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President Grace J. Wang was named to the annual list which was featured in The Boston Globe Magazine as part of its Women & Power issue. The list was created by The Women’s Edge, a nonprofit that supports female business leaders, and celebrates the state’s leading companies and nonprofit organizations led by women. The group examined 2023 revenue or operating budget as well as other variables and ranked organizations according to its own formula.
NPR Hartford reported on Andrew Trapp, associate professor of operations and industrial engineering, developing analytical tools to estimate capacities for holding sites, judges, and other resources needed to humanely process migrant asylum cases at the U.S. southern border.
The Wall Street Journal spoke with Dean Andrew Palumbo, admissions and financial aid, for this article. (Go down to header: “Get Rid of the SAT and ACT”; scroll down two more paragraphs). “If it’s not a great predictor and potentially acting as a barrier for students who are at or above peers but bad testers, what message are we sending?” Palumbo told the newspaper.
EdSurge published an article by seventh-grade teacher Andrew Burnett, FA Day Middle School in Newton, in which she sited her work with Neil Heffernan, the William Smith Dean's Professor of Computer Science and the director of the Learning Sciences and Technologies Program at WPI. She detailed how her research for Heffernan, involving ASSISTments, a responsive online learning tool based in learning science that was founded by Heffernan and his wife, impacted her teaching when she returned to the classroom.
Boston 25 News interviewed Professor Milosh Puchovsky, fire protection engineering, was interviewed about potential fire hazards associated with solar panels on homes. “Just having the panel on the roof would change the risk because you are introducing an electrical current where one was not previously,” he told the station, adding that rooftop solar panels can be safe and effective if properly installed and regularly maintained after installation.
Boston 25 reported on WPI researchers developing a sensor the size of a Band-Aid to measure a baby’s blood oxygen levels, a vital indication of the lungs’ effectiveness and whether the baby’s tissue is receiving adequate oxygen supply. This wearable device will be flexible and stretchable, wireless, inexpensive, and mobile - possibly allowing the child to leave the hospital and be monitored remotely.
The Register reported on Berk Sunar, professor of electrical and computer engineering and leader of the Vernam Lab, and Daniel Moghimi, a PhD candidate in the electrical and computer engineering department, leading an international team of researchers that discovered serious security vulnerabilities in computer chips made by Intel Corp. and STMicroelectronics. The flaws affect billions of laptop, server, tablet, and desktop users around the world. The proof-of-concept attack is dubbed TPM-Fail.
The Telegram & Gazette reported on the National Science Foundation (NSF) awarding WPI a $1 million grant to help low-income, high-achieving students earn a STEM degree from the university. WPI Director of Multicultural Affairs and Biomedical Engineering Professor Tiffiny Butler is principal investigator, while Katherine Chen, executive director of the STEM Education Center, is co-principal investigator.
WBZ News Radio interviewed Cagdas Onal, associate professor of mechanical engineering about a $3m NSF grant WPI received to study how humans and robots can co-exist in the workplace.
Under Emerging Tech, Digital Trends interviewed Craig Putnam, associate director of robotics engineering, about the student-led project that is developing the autonomous rover and payload-deploying drone. The goal is to find and safely destroy hidden munitions that kill or maim as many as 20,000 people around the world each year. Putnam told Digital Trends, “the goal was to come up with a system that was as low cost as reasonably possible so that it could be afforded by some remote village that has a problem with land mines in the area.”
Vice cited work by Professor Emily Douglas, head of the Department of Social Science and Policy Studies, for this article. The publication cited a 2016 analysis co-authored by Douglas, that found while women are more likely to be injured (or killed) in domestic violence disputes, men and women inflict violence on their intimate partners at roughly the same rate.
Robotics Business Review published an extensive story with photos of last week’s Robotics Engineering Research Symposium at WPI. The story includes comments from WPI President Laurie Leshin and WPI alumnus Mathew DeDonato ’09, who is now a manager in the vehicle hardware group at Toyota Research Institute. President Leshin called WPI’s robotics program “an incredible model for higher education.”
WBZ radio aired a segment last night and this morning about WPI’s Jazz History Database. Rich Falco, director of Jazz Studies and assistant teaching professor of music, discussed the unique collection. WPI has compiled hundreds of CDs, cassettes, and other materials from jazz artists, families, and musical societies. Students digitize the analog versions of the jazz performances and enter them into the database.
The Worcester Business Journal reported on WPI receiving $3 million from the National Science Foundation to study human-robot interaction in the workplace. Eight WPI researchers are involved: Cagdas Onal (principal investigator), Yunus Telliel, Jeanine Skorinko, Winston Soboyejo, Jing Xiao, Pratap Rao, Soussan Djamasbi and Jane Li.
The Associated Press published a Telegram & Gazette article on WPI’s Haichong (Kai) Zhang, assistant professor in biomedical engineering and robotics engineering, and his five-year $1.8 million Director's Early Independence Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It’s to create a robotic system that will detect and analyze three different indicators of prostate cancer.
The Worcester Business Journal featured Haichong (Kai) Zhang, assistant professor in biomedical engineering and robotics engineering, and his receiving a five-year $1,869,423 Director's Early Independence Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It’s for his ongoing work to create a robotic system that will detect and analyze three different indicators of prostate cancer. Gregory Fischer, professor of robotics engineering, is also working on the project.
Jing Xiao, director of Robotics Engineering, and PhD student Alexandra Valiton were interviewed by Worcester News Tonight about therecent Robotics Engineering Research Symposium.
The Telegram & Gazette interviewed Scott Barton, associate professor of music, about his producing a first-of-its-kind concert at Mechanics Hall, pairing human musicians with artificially intelligent musical robotics.
Boston 25 reported that WPI is getting an $8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to scale up ASSISTments, a middle-school math assessment tool. ASSISTments was created by Neil Heffernan, the William Smith Dean Professor of Computer Science and the director of the Learning Sciences and Technologies Program at WPI, and his wife, Cristina Heffernan.
