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Written by Joyce Lee '22 Edited by Ashwin Palaniappan As the world continues to industrialize, the planet suffers its consequences—and the effects of environmental changes on health grow even more noticeable by the day. Air pollution poses a unique challenge to pollution response because it respects no state borders and cannot be selectively avoided. 9 out of 10 people breathe air with high levels of pollutants, and ambient air pollution is estimated to contribute to approximately 7 million deaths per year. [1]
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Written by Kyle Qian, '21 Edited by Ashwin Palaniappan Some of the biggest current trends in the tech world are blockchain and the internet of things -- they are the backbone of products for emerging startups and established tech giants alike. While the hype surrounding these areas is a bit excessive, much of it is warranted. Blockchain is essentially a distributed database of records. Simply put, it allows us to keep track of information in a secure, yet transparent fashion and is pretty groundbreaking in the sense that it is pretty much impossible to forge/hack the data. Meanwhile, the internet of things is the idea of connecting all things in the world to the internet, so that these things may freely exchange data. For instance, imagine smart homes, where all appliances and utilities could be controlled through your phone. The analyst firm Gartner predicts that by 2020, there will be more 26 billion such connected devices powering IoT. Separately, these revolutionary technologies are already serving different needs across industries. Jointly, they could greatly improve the quality of life -- secure data transmissions is positioned to impact everyone’s life at some point-- and raise the bar for technological development.
 https://pixabay.com/en/judge-hammer-judgement-court-1587300/ By Emily Rehmet, '20
For decades, neuroscientists have developed novel neuroscience technologies with the promise of revolutionizing decision-making in courtrooms. As devices such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalograms (EEGs) have become more advanced, we have been able to obtain information about the states of others that could contribute towards a conviction. We can start answering questions such as is the person on the stand lying or not? Has the defendant seen this object before at the crime scene? How does the defendant feel towards the victim? By Holly Zheng, '22 Do you tend to say “you’all” or “you guys”? A dialect quiz on New York Times from 2013 might be able to tell you how your linguistic idiosyncrasies match a specific geographic region. Dialectology is a branch of sociolinguistics with a focus on regional language variations. In 1939, Hans Kurath, who was a linguistics professor at Brown at the time, compiled with colleagues the “Linguistic Atlas of New England,” the first comprehensive English linguistic atlas of a large region. A result of interviews with more than 400 people, this collection of 734 maps described phonetic variations in American English dialects across the seven New England states. [1]
By Holly Zheng, '22 From the red squiggly lines on Microsoft Word and AutoCorrect on our phones to the list of synonym suggestions by Grammarly, assistant writing apps have gained a significant market by helping many to improve the quality of their emails, essays, and work reports. These highly intelligent personal editors not only take away our worries of misspelling and punctuation mistakes, but also try to give us word suggestions so that the sentence is more concise. The technology behind these devices is a fascinating application of natural language processing and machine learning. Grammarly, one of the most well-known assistant writing app, recently published a blog post where the company explained a new training model to detect and fix run-on sentences. [1]
By Olivia Woodford-Berry, '19 While science is often viewed as an objective, well-policed corner of academia, the trust in the integrity of scientists is not always well placed.
By Malika Ramani, '21 In the first clip, a man dances in his wheelchair, arms and legs swinging gently. In the second clip, a woman opens her eyes and smiles in awe. In the third, a man starts singing along. These three individuals share something in common: they are all residents in long term care facilities, and they are all listening to music. These are simply a sampling of the many scenes depicted in Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory, the 2014 documentary that highlights the work of a nonprofit organization called Music & Memory, [1] whose mission is to train professionals in long term care facilities in music therapy in order to treat patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. [2] The documentary has since spurred researchers across the country – including a team at Brown University – to investigate how and why music therapy can successfully reduce agitated behaviors.
by Dylan Sam, '21
GANs are created through the usage of two different neural networks: a generative network and a discriminative network. The generative network trains on real-life input data to be able to develop synthetic images or other forms of data. The discriminative network is trained so that it can learn to discriminate between “real” and “fake” images. GANs are powerful because it connects these two different networks together.
By Ashley Nee The most severe Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been ravaging the country since August of this year, with 319 probable cases and 198 fatalities. [1] The scale of this outbreak, exacerbated by internal DRC conflict and resistance, has led the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to warn that if Ebola were to become endemic to the area, then “this [would] mean that we've lost the ability to trace contacts, stop transmission chains, and contain the outbreak.” [2]
by Rahul Jayaram, '21 If you have ever played a racing video game, that experience probably formed your first understanding of what driving a vehicle actually feels like. In fact, you probably developed a better intuition for the basic techniques of driving, such as accelerating, braking, and steering, from playing a game than you would have from observing another person drive. Despite not driving an actual car, the experience obtained from a simulation was meaningful. This scenario parallels the concept of neural modeling, or the use of mathematical representations of different brain aspects to better understand how our own brains work. Modeling uses equations to describe the changing relationship between different factors, in this case those that underlie human brain functionality, and can provide a functional understanding of the dynamic processes in our body.  © 2018 McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT |
