Aurelia Butler

For students learning a second or foreign language, text is often simplified to ensure that they can comprehend it well enough to understand the core message. Usually, complicated text in a foreign language is simplified manually by teachers or material designers. However, with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI)-based software, automatic simplification of text is now a reality. One such tool is the automatic text simplification (ATS) software, which simplifies text in second and foreign languages for L2 learners. Currently, there is limited data on the effectiveness of an ATS software in an educational setting.
To address this, Professor Dennis Murphy Odo from the Department of English Education at Pusan National University conducted a study, published in Applied Linguistics, to assess how L2 learners comprehend English language text simplified by an ATS tool. For this purpose, he recruited 61 native Korean speakers who had been studying English for the past 10 years, with reading proficiencies ranging from low to high.
These L2 learners were divided into low and high L2 reading proficiency groups and assigned to read either authentic English text derived from the Scientific American website, or automatically simplified version of that same text using a ‘Yet Another Text Simplifier’ (YATS) ATS tool. Following this, the L2 learners from both groups took a free recall test and a multiple-choice (MC) comprehension test, that tested their ability to recall and comprehend the text.
The key finding, derived from an analysis of the free recall test scores was that L2 learners with a higher reading proficiency found automatically simplified text more comprehensible, as compared to L2 learners with a lower reading proficiency.
While discussing this finding Prof. Odo remarks, “Although online automated text simplification tools can prove to be highly useful in making authentic materials more comprehensible for L2 learners beyond a certain level of foreign language reading proficiency, they may not do so for learners with a lower level of reading proficiency.”
Hence, ATS software can help L2 students with a high reading proficiency understand complicated text, and support teachers in simplifying challenging text for their students.
However, there is a need for ATS tools to be developed further, in order to make text comprehensible enough for L2 learners with low reading proficiencies. “On the positive side, software developers will continue to develop AI-enhanced tools that will make challenging texts more and more comprehensible to foreign language learners with different reading proficiencies,” says Prof. Odo in conclusion.
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Materials provided by Pusan National University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

In a study that confirms its promise as the next-generation semiconductor material, UC Santa Barbara researchers have directly visualized the photocarrier transport properties of cubic boron arsenide single crystals.
“We were able to visualize how the charge moves in our sample,” said Bolin Liao, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering. Using the only scanning ultrafast electron microscopy (SUEM) setup in operation at a U.S. university, he and his team were able to make “movies” of the generation and transport processes of a photoexcited charge in this relatively little-studied III-V semiconductor material, which has recently been recognized as having extraordinary electrical and thermal properties. In the process, they found another, beneficial property that adds to the material’s potential as the next great semiconductor.
Their research, conducted in collaboration with physics professor Zhifeng Ren’s group at the University of Houston, who specialize in fabricating high-quality single crystals of cubic boron arsenide, appears in the journal Matter.
‘Ringing the Bell’
Boron arsenide is being eyed as a potential candidate to replace silicon, the computer world’s staple semiconductor material, due to its promising performance. For one thing, with an improved charge mobility over silicon, it easily conducts current (electrons and their positively charged counterpart, “holes”). However, unlike silicon, it also conducts heat with ease.
“This material actually has 10 times higher thermal conductivity than silicon,” Liao said. This heat conducting — and releasing — ability is particularly important as electronic components become smaller and more densely packed, and pooled heat threatens the devices’ performance, he explained. More

Using a simple set of magnets, MIT researchers have come up with a sophisticated way to monitor muscle movements, which they hope will make it easier for people with amputations to control their prosthetic limbs.
In a new pair of papers, the researchers demonstrated the accuracy and safety of their magnet-based system, which can track the length of muscles during movement. The studies, performed in animals, offer hope that this strategy could be used to help people with prosthetic devices control them in a way that more closely mimics natural limb movement.
“These recent results demonstrate that this tool can be used outside the lab to track muscle movement during natural activity, and they also suggest that the magnetic implants are stable and biocompatible and that they don’t cause discomfort,” says Cameron Taylor, an MIT research scientist and co-lead author of both papers.
In one of the studies, the researchers showed that they could accurately measure the lengths of turkeys’ calf muscles as the birds ran, jumped, and performed other natural movements. In the other study, they showed that the small magnetic beads used for the measurements do not cause inflammation or other adverse effects when implanted in muscle.
“I am very excited for the clinical potential of this new technology to improve the control and efficacy of bionic limbs for persons with limb-loss,” says Hugh Herr, a professor of media arts and sciences, co-director of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics at MIT, and an associate member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
Herr is a senior author of both papers, which appear today in the journal Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology. Thomas Roberts, a professor of ecology, evolution, and organismal biology at Brown University, is a senior author of the measurement study. More

Extreme miniaturization of infrared (IR) detectors is critical for their integration into next-generation consumer electronics, wearables and ultra-small satellites. Thus far, however, IR detectors have relied on bulky (and expensive) materials and technologies. A team of scientists lead by Empa researcher Ivan Shorubalko now succeeded in developing a cost-effective miniaturization process for IR spectrometers based on a quantum dot photodetector, which can be integrated on a single chip, as they report in Nature Photonics.
Miniaturization of infrared spectrometers will lead to their wider use in consumer electronics, such as smartphones enabling food control, the detection of hazardous chemicals, air pollution monitoring and wearable electronics. They can be used for the quick and easy detection of certain chemicals without using laboratory equipment. Moreover, they can be useful for the detection of counterfeit medical drugs as well as of greenhouse gases such as methane and CO2.
A team of scientists at Empa, ETH Zurich, EPFL, the University of Salamanca, Spain, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the University of Basel now built a proof-of-concept miniaturized Fourier-transform waveguide spectrometer that incorporates a subwavelength photodetector as a light sensor, consisting of colloidal mercury telluride quantum dot (Hg Te) and compatible with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology, as they report in the recent issue of Nature Photonics.
Tremendous effects on spectrometers of different kinds — and in various fields
The resulting spectrometer exhibits a large spectral bandwidth and moderate spectral resolution of 50 cm−1 at a total active spectrometer volume below 100 μm × 100 μm × 100 μm. This ultra-compact spectrometer design allows the integration of optical-analytical measurement instruments into consumer electronics and space devices. “The monolithic integration of subwavelength IR photodetectors has a tremendous effect on the scaling of Fourier-transform waveguide spectrometers,” says Empa researcher Ivan Shorubalko. “But this may also be of great interest for miniaturized Raman spectrometers, biosensors and lab-on-a-chip devices as well as the development of high-resolution snapshot hyperspectral cameras.”
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Materials provided by Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA). Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

A new paper in Cell Systems explores the importance of using multiple data types in drug discovery. The paper screens over 1,000 drugs tested in six doses and demonstrates that gene expression and cell morphology provide different information for drug prioritization.
Led by biomedical data scientist Gregory Way, PhD, MS, the study showcases that by using these two data types simultaneously, scientists can measure fundamentally different aspects of the drug’s biology.
“We believe these two popular methods can be used to our advantage in designing drugs that address the full complexity of biology,” said Way, who is an assistant professor in biomedical informatics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
Way and a team of data scientists found that the two data types provide a partially shared but also complementary view of drug mechanisms. They said using both approaches can advance drug discovery, functional genomics and precision medicine in unique directions.
“While labeling drugs based on mechanism of action is incredibly powerful, the approach risks missing a bigger picture. Both data types, collected via phenotypic drug screening, embrace the complexity of biology and can allow scientists to study and leverage the multifaceted effects drugs can offer,” Way adds.
Their paper shows how the assays compare with each other on useful biological tasks (e.g., mechanism of action prediction) given all the sources of variation/noise and current best practices in data processing. The phenotypic drug screening approach allows researchers to measure thousands of features of thousands of different drugs in a single experiment.
“We hope our analysis can guide researchers in experimental design and in understanding the limitations of their particular profiling modality to provide more consistent measurements and maximize potential for drug discovery successes,” Way said.
The paper guides scientists in planning experiments that profile cells for reversing disease phenotypes, quantifying cell response to chemical or genetic perturbation and querying drug mechanisms.
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Materials provided by University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Original written by Julia Milzer. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

If you’ve ever played the claw game at an arcade, you know how hard it is to grab and hold onto objects using robotics grippers. Imagine how much more nerve-wracking that game would be if, instead of plush stuffed animals, you were trying to grab a fragile piece of endangered coral or a priceless artifact from a sunken ship.
Most of today’s robotic grippers rely on embedded sensors, complex feedback loops, or advanced machine learning algorithms, combined with the skill of the operator, to grasp fragile or irregularly shaped objects. But researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have demonstrated an easier way.
Taking inspiration from nature, they designed a new type of soft, robotic gripper that uses a collection of thin tentacles to entangle and ensnare objects, similar to how jellyfish collect stunned prey. Alone, individual tentacles, or filaments, are weak. But together, the collection of filaments can grasp and securely hold heavy and oddly shaped objects. The gripper relies on simple inflation to wrap around objects and doesn’t require sensing, planning, or feedback control.
The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“With this research, we wanted to reimagine how we interact with objects,” said Kaitlyn Becker, former graduate student and postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and first author of the paper. “By taking advantage of the natural compliance of soft robotics and enhancing it with a compliant structure, we designed a gripper that is greater than the sum of its parts and a grasping strategy that can adapt to a range of complex objects with minimal planning and perception.”
Becker is currently an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. More