More than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, remote workers are still struggling to find an efficient work-life balance. Timothy D. Golden, a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, offers research-based best practices for managing common issues that impede success while working from home.
President Joe Biden is proposing a sweeping $2 trillion infrastructure bill that would fund improvements to transportation, manufacturing, and digital infrastructure, among other projects. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the country’s first technological research university, are leaders in improving the sustainability, safety, and performance of transportation systems, energy systems, and wireless networks, among other areas. Experts in civil and environmental engineering, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering are available to discuss what impact large-scale infrastructure projects could have on a multitude of systems that impact people across the country.
Outsourcing routine tasks, like payroll, customer service, and accounting, offers well-known benefits to businesses and contributes to an economy in which entrepreneurial vendors can support industry and expand employment. However, new research from the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute discovered that not all client-vendor relationships are beneficial for the vendors.
A novel form of polymerized estrogen developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute can provide neuroprotection when implanted at the site of a spinal cord injury — preventing further damage. This promising result, found in a preclinical model, was recently published in ACS Chemical Neuroscience, and it lays the groundwork for further advancement of this new biomaterial.
New research shows that the marketing communication technique of marketing is not limited to decisions that involve numbers, the use and understanding of which require high-level cognitive thinking. Anchoring also biases judgments at relatively low levels of cognition when no numbers are involved.
As the planet heats up, are lakes releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? With a prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant, researcher Kevin Rose will examine large-scale patterns in concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and dissolved oxygen to answer the question.
Future roads will likely carry autonomous vehicles that communicate with one another in a system where vehicles relay information — like destination, speed, or upcoming lane change — and then receive real-time feedback about decisions like route changes necessary to avoid traffic. Such an intelligent connected vehicle system could vastly improve mobility and safety, while reducing congestion and emissions from vehicles idling in traffic, but it will also add significant complexity to already dynamic traffic patterns, making vehicle flow vulnerable to instability.
The original goal of human-like artificial intelligence was abandoned long ago in favor of less ambitious approaches, two cognitive scientists argue in a new book. If that initial vision is to be realized, they say, AI systems will require a full understanding of language and meaning.
Over the course of the last year, Rensselaer experts have made many meaningful contributions to the understanding of — and response to — the COVID-19 crisis. Here is a list of pandemic-related topics they can address.
Envisioning an animal-free drug supply, scientists have — for the first time — reprogrammed a common bacterium to make a designer polysaccharide molecule used in pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals.
In research published today in npj Science of Learning, engineers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute demonstrate how a testing strategy they call “distanced online testing” can effectively reduce students’ ability to receive help from one another in order to score higher on a test taken at individual homes during social distancing.
In a paper recently presented at the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, the research team wrote that, prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, “little attention had been paid to the possibility that a significant number of critical personnel in both the infrastructure and disaster response and recovery supply chains could be incapacitated or otherwise unavailable due to an ongoing pandemic.” Furthermore, their modeling suggests that “our current understanding of such compound extreme events is inadequate to the potential threat.”
An antioxidant found in green tea may increase levels of p53, a natural anti-cancer protein, known as the “guardian of the genome” for its ability to repair DNA damage or destroy cancerous cells.
Jonathan Dordick, the Howard P. Isermann ’42 Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), for his “contributions to methods for rapidly screening drug efficacy and toxicity, and biocatalytic technologies for improving human health.”
In an era of required social distancing and stressed medical resources, a virtual clinical environment that allows doctors and nurses to safely practice intubating a simulated COVID-19 patient, among other necessary procedures, could accelerate and enhance training efforts. With the support of a new $654,000 supplement grant, a team of engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will develop an artificially intelligent agent called the Virtual Intelligent preceptor for COVID (VIVID), which will prepare teams for surgeries, to intubate patients, and to properly use personal protective gear, without increasing anyone’s risk of exposure.
Triage care on the battlefield requires split-second decision-making and proficiency in providing first aid. Correctly applying a tourniquet or inserting an intubation tube before a patient is evacuated to a hospital could save lives. To improve training for the field medics responsible for this level of care, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will team up with researchers from the United States Army Research Laboratory in Orlando, Florida, to better understand skill acquisition and to standardize the prolonged field care (PFC) certification process. With the support of a $3.1 million grant from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center, the team will combine neuroimaging, computer vision, eye-tracking, and artificial intelligence methods to make PFC certification faster, more objective, and scalable for all soldiers.
A grant-funded project will produce single-molecule images of the interaction that produces a protein key to Alzheimer's Disease.
Warnings about misinformation are now regularly posted on social media platforms, but not all of these cautions are created equal. New research from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that artificial intelligence can help form accurate news assessments — but only when a news story is first emerging.
Bram Van Heuveln, a lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, makes the case for a new understanding of the Turing Test in a chapter of the book Great Philosophical Objections to Artificial Intelligence: The History and Legacy of the AI Wars, published this month by Bloomsbury.
In research published today in Integrative Biology, a team of engineers from Rensselaer developed an in vitro — in the lab — lymphatic vessel model to study the growth of tumor emboli, collections of tumor cells within vessels that are often associated with increased metastasis and tumor recurrence.
Macrophages, the killer cells of the immune system, are controlled by circadian rhythms, a finding which may indicate that our ability to fight disease relies more heavily on daily circadian cycles than previously assumed.
As communities across the United States struggle to manage a wave of COVID-19 infections, a multidisciplinary team of researchers argue that the pandemic has revealed the ways in which engineered structures and services have contributed to society’s challenges. They subsequently insist that the built environment — including both engineered structures and services — cannot be ignored when developing long-term pandemic mitigation. In an article recently published in The Journal of Critical Infrastructure Policy, a team led by David Mendonca, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, implores engineers and social scientists to re-examine the models, data collection methods, and assumptions that their research is currently built upon.
In a money-saving revelation for organizations inclined to invest in specialized information technology to support the process of idea generation, new research suggests that even non-specialized, everyday organizational IT can encourage employees’ creativity.
The 2020 wildfires on the West Coast stymied planned research at the University of California Blue Oak Ranch Reserve, but also created a rare chance to catch the first link in the chain that connects fire-derived “black carbon” from a charred hillside with the deep ocean.
A new research effort led by a team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute aims to improve manufacturing of rapidly deployed structures in order to address future shortages of medical care and quarantine facilities, as well as housing needs following a disaster. This project will rely on the development of a group of self-aware, human-directed robots to assist in manufacturing, and is being funded by the Department of Defense through the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute.
According to new research from behavioral economist Ian Chadd, an assistant professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, irrelevant information or unavailable options often cause people to make bad choices. When both elements are present, the probability of a poor decision is even greater.
In research recently published in the AIAA Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, a multidisciplinary team of engineers demonstrated how a series of lunar images can be used to infer the direction that a spacecraft is moving. This technique, sometimes called visual odometry, allows navigation information to be gathered even when a good map isn’t available. The goal is to allow spacecraft to more accurately target and land at a specific location on the moon without requiring a complete map of its surface.
With the support of a new grant from the National Institutes of Health, a team from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will examine the interactions between the brain, bone, and the gut microbiota in relation to Alzheimer’s disease. What the researchers learn could lead to new biomarker and therapeutic discoveries for both diagnosis and treatment.
In research recently published online in Medical Image Analysis, a team of engineers demonstrated how a new algorithm they developed was able to successfully predict whether or not a COVID-19 patient would need ICU intervention. This artificial intelligence-based approach could be a valuable tool in determining a proper course of treatment for individual patients.
With the support of a four-year $1.2 million grant from The Department of Veterans Affairs, an interdisciplinary team of engineers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute aims to create a polymer coating that could potentially be capable of reducing the body’s inflammatory response following the implantation of electrodes.
With the support of a $2.2 million grant from the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command of the U.S. Department of Defense, received through a Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium award, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University at Buffalo will combine neuroimaging, neuromodulation, and artificial intelligence to better understand and measure surgical skill acquisition — and then determine if that mastery can be accelerated.
Despite additional costs, increased restrictions, and issues stemming from compliance directives, research from the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that government-mandated stress tests are effective in strengthening the overall health of the American banking industry.
Leaders at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute relied on a powerful algorithm, COVID Back-to-School - now freely available to the public - to determine that twice-weekly testing of all students would be the optimal regimen for keeping the infection rate on campus safely below 1% for any two-week period.
A new research project for satellite telecommunications, supported by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, proposes to use the properties of light itself to punch a pathway for data through the clouds.
A small energy harvesting device that can transform subtle mechanical vibrations into electrical energy could be used to power wireless sensors and actuators for use in anything from temperature and occupancy monitoring in smart environments, to biosensing within the human body. In research recently published in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute developed a predictive model for such a device, which will allow researchers to better understand and optimize its functionalities.
Armed with evidence that a specific site on heparan sulfate — known as the 3-O-sulfate group — is critical to the transfer of harmful tau proteins in the brain, a research program funded by the NIH’s National Institute of Aging is scrutinizing the interactions between heparan sulfate and tau, determining how misfolded tau spreads in the brain, and developing strategies to block it.
With the support from a NASA Early Career Faculty Award, Shankar Narayanan, an assistant professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, aims to develop new materials that can protect objects from extreme radiation and temperature variations in space — an important step toward enabling long-distance space exploration.
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