Professor Daniel Stouffer, currently a Senior Lecturer at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Canterbury (NZ), was one of nine new Early Career Fellows elected by the Ecological Society of America (ESA). ESA designates as Early Career Fellows of the Society certain early career members (typically chosen ...
Nine to Five to Nine to Nine
Towards the end of an undergraduate engineering program, the graduating class forms two distinct groups. A handful of students choose to continue their formal education in grad school, while the majority turn to industry in order to cash in on their degrees. I fell into the latter category, but today ...
A knight and a thief walk into a bar and meet three gods……
Most people have heard the logic puzzle about the knight and the thief. The knight always tells the truth and the thief always lies. If you happen to run into the two of them on the road one day, how can you figure out who is whom by asking just ...
Jane Wang accepts Research Scientist position at Google DeepMind
Amaral lab alumnus Jane Wang has recently accepted a Research Scientist position at Google DeepMind, where she will work on integrating neuroscience concepts into artificial intelligence. Google DeepMind is a company focused on researching reinforcement learning, hippocampal learning, and deep neural networks. Dr. Wang’s experience in computational research from her ...
Andrew Jennings wins 3rd prize in the Poster competition at Northwestern Computational Research Day
At the second annual Northwestern Computational Research day the Amaral Lab was well represented, with undergraduate students Andrew Jennings and Aaron Stern presenting their research. Both did an excellent job, not only in crafting their posters but also presenting their work to all of the symposium attendees. Despite the stiff ...
Computational research, no longer a red-headed stepchild!
This week I had the, almost obscene, pleasure of participating in Northwestern’s Computational Research Day as a chairperson and poster judge.I typically cringe at the thought of attending conferences and symposia, since I am mainly a homebody (I love my desk, computer, research, and daily schedule), but at the symposium ...
CUDA
CUDA, Compute Unified Device Architecture, is a parallel computing platform designed by NVIDIA. NVIDIA manufactures graphics cards that accelerate the layout of graphics to a display. In 1999, NVIDIA presented its GeForce 256 as “the world’s first ‘GPU’, or Graphics Processing Unit”. A GPU is an specialized processor designed to speed up 3D rendering. 3D rendering algorithms involve simple calculations, such the amount of light that each pixel receives for each frame, executed over and over, extremely quickly. Therefore, the GPU has been specialized to calculate simple math operations (i.e. matrix product) using lots of threads (parallel process unit). Nowadays, developers can use this powerful architecture to operate on our own data using CUDA. NVIDIA provides the tools that developers need to take advantage of this technology.
Funding decline for the Model Organism Research Paradigm in the USA
Despite the economy has been recovering since the 2008 crisis, many biology labs are still facing funding issues. Part of the funding issues has resulted from funding changes in the overall federal budget destined to science. A funding decrease or stagnation for science does not only affect the number of ...
Learning: Nature and Nurture
Learning machines are a hit in fiction, while machine learning is trying to break into research. How does nature and nurture play into the systems we contrive?
Anywhere in the World for a Hundred Bucks
Through strategic use of frequent flier programs, anywhere in the world is accessible for a hundred bucks.
Dataclysm: The very best of
I recently read Dataclysm by Christian Rudder. These are some of my favorite stories from this book.
Picking a Method
Although the current state of Picking a Method resembles a messy dark art, I don’t think that this state will continue.
Hear Ye, Hear Ye, Hear Ye
All cultures have traditions that seem strange to an outsider. To withstand the test of time and not fade out, these traditions presumably had to fill some niche in our lives much like different species fill a specific niche in an ecosystem. Thanksgiving caters to our sentimental side with family ...
Adam Hockenberry awarded Presidential Fellowship
Adam Hockenberry, a graduate student in IBiS jointly advised by Mike Jewett and Luís Amaral has been awarded a Presidential Fellowship. The Presidential Fellowship is funded by the President of the University and awarded by The Graduate School. This highly competitive award is the most prestigious fellowship awarded by Northwestern ...
Building trustworthy Big Data algorithms
By Emily Ayshford Much of our reams of data sit in large databases of unstructured text. Finding insights among emails, text documents, and websites is extremely difficult unless we can search, characterize, and classify their text data in a meaningful way. One of the leading big data algorithms for finding ...
'Friending' your way thin
By Erin White EVANSTON, Ill. —- If you want to lose pounds using an online weight management program, don’t be a wallflower. A new Northwestern University study shows that online dieters with high social embeddedness — who logged in regularly, recorded their weigh-ins and ‘friended’ other members — lost more ...
The futility of scientific creativity
Newton and Leibniz developed calculus more or less simultaneously and independently. But would the world be any different if one or the other decided to become a blacksmith instead? Or was it simply that there was an intellectual foundation of the day that laid down an obvious path towards calculus, and we look back after the fact to come up with reasons to lionize the victors?
Data analysis trumps critics, wisdom of crowds and number of awards
EVANSTON, Ill. —- Don’t rely on the Academy Awards next month if you are seeking to know whether the movies deemed great today will survive the test of time. According to a new Northwestern University study, the best predictor of a movie’s significance is how often a movie is referenced ...
Max Wasserman awarded Ph.D.
On Tuesday, December 10th, 2014 Max Wasserman successfully defended his PhD thesis. He studies networks contained within the Internet Movie Database.