grant that created 32 one million-dollar chairs in science and engineering at UT Austin. In 2013, the university announced the naming of the O'Donnell Building for Applied Computational Engineering and Sciences, in recognition of their support throughout the years.
The Oden Institute and TACC
Peter ODonnell enjoyed a long friendship with J. Tinsley Oden, professor of mathematics, computer science, mechanical engineering and aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at UT Austin, and widely considered to be the father of computational mechanics.
ODonnell realized how important high performance computing (HPC) and computational science were to become in higher education, and in Oden he found a partner with the kind of specialized expertise in mathematics, science and engineering to help put both on the map at UT Austin.
O'Donnell and Oden worked closely to create the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences in 2002, now called the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering & Sciences and recognized as one of the top computational research institutes in the world.
Thanks to the unwavering generosity of the ODonnells, Oden was able to recruit some of the most talented computational scientists in the field and build a team that could not only expand the mathematical agility of computational science and engineering as a discipline, but also grow the number of potential real-world applications.
O'Donnell also helped UT Austin get ahead in HPC. In 1985, he encouraged university leadership to acquire the powerful CRAY X-MP system, making UT Austin the first university in Texas to have a supercomputer. This led to the establishment in 2001 of a dedicated advanced computing entity, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).
Encouragement was followed by the foundations generous support of TACC, which now operates two of the most powerful university supercomputers in the world: Frontera and Stampede2. O'Donnell noted, "That's leverage. High performance computing is changing everything."
ODonnell renewed his commitment to TACC in 2012, and to the advancment of data-driven science by supporting the acquisition of high-performance data analysis and storage systems efforts that helped UT Austin become a leader in data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence. The foundation also contributed to the construction of the Advanced Computing Building that houses the bulk of TACCs staff.
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Big Brain Brotherhood: Cognitive Science Association – New University
The Cognitive Science Association (CSA) at UCI was founded by cognitive sciences alumna Angelina Quagletti with just three board members and a simple mission in summer 2019.
[The founding members] felt that there wasnt enough community within current cognitive science majors, and we were kind of left in the dark, current CSA President and third year cognitive sciences student Tommie Huynh said. It was hard to navigate courses and the major because its a pretty small major.
According to Huynh, these challenges stem from the ambiguous and interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science.
Academia has not really well-defined it quite yet, Huynh said.
Huynh described cognitive sciences as being based on five academic pillars: computer science and artificial intelligence; neuroscience; psychology; linguistics; and philosophy. With such a wide breadth of study, students within the program can find it hard to narrow down their interests and figure out where to go.
[Quagletti] wanted more of a peer support network, Huynh said. We can help you with guidance on graduate school and [help with] resumes and volunteer opportunities.
In addition to the extracurricular and professional support, the CSA also provides academic resources for its members. One event is Courses in Cognitive Science, where students learn more about the cognitive science curriculum and speak with students who have already taken the course.
With such an interdisciplinary subject, crossovers are inevitable and celebrated. Even though CSA focuses on creating a home base for cognitive science students, Huynh stated that the organization is open to all.
I think if you like cognitive science, it doesnt really matter what major youre in. Were not gatekeeping, you know, Huynh said.
For example, the field features a close collaboration with computer science.
They use our theories that we derive from cognitive science, but computer science actually executes them and implements them, Huynh said. We can apply their code that they create in our experiments to study human behavior.
Many of the unions between cognitive science and related disciplines are most evidently observed in the lab, which is a cornerstone of the Cognitive Sciences program.
The CSA held their first major in-person function, the Research Involvement Event event on Oct. 7. The event was organized by CSAs Internal Vice President Ren-Hui Michelle Tham, a fourth year cognitive sciences student, and Co-Internal Vice President Gloria Cheng, a third year cognitive sciences student. The presentation, which featured the majors Department Chair professor Ramesh Srinivasan, Undergraduate Director Dr. Michael Lee and six student panelists, gave insider tips on how students could get into a research lab and what they could get out of it.
The CSA is a tight-knit unit, working together to ensure that students and peers are successful. In the spring quarter 2021, CSA students came together to raise their voices in opposition to the Department of Cognitive Sciences programs B-minus requirement for major-required classes.
The UCI course policy states that students can retake classes in which they earn a C-minus or lower. However, this posed a major issue when combined with the departmental policy.
If cognitive sciences majors earned either a C or C-plus in a major-required course, they were unable to retake the class since it violated the university policy. Students were dropped from the cognitive sciences major entirely if they were unable to make the B-minus cutoff.
The policy had a difficult loophole that allowed students to fail the classes deliberately in order to retake them and stay in the cognitive sciences major.
It was unnecessary, Huynh said. Thats not something you want in academia. You want someone to try their hardest, honest and fair work.
Thanks to the CSA students unification, petitions and testimonies, the B-minus policy was overturned effective fall 2021. Now cognitive science students are only required to earn a C or above to pass major-required courses, which aligns with the campuswide policy.
I think it was a direct consequence of what [the] Cognitive Science Association did. I really loved that about the cognitive sciences major: we did that, all student-based. We saw the results, and that made me feel empowered, Huynh said.
Lauren Le is a STEM Intern for the fall 2021 quarter. She can be reached at laurenl9@uci.edu.
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Big Brain Brotherhood: Cognitive Science Association - New University
National Science Foundation Director Shares Vision for Solutions-Focused Science – Diverse: Issues in Higher Education
Soon after the Apollo missions returned to earth, the United States parceled pieces of moonrock to countries around the globe as a gesture of goodwill. By chance or by fate, some of those pieces landed at a consulate in India, where a nine-year-old Sethuraman Panchanathan marveled at them with his father, an astrophysicist and professor.
Today, Dr. Panchanathan is best known as the 15th director of the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Dr. Sethuraman PanchanathanEvery day my father was inspired and enthused by science and what it can do for humanity, says Panchanathan who goes by Panch of his upbringing in Chennai, India. When he took me to see [the moonrock], it made me so excited about what exploration truly was and how one could have achieved it. ... I saw that things could be made possible by consistent effort and dedication.
Making things possible could very well be a motto of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds approximately 25% of all federally supported research at U.S. colleges and universities. In fact, the foundation is the major source of federal backing in fields such as mathematics, computer science, economics and social sciences.
Appointed by former President Donald Trump to lead the $8.5 billion independent federal agency in 2019, Panchanathan was unanimously confirmed by the Senate in June 2020 a particularly heated month amid a year marked by an ongoing pandemic, racial strife and distrust of public and scientific authorities.
Yet, despite taking on the position during a tumultuous era, Panchanathan still speaks with the same optimism toward science that he describes having as a child. Its through science, he insists, that we can unlock solutions to major issues confronting humanity.
That belief has been the impetus behind his own research at Arizona State University (ASU), where he is a tenured professor currently on extended leave for his six-year term at NSF and has held various leadership positions within the past two decades. With a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering, Panchanathan has devoted much of his time to exploring how machines can help people with disabilities, specifically those who are visually impaired.
He founded the universitys Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing (CUbiC) which remains dedicated to developing assistive and rehabilitative technologies for individuals with disabilities. Using an interdisciplinary approach to its efforts, the center develops technologies that address an array of challenges, such as helping visually impaired people read body language and improving the intelligibility of speech thats been impacted by a neurological disorder.
By bringing together a group of people from engineering, from science, from accessible education, fromNSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan greets University of Kansas Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Assistant Professor Brian AtkinsonRylie Koester, University of Kansas Office of Research business and from design, we are working together to find comprehensive solutions, says Panchanathan, who holds four patents, has published close to 500 articles and has received numerous awards for his scientific contributions.
In other words, its research for societys sake, and hes taken that mindset with him to the NSF.
Ive started to imagine the DNA of the NSF like this, he says, describing the double helix pattern of the molecule. One strand of the DNA is curiosity-driven, exploratory research. Thats something that has been done everywhere and has made possible fundamental discoveries, such as discovering black holes or the basics of artificial intelligence.
The other strand, he says is use-inspired, solutions-focused, translational research and innovation. To me, these two are highly intertwined.
He says the NSF is paying special attention to research that not only has scientific merit but broader societal impact. By funding such research, he hopes to see the agency encourage scientific innovation that can address major challenges confronting artificial intelligence, disaster response, agriculture, biotechnology and cybersecurity, among other areas.
In describing his vision for the agency, Panchanathan consistently stresses diversity. And, for him, that includes the broadest definition of the word: diversity of class, race, culture, gender, geography and academic disciplines. Having researchers with a wide breadth of perspectives and backgrounds, he says, is key if the U.S. wants to remain a global leader of science.
We need to see how we can reach the amazing domestic talent that we have in different rural, urban, socioeconomic demographics, he says. How can we ensure that we double or triple African American technology talent? Quadruple Native American talent?
He often refers to those demographics as the missing millions people who are capable of succeeding in science but lack accessible pathways into STEM. One way NSF has been working on building those pathways is through its INCLUDES initiative, which works to boost inclusivity in STEM by forming alliances between public and private organizations throughout the nation and by funding research related to advancing diversity. In early August, the foundation invested an extra $50 million to establish five new INCLUDES Alliances.
But aside from cultivating domestic talent, Panchanathan also emphasizes the importance of attracting the talents of international students to the U.S. He, after all, is a prime example of such talent. Drawn by the information and technology revolution taking place in the 90s, Panchanathan speaks with a fierce love for the country hes built his career in. The American dream, to this self-described eternal optimist, is still possible but its a dream hes hoping to make ever more accessible.
After being named director of the NSF, I felt so thrilled that I would be able to give back all that Ive been given in terms of the opportunity in this amazing nation. I often talk about how this is the land of innovation and democracy, he says. This nation has given me so much, so now its time for me to serve and see how I can give back. Thats why Im deeply, deeply, deeply committed to ensuring accessibility and inclusion.
This article originally appeared in the October 14, 2021 edition of Diverse. Read it here.
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Maryland Today | From the Floundry to the Hatchery – Maryland Today
Weve always wanted to be involved in some kind of incubator, Haroon said. We believe technology companies are really the future of entrepreneurship, and its the computer science majors that are building technology companies.
The Mokhtarzada Hatchery, located in the Brendan Iribe Center for Computer Science and Engineering, every year will provide up to four teams of student entrepreneurs with seed funding of as much as $10,000, plus working space and mentoring and networking opportunities.
There seems to be this gap where you have student groups who get a lot of support early on to develop an idea, but that transition from this idea to a business that is going to get a serious round of funding is missing, Zeki said.
Its just the kind of challenge the Mokhtarzada brothers love.
Two Continents, Two GenerationsThe connection between the Mokhtarzada family and the University of Maryland crosses two continents and two generations.
Their parents, Mohammad Mokhtarzada 70, M.A. 74 and Ilhan Cagri 00, Ph.D. 05 met at Maryland. She is Turkish and grew up in the U.S., and he was a foreign student from Afghanistan. After Mohammad finished his second degree, they returned there until after the Russians invaded.
The couple raised their children in the Maryland suburbs and ran a business out of their home to help people get passports and visas.
They had computers and I just always loved it, Zeki said. When I was in my teens, my father encouraged me to start getting involved in programming and the database software that the office was using, so I just got the exposure and I always enjoyed it.
While Idris shared Zekis passion for computers. Haroon was interested in entrepreneurship, starting businesses for lawnmowing, magic shows and snow shoveling.
At UMD, Zeki and Haroon began their first venture together: a do-it-yourself website company in their dorm room that eventually became Webs.com. Yahya and Idriswho wasnt even in college yetpitched in.
We bootstrapped the company for a while and we raised venture funding, Haroon said. Ten years later, they sold it to Vistaprint for about $120 million.
The brothers stayed with Vistaprint for a few years, but by 2015 they were ready for something new. From Idris basement, they formed the Floundry, Haroon said, where we would literally flounder on ideas.
The first idea was kind of like a Peloton with virtual reality, so you could be on an exercise bike and do virtual reality, Zeki recalled. We started developing that idea, but then it was like that wont work, itll get all sweaty, its going to take us a year to develop.
Then Haroom started thinking about how people are paying for subscriptions they arent aware of. The brothers didnt have to look far for examples: Haroon was paying for an alarm company every month on a house he no longer lived in. Zeki was paying for Audible monthly without even knowing it. Idris and Yahya had the same problem.
Together, the four Mokhtarzadas co-founded Truebill, an app that helps users manage their bills and online subscriptions. Six years later, the company has done several rounds of funding, most recently raising $45 million.
We have thousands of customers signing up every day. Were in a place where we can say we advocate for consumers financial health, said Zeki, who now works as an advisor to Truebill and as CTO at Tenovos, an online software company in digital marketing.
Never Forgetting Where They Came FromEven after all these years, success is not something the Mokhtarzadas take for granted. They are grateful that they were able to leave Afghanistan when others were not, and are committed to turning their good fortune into something meaningful and good. Launching the Hatchery is a way to do just that.
I dont think you could do this at just any school, said Idris, who is Truebills CTO. At Maryland, you have an incredible program, incredible professors, incredible students, incredible alumni. Plenty of alumni have gone on to do great things. We want to continue that and make that happen more often.
Haroon, who is CEO of Truebill, said it allows the family to pay back the University of Maryland a little bit and pay it forward in the UMD community.
I think this is missing in the D.C. metro area, he said. Theres a reason people are going to San Francisco and thats because they have incubators that are very focused on getting entrepreneurs out and building companies. Thats something that wed love to replicate closer to home.
Their dream became easier to achieve in 2019, when Truebills headquarters moved from San Francisco to Silver Spring, Md., and UMD opened the Brendan Iribe Center and offered the brothers space for the Hatchery.
The goal: foster success, one student venture at a time.
There are a lot of lessons that people in the startup world have learned that college students havent and (that) they dont teach in college, Idris said. You need that sort of community, and if I can help push that forward, thats a really cool thing.
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Maryland Today | From the Floundry to the Hatchery - Maryland Today
Wake Board of Education approves agreement for new computer science high school in the RTP – WRAL.com
By Emily Walkenhorst, WRAL education reporter
Cary, N.C. A computer science-focused early college high school will open next year in Wake County, pending approval from state leaders.
The Wake County Board of Education approved a memorandum of understanding between with the Wake Technical Community College without opposition Tuesday night.
The high school, yet to be named, would enroll a maximum of 75 students in each of the four grades at first, eventually increasing capacity to 100 students per grade.
It would be the systems first high school in Morrisville and at the Research Triangle Park. It would be located primarily on the second floor of a building on the edge of Wake Techs RTP campus.
Students could also attend courses at the college.
According to the agreement approved Tuesday, the school will focus on computer programming, cybersecurity and network management, and biotechnology with the potential for the change or addition of other focus areas based on market demand and program availability and as approved by the parties.
The school would be on a modified calendar and application-based.
While the board has approved the memorandum of understanding with Wake Tech, North Carolina school districts must also apply at the state level to open an early college high school. Thats according to the Cooperative Innovative High School state statute.
School system officials submitted an application last week, said Paul Domenico. district director of curriculum enhancement programs. Domenico told the board he believed it was very strong.
The school district already has six early colleges, three of which come from partnerships with Wake Tech.
The Wake County Public School System has expanded specialized programming at both base and magnet schools as its enrollment is projected to stagnate and nearby charter school enrollment rises.
Early colleges are popular in Wake County and record high achievement levels. For the 2018-2019 school year, applications at three of the early college high schools exceeded the overall enrollment capacity for all grades at those schools.
Four-year graduation rates exceeded 95% among those who graduated this spring.
North Carolina was home to 132 cooperative innovative high schools as of August 2020, per the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. Of those, 116 partner with a community college.
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