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.”