Eight New York University Faculty Join  Hillary Clinton, Jeff Bezos, and Clint Eastwood
As 2012 AAAS Fellows

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) elected eight New York University faculty as Fellows: Crispin James Garth Wright, a professor of philosophy; Yacov Trope, a professor of psychology; Danny Reinberg, a professor of biochemistry and molecular pharmacology, NYU School of Medicine; Elizabeth Phelps, a Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science; Paul Boghossian, a Silver Professor of Philosophy; Richard Sylla, Henry Kaufman Professor of the History of Financial Institutions and Markets at NYU’s Stern School of Business; Daryl Levinson, David Boies Professor of Law at NYU’s School of Law; and Marvin Trachtenberg, Edith Kitzmiller Professor of Fine Arts at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts.

They join Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Amazon founder Jeffrey Bezos, and actor Clint Eastwood as 2012 AAAS Fellows.

The new class will be inducted at a ceremony on October 6 at the academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 

Steinhardt Professors Win Million Dollar Grant From Intel for New Social Computing Initiative

Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development professor Helen Nissenbaum has received $1.625 million to serve as NYU’s lead researcher at the new Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing, an initiative that will bring the social sciences to bear on contemporary computing—from examining social networks to e-government practices.

Assistant professor Erica Robles-Anderson, also from Steinhardt’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, will collaborate with Nissenbaum on questions pertaining to the ways in which people interact in today’s fully networked environment.

“This exciting opportunity places NYU faculty and students alongside many of the leading thinkers in the field of social computing, to pursue deep and sustained study of theory and practice,” says Nissenbaum.

The center, unveiled in late June by Intel, is devoted to studying the “third wave” of social computing: The merging of the digital and social, human, and machine realms.

The University of California at Irvine will serve as the hub of the $12.5 million Intel-funded research center and facilitate joint research collectives overseen by lead researchers at four partnering institutions: Cornell University, Indiana University, Georgia Tech, and NYU.

 

NYU-Poly’s Ted Rappaport to Receive International Engineering Education Award

Theodore (Ted) S. Rappaport, a professor at NYU-Poly and a leading researcher in wireless communication engineering, has been chosen as the 2012 recipient of the William E. Sayle Award for Achievement in Education by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Education Society. The prestigious award is presented annually to an Education Society member who has made significant contributions in engineering education.

Rappaport, who is also a professor at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and in the Department of Radiology at NYU Langone Medical Center, was chosen for his exceptional technical advancements and service in computer science and engineering education and accreditation.

“We take great pride in IEEE’s recognition of professor Rappaport’s achievements, and we are honored to have him teaching and conducting research at NYU-Poly,” says NYU-Poly President Jerry M. Hultin. “He has contributed greatly to engineering education, and he generously shares his scholarship and expertise with the young men and women studying at this institution.”

Rappaport is the founding director of NYU Wireless, a new research center that combines engineering, computer science, and medical applications. He directs a national research center that involves five major universities and the National Science Foundation’s Wireless Internet Center for Advanced Technology at NYU-Poly, where most of the NYU Wireless research will be conducted.

 

NYU Abu Dhabi’s Ozgur Sinanoglu Awarded Research Grant From ATIC

NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) assistant professor of computer engineering Ozgur Sinanoglu has been awarded a $200,000 grant by the Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) to conduct a two-year research project in electronic chip testing in Abu Dhabi. The grant is supported by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), an international technology research consortium that provided technical support and expertise in the grant selection process.

NYUAD’s Design for Excellence Lab, headed by Sinanoglu, focuses on the area of electronic chip reliability and security. Testing of chips is an important research area for improving the efficiency of semiconductor fabrication, as the process of screening for defects is estimated to account for roughly 30 percent of production costs. With the ATIC grant, Sinanoglu—supported by NYUAD Global Academic Fellow and NYU New York Ph.D. student Chandrakumar Holenarasipursuresh—will investigate the area of adaptive testing, which takes into account the slight variations that can arise in the manufacturing process. They will also investigate the area of dynamic voltage scaling in computing.

NYU Faculty Win Google Research Awards

Four NYU professors have received Google Research Awards, highly-competitive grants that support cutting-edge research in computer science, engineering, and related fields.

Recipients of these one-year awards are: Yann LeCun, a Silver Professor at NYU’s Center for Neural Science and Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences; computer science professor Mehryar Mohri; computer science professor Ken Perlin, who directs the Games for Learning Institute; and David Sontag, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science.

LeCun will work toward building a palm-size specialized computer to perform vision tasks for such applications as autonomous robots or driver assistance for cars.

Mohri will pursue a new and more efficient algorithm aimed at improving speech-recognition technologies. The resulting algorithms are likely to yield significant accuracy improvements and directly benefit the many applications of speech recognition in everyday life as well as improve accessibility for the disabled.

Perlin’s work will focus on enhancing ARCADE, a platform—inspired by Hollywood post-production effects used in such films as Minority Report—that creates and performs real-time presentations in which a presenter or teacher directly manipulates 3D virtual objects that appear to float holographically in the air.

Sontag’s project will tackle how to discover the latent variables that influence our observations from massive amounts of data. In collaboration with colleagues in emergency medicine, Sontag will be applying these methods to do early detection of sepsis, a severe condition caused by the immune system’s overreaction to an infection and the leading cause of death in non-cardiac ICUs.

Steinhardt Professor Cybele Raver Receives APA Distinguished Contributions Award

Cybele Raver, vice provost of academic, faculty, and research affairs at NYU and a professor of applied psychology at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, received the American Psychological Association’s 2012 Distinguished Contributions of Applications to Education and Training Award. The award recognizes the significant contribution Raver has made in the application of psychological principles to the study of developmental science.

Raver’s research focuses on the role of young children’s emotional development and the impact of self-regulation on cognition and school readiness. She is currently conducting the Chicago School Readiness Program, a federally funded study that measures the impact of classroom-based interventions in Head Start classrooms. Her work has been supported by grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the W. T. Grant Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

 

Mary Carruthers Elected to British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

The British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences elected Mary Carruthers, the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature at NYU, as one of its 2012 Fellows.

At NYU, Carruthers has been dean for the humanities in the Faculty of Arts and Science and chair of the university’s Department of English. Her published works include: Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, an edited volume; The Book of Memory; The Craft of Thought: Rhetoric, Meditation, and the Making of Images, 400-1200; and The Search for St. Truth: A Study of Meaning in Piers Plowman.

Established by Royal Charter in 1902, the academy champions and supports the humanities and social sciences. The roll call of past Fellows includes many of the greatest names of the 20th century, such as John Maynard Keynes, Isaiah Berlin, Louis and Mary Leakey, and C. S. Lewis.

 

College of Nursing’s Anastasi Awarded $2.5M From NIH to Study Irritable Bowel
Syndrome Symptom Management

Joyce K. Anastasi, the Independence Foundation Endowed Professor and founding director of the Division of Special Studies in Symptom Management at the College of Nursing, has been awarded a $2.5 million four-year National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant for the study of “Symptom management for irritable bowel syndrome constipation.”

The primary aim of the study is to investigate the efficacy of Acupuncture/Moxibustion (Acu/Moxa) in reducing abdominal pain/discomfort and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) secondary supporting symptoms such as intestinal gas, bloating, and stool consistency. The randomized, blinded, sham/placebo controlled study, with 183 adults diagnosed with IBS-Constipation, will follow the accepted standards of rigorous clinical trials.

“Acu/Moxa, used in traditional Chinese medicine, has been employed successfully to manage various GI disorders including IBS,” says Anastasi. “However, few acupuncture studies have had the necessary rigor to evaluate this therapy.”

IBS is the most commonly identified functional bowel disorder afflicting 15-20 percent of North Americans. It is defined as abdominal pain/discomfort in the mid or lower gastrointestinal (GI) tract, associated with defecation or a change in bowel patterns with features of disordered defecation. The chronic symptoms of IBS have been linked with decreased quality of life, decreased work productivity, and increased health-care utilization. Few current therapies such as dietary modification, supplements, psychotherapy, and pharmacologic agents are proven effective, either singly or in combination. Most studies, says Anastasi, “have been limited by size, design, and duration of follow-up.”

 

 

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