Aurelia Butler

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  • 175 Shares169 Views

    in Computers Math

    The brain may learn about the world the same way some computational models do

    To make our way through the world, our brain must develop an intuitive understanding of the physical world around us, which we then use to interpret sensory information coming into the brain.
    How does the brain develop that intuitive understanding? Many scientists believe that it may use a process similar to what’s known as “self-supervised learning.” This type of machine learning, originally developed as a way to create more efficient models for computer vision, allows computational models to learn about visual scenes based solely on the similarities and differences between them, with no labels or other information.
    A pair of studies from researchers at the K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center at MIT offers new evidence supporting this hypothesis. The researchers found that when they trained models known as neural networks using a particular type of self-supervised learning, the resulting models generated activity patterns very similar to those seen in the brains of animals that were performing the same tasks as the models.
    The findings suggest that these models are able to learn representations of the physical world that they can use to make accurate predictions about what will happen in that world, and that the mammalian brain may be using the same strategy, the researchers say.
    “The theme of our work is that AI designed to help build better robots ends up also being a framework to better understand the brain more generally,” says Aran Nayebi, a postdoc in the ICoN Center. “We can’t say if it’s the whole brain yet, but across scales and disparate brain areas, our results seem to be suggestive of an organizing principle.”
    Nayebi is the lead author of one of the studies, co-authored with Rishi Rajalingham, a former MIT postdoc now at Meta Reality Labs, and senior authors Mehrdad Jazayeri, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research; and Robert Yang, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences and an associate member of the McGovern Institute. Ila Fiete, director of the ICoN Center, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and an associate member of the McGovern Institute, is the senior author of the other study, which was co-led by Mikail Khona, an MIT graduate student, and Rylan Schaeffer, a former senior research associate at MIT.
    Both studies will be presented at the 2023 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in December. More

  • 100 Shares159 Views

    in Physics

    Salty sweat helps one desert plant stay hydrated

    Sweat keeps some animals cool in scorching heat. Salty secretions also serve one desert shrub a refreshing sip of water. 

    The Athel tamarisk uses a special selection of salts excreted from its leaves to pull water from the air, researchers report October 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This study provides new insights into the clever chemical strategies that plants have evolved to survive in harsh environments.

    The Athel tamarisk (Tamarix aphylla) thrives in the arid, salt-rich soils of coastal flats across the Middle East. That’s because the tamarisk is a halophyte, a type of plant that secretes excess salt in concentrated droplets from glands in its leaves. The moisture from these briny excretions dissipates in the heat of the day, leaving the tamarisk encrusted in white crystals that shake off in the wind.

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    While driving through the hot, humid deserts of the United Arab Emirates, materials scientist Marieh Al-Handawi of New York University Abu Dhabi noticed water condensing on these crystals. There are lots of plants with leaf structures adapted to attract liquid water from fog. But Al-Handawi, who looks to nature for strategies to tackle water scarcity, suspected that the chemical composition of the excreted salts might have something to do with the dew.

    To investigate, Al-Handawi and her team recorded time-lapse videos of Athel tamarisk plants in their natural habitat. These recordings showed that salt crystals that form from daytime excretions swell with water at night. Back in the lab, the researchers found that at 35° Celsius and 80 percent relative humidity, a naturally encrusted branch collected 15 milligrams of water on its leaves after two hours, while a washed branch yielded only about one-tenth as much.

    “This result was conclusive to us,” Al-Handawi says, “because it proved salts are the main contributor to the water harvesting, and it’s not the surface of the plant.” What’s more, the researchers observed dew form on the crystals down to just 50 percent relative humidity. 

    When the scientists scrutinized the mineral makeup of the tamarisk’s saline sprinkles, they found more than 10 different types of salt all crystallized together. These crystals are made mostly of sodium chloride and gypsum. Yet the researchers also spotted traces of a secret ingredient: lithium sulfate. This mineral is exceptionally good at taking in water and at much lower humidity than either sodium chloride or gypsum. While sodium chloride and gypsum bring in the largest volumes of water, the addition of lithium sulfate to the mineral mélange, the researchers say, helps explain how the tamarisk collects water even at low humidity.

    “This paper provides a new level of detailed understanding of how some desert plants can both excrete salt and use it to take up water from the air into leaves,” says plant physiologist and ecologist Lawren Sack of UCLA, who was not involved in the study.

    He is excited to see the chemical complexity of the salts involved. Desert plants have evolved intricate chemical strategies to squeeze every last drop of water from the environment, he says, and most of those systems await discovery.

    Al-Handawi agrees, noting that the salt recipe may differ across regions and seasons. It makes her hopeful, she says, that there are other exciting water-harvesting materials waiting to be found in the desert. More

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    in Computers Math

    Powder engineering adds AI to the mix

    A research team at Osaka Metropolitan University has developed a new simulation method that accurately predicts powder mixing using AI, and has succeeded in increasing calculation speed by approximately 350 times while maintaining the same level of accuracy as conventional methods. This method is expected to not only pave the way for more efficient and precise powder mixing processes but also open up new possibilities for industries seeking to enhance product quality and streamline production.
    Imagine a world without powders. It may sound exaggerated, but our daily lives are intricately connected to powders in various ways from foods, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics to batteries, ceramics, etc. In all these industries, powder mixing is an important unit operation where different types of powders are mixed to achieve uniformity. However, it can be difficult to predict what conditions are optimal to achieve the desired uniformity as the process often relies on trial and error as well as engineers’ expertise.
    Numerical simulations using the discrete element method (DEM) have been used widely as an approach that can accurately predict powder mixing. This is achieved by calculating the motion of all particles in a very short time range (1/1,000,000 of a second), calculating the motion of the entire powder using the calculated values, and then repeating the process over and over again to calculate the motion of each particle a short time ahead. Therefore, the substantial amount of time it takes to predict powder mixing significantly hampers the ability to have large-scale and long-duration powder mixing processes.
    A research team led by Associate Professor Hideya Nakamura, Associate Professor Shuji Ohsaki, Professor Satoru Watano, and Ph.D. student Naoki Kishida from the Graduate School of Engineering at Osaka Metropolitan University has developed a new simulation method using AI. Additionally, the team has succeeded in enhancing computational speed by about 350 times. This new method is characterized by using a recurrent neural network (RNN) that enables a long-time-scale powder mixing simulation with low computational costs while maintaining the same level of accuracy as conventional methods.
    “We have successfully harnessed our knowledge in powder technology, which we have honed over many years, and combined it with machine learning to rapidly predict the unique behavior of complex powders,” explained Professor Nakamura. “We would like to build upon this achievement to contribute to the future of industries seeking to enhance product quality and streamline production.” More

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Computers Math

    Virtual meetings tire people because we’re doing them wrong

    New research suggests sleepiness during virtual meetings is caused by mental underload and boredom. Earlier studies suggested that fatigue from virtual meetings stems from mental overload, but new research from Aalto University shows that sleepiness during virtual meetings might actually be a result of mental underload and boredom.
    ‘I expected to find that people get stressed in remote meetings. But the result was the opposite — especially those who were not engaged in their work quickly became drowsy during remote meetings,’ says Assistant Professor Niina Nurmi, who led the study.
    The researchers measured heart rate variability during virtual meetings and face-to-face meetings, examining different types of fatigue experiences among 44 knowledge workers across nearly 400 meetings. The team at Aalto collaborated with researchers at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, where stress and recovery are studied using heart rate monitors. The paper was published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology.
    ‘We combined physiological methods with ethnographic research. We shadowed each subject for two workdays, recording all events with time stamps, to find out the sources of human physiological responses,’ Nurmi says.
    The study also included a questionnaire to identify people’s general attitude and work engagement.
    ‘The format of a meeting had little effect on people who were highly engaged and enthusiastic about their work. They were able to stay active even during virtual meetings. On the other hand, workers whose work engagement was low and who were not very enthusiastic about their work found virtual meetings very tiring.’
    It’s easier to maintain focus in face-to-face meetings than virtual ones, as the latter have limited cognitive cues and sensory input. ‘Especially when cameras are off, the participant is left under-stimulated and may start to compensate by multitasking,’ Nurmi explains.
    Although an appropriate level of stimulation is generally beneficial for the brain, multitasking during virtual meetings is problematic. Only highly automated tasks, such as walking, can be properly carried out during a virtual meeting.
    ‘Walking and other automated activities can boost your energy levels and help you to concentrate on the meeting. But if you’re trying to focus on two things that require cognitive attention simultaneously, you can’t hear if something important is happening in the meeting. Alternatively, you have to constantly switch between tasks. It’s really taxing for the brain,’ Nurmi says. More

  • 125 Shares159 Views

    in Heart

    Fake fog, ‘re-skinning’ and ‘sea-weeding’ could help coral reefs survive

    Erinn Muller should have reason to despair. The marine biologist studies coral health in Florida, a state whose reefs have been devastated by extreme heat, increasingly ferocious hurricanes and deadly infectious diseases (SN: 6/15/23; SN: 9/13/23; SN: 7/9/19).

    “We’ve lost 98 percent of our living coral cover,” says Muller, of the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla. While among the hardest hit, Florida isn’t alone. From Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to the Caribbean, coral reefs globally are in trouble.

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    But innovative efforts to protect and restore coral reefs buoy Muller’s hopes. She just has to visit Mote’s Caribbean king crab nursery, a project of reef restoration expert Jason Spadaro. There, tiny specks of crustaceans will grow into salad-loving foragers. Once they are set loose on nearby reefs, Maguimithrax spinosissimus eat away suffocating seaweed.

    “I’m optimistic because there is really truly so much work being done” to restore coral reefs, says Tali Vardi, a marine biologist and executive director of the Coral Restoration Consortium, a global community of scientists, managers and restoration experts dedicated to helping coral reefs. While safeguarding the future of coral reefs ultimately depends on halting climate change, “we’re trying to maintain pockets of biodiversity” that can serve as a springboard for the long-term recovery of reefs.

    Given how diverse coral reefs are, Vardi says, researchers need a diversity of solutions to match. “There’s no silver bullet here.”

    Around the globe, coral biologists are trying everything from low-tech seaweed removal to high-tech artificial fog production to protect corals. Here’s a closer look at three projects that researchers are developing to help save coral reefs.

    Sea-weeding, literally

    In Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, it’s not crabs doing the weeding. It’s volunteers with Earthwatch Institute — an international environmental organization — snorkeling and diving underwater to pluck macroalgae, the weed of the sea. The volunteers’ goal is to free parts of the reef from a seaweed scourge to see if that leads to a resurgence in coral.

    “There’s been this issue with increases in macroalgae versus corals for a long time,” says David Bourne. “If something’s out of whack” with the reef ecosystem, “the corals lose out and the macroalgae take over.”

    Though they seem like a cross between plants and rocks, the hard corals that form reefs are actually giant colonies of tiny animals called coral polyps. The polyps secrete a hard skeleton made of calcium carbonate, and skeleton by skeleton, they build an undersea city. Tiny photosynthetic algae partners living inside the polyps give the corals their brilliant colors and generate energy for their hosts.

    Seaweed, however, takes up space and soaks up light that could otherwise be used by corals. If corals decline in number due to stressors like heat or disease, seaweed can quickly proliferate and take their place.

    Bourne, a marine biologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, wanted to know if the seaweed-removal program being run by Earthwatch was effective. From 2018 to 2021, volunteers pruned seaweed from 24 sections of the reef — each 5 meters by 5 meters — several times per year, while leaving other seaweed-laden areas alone. In total, they removed a whopping 2,148 kilograms of seaweed.

    At the start, the tended plots had enough corals to cover only about 34 square meters. Removing macroalgae from those plots led to a total gain of nearly 203 square meters of coral cover, enough to blanket a tennis court, Bourne’s team reported September 13 in the Journal of Applied Ecology. This change wasn’t seen in the plots left unpruned.

    After volunteers removed suffocating seaweed from sections of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, coral cover expanded dramatically in just a few years. These photos show the same part of the reef in May 2019 and May 2023.Hillary Smith

    “It’s not surprising that we saw some recovery,” Bourne says. “What was surprising was the amount of recovery and how quickly it happened.” Sea-weeding is a straightforward way to skew the reef’s competitive balance and help corals thrive, he says.

    Bourne hopes the simplicity of the approach will help it spread. “The advantage of sea-weeding is it’s really low tech; anybody can do it,” he says. Plus, seaweed tends to be an issue on reefs that are close to shore and known to local communities, “so there’s active groups that are interested in helping.”

    ‘Re-skinning’ a coral skeleton

    Though it may sound macabre, the calcium carbonate skeletons of dead reefs can serve as vital scaffolding for new corals to flourish. “Re-skinning” a dead reef takes advantage of coral microfragments, small bits of coral polyps. Growing microfragments in the lab and then transplanting them onto reef skeletons can, in a way, bring a dead ecosystem back to life.

    David Vaughan discovered the restorative potential of coral microfragments through what he calls a “eureka mistake.” Vaughan, formerly executive director of Mote and now head of the nonprofit Plant A Million Corals in Summerland Key, Fla., accidentally broke off shards of a branching coral while moving it to a new tank. Some coral polyps remained on the bottom of the tank. Vaughn assumed the tiny animals wouldn’t survive. But when he checked on them about two weeks later, he saw instead that they had quickly grown and multiplied.

    Large corals grow slowly, Muller says, because they have to put a lot of energy into creating more of their calcium carbonate skeleton. If you instead affix multiple microfragments, consisting of a thin skeletal layer with a small bit of live coral tissue on top, near each other on a hard surface, they grow rapidly and fuse together. Mote scientists “hacked the biology of a lot of these slow-growing species to encourage them to put a lot of their resources into creating tissue faster,” Muller says.

    Microfragments of slow-growing corals that are placed near each other on the skeleton of a dead coral will quickly grow and merge together. Coral fragments, like these pictured at Mote Marine Laboratory, can be grown in land-based nurseries.Mote Marine Laboratory

    A 2018 study found that microfragments of the mountainous star coral (Orbicella faveolata) grew 10 times as much tissue over a 31-month period as the normal, larger fragments that were previously used for reef restoration. For every square centimeter of coral that was planted at the beginning of the experiment, microfragments grew an average of 3.38 square centimeters of new tissue, while larger fragments grew only 0.35 square centimeters. Ocean plantings of coral microfragments have since withstood disease, bleaching and hurricanes, and grown large enough to reproduce within several years.

    “Spawning after five years,” Spadaro says, “was definitely a game changer in terms of restoration.” Re-skinning with microfragments can give you functional reef ecosystems in a fraction of the time as previous methods. Mote scientists have since shared their knowledge with others working to restore corals around the world, such as in Hawaii and the Caribbean.

    Making shade

    Bleaching is the dramatic outcome of great hardship; pushed to the brink by extreme stress, a strained coral belches out its symbiotic photosynthetic algae, turning stark white and losing its primary food source. Excessive heat is the most common culprit, but it’s not the only one.

    Excess light can lead to bleaching, too, says Peter Butcherine, a biologist at Southern Cross University in Coffs Harbour, Australia. Too much light during photosynthesis, performed by the corals’ algae partners, leads to an abundance of toxic oxygen-containing molecules that are highly reactive and can cause cell death. Protecting corals from too much sun exposure can help prevent bleaching, but “you can’t roll out thousands of square meters of shade cloth” to shield an area the size of the Great Barrier Reef, Butcherine says.

    Instead, Butcherine and others have turned to a more ephemeral approach: creating fog. “It’s essentially a sea mist,” Butcherine says. Though misting the entire Great Barrier Reef isn’t feasible, marine fog could be used to protect sensitive parts of the reef during the time of day when sunlight is at its harshest.

    [embedded content]
    Too much sunlight can lead to coral bleaching, much like excessive heat can. By creating artificial marine fog using arrays of misters mounted to ships, like what’s seen in this video, researchers hope to shield reefs such as Australia’s Great Barrier Reef from harmful rays.

    Butcherine and colleagues showed that shading corals for just four hours a day can delay bleaching even when water temperatures are high, such that corals could withstand three extra weeks of bleaching-level heat. The results of that laboratory study were published in the Sept. 20 Frontiers in Marine Science. This delay could help corals hold on to their algal partners until the environment around them cools.

    Because it’s still being developed, marine fogging is quite expensive; it requires large arrays of misters mounted to ships. But Butcherine is excited by the potential of using solar power, including sun-powered drones mounted with misters, to implement the technique at a wider scale, and even at other reefs around the world.

     “I’m optimistic that we can make a difference,” Butcherine says. More

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    AI can alert urban planners and policymakers to cities’ decay

    More than two-thirds of the world’s population is expected to live in cities by 2050, according to the United Nations. As urbanization advances around the globe, researchers at the University of Notre Dame and Stanford University said the quality of the urban physical environment will become increasingly critical to human well-being and to sustainable development initiatives.
    However, measuring and tracking the quality of an urban environment, its evolution and its spatial disparities is difficult due to the amount of on-the-ground data needed to capture these patterns. To address the issue, Yong Suk Lee, assistant professor of technology, economy and global affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, and Andrea Vallebueno from Stanford University used machine learning to develop a scalable method to measure urban decay at a spatially granular level over time.
    Their findings were recently published in Scientific Reports.
    “As the world urbanizes, urban planners and policymakers need to make sure urban design and policies adequately address critical issues such as infrastructure and transportation improvements, poverty and the health and safety of urbanites, as well as the increasing inequality within and across cities,” Lee said. “Using machine learning to recognize patterns of neighborhood development and urban inequality, we can help urban planners and policymakers better understand the deterioration of urban space and its importance in future planning.”
    Traditionally, the measurement of urban quality and quality of life in urban spaces has used sociodemographic and economic characteristics such as crime rates and income levels, survey data of urbanites’ perception and valued attributes of the urban environment, or image datasets describing the urban space and its socioeconomic qualities. The growing availability of street view images presents new prospects in identifying urban features, Lee said, but the reliability and consistency of these methods across different locations and time remains largely unexplored.
    In their study, Lee and Vallebueno used the YOLOv5 model (a form of artificial intelligence that can detect objects) to detect eight object classes that indicate urban decay or contribute to an unsightly urban space — things like potholes, graffiti, garbage, tents, barred or broken windows, discolored or dilapidated façades, weeds and utility markings. They focused on three cities: San Francisco, Mexico City and South Bend, Indiana. They chose neighborhoods in these cities based on factors including urban diversity, stages of urban decay and the authors’ familiarity with the cities.
    Using comparative data, they evaluated their method in three contexts: homelessness in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco between 2009 and 2021, a set of small-scale housing projects carried out in 2017 through 2019 in a subset of Mexico City neighborhoods, and the western neighborhoods of South Bend in the 2011 through 2019 period — a part of the city that had been declining for decades but also saw urban revival initiatives. More

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    Novel device promotes efficient, real-time and secure wireless access

    A new device from the lab of Dinesh Bharadia, an affiliate of the UC San Diego Qualcomm Institute (QI) and faculty member with the Jacobs School of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, offers a fresh tool for the challenge of increasing public access to the wireless network.
    Researchers developed prototype technology to filter out interference from other radio signals while sweeping underutilized spectrum frequency bands for high-traffic periods. The technology could help regulators distribute wireless access at an affordable cost during low-traffic periods.
    “Through meticulous analysis of spectrum usage, we can identify underutilized segments and hidden opportunities, which, when leveraged, would lead to a cost-effective connectivity solution for users around the globe,” said Bharadia. “Crescendo stands at the forefront of this initiative, offering a low-complexity yet highly effective solution with advanced algorithms that provides robust spectrum insights for all.”
    Accessing a “Quiet” Resource
    When unoccupied, broadband frequencies owned by users like the U.S. Navy or military can offer wireless connection to the public or corporations at low cost. The challenge is determining when the primary owners use the frequencies, and when they would be available for public use.
    Working with Associate Professor Aaron Schulman of the Jacobs School of Engineering Computer Science and Engineering Department, researchers from Bharadia’s Wireless Communications, Sensing and Networking Group created a novel device called “Crescendo.”
    Crescendo features adaptive software that allows it to sweep for activity across a range of frequencies within an agency-owned wideband spectrum. The device can adapt to signal interference in real-time by dynamically adjusting which signals it receives to tune out interference from nearby towers, base stations and other sources of high power signals. The technology’s high signal fidelity also ensures that users can count on a secure connection, with any cyberattacks identified in real-time. More

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    Robot stand-in mimics movements in VR

    Researchers from Cornell and Brown University have developed a souped-up telepresence robot that responds automatically and in real-time to a remote user’s movements and gestures made in virtual reality.
    The robotic system, called VRoxy, allows a remote user in a small space, like an office, to collaborate via VR with teammates in a much larger space. VRoxy represents the latest in remote, robotic embodiment.
    Donning a VR headset, a user has access to two view modes: Live mode shows an immersive image of the collaborative space in real time for interactions with local collaborators, while navigational mode displays rendered pathways of the room, allowing remote users to “teleport” to where they’d like to go. This navigation mode allows for quicker, smoother mobility for the remote user and limits motion sickness.
    The system’s automatic nature lets remote teammates focus solely on collaboration rather than on manually steering the robot, researchers said.
    “The great benefit of virtual reality is we can leverage all kinds of locomotion techniques that people use in virtual reality games, like instantly moving from one position to another,” said Mose Sakashita, a doctoral student in the field of information science at Cornell. “This functionality enables remote users to physically occupy a very limited amount of space but collaborate with teammates in a much larger remote environment.”
    Sakashita is the lead author of “VRoxy: Wide-Area Collaboration From an Office Using a VR-Driven Robotic Proxy,” to be presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST), held Oct. 29 through Nov. 1.
    VRoxy’s automatic, real-time responsiveness is key for both remote and local teammates, researchers said. With a robot proxy like VRoxy, a remote teammate confined to a small office can interact in a group activity held in a much larger space, like in a design collaboration scenario. More