NYU President Linda G.Mills and Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology(KAIST)President Kwang Hyung Lee were joined by Sung Bae Jun,president of the Institute of Information&Communications Technology Planning&Evaluation,and Joon Hee Joh,president of the Korea Software Industry Association in signing an agreement to collaborate on amajor Artificial Intelligence(AI)and digital technologies research effort.Senior public officials—including the President of the Republic of Korea,Yoon Suk Yeol;Korea’s Minister of Science and Information and Communications Technology Jong-Ho Lee;the Director of the US National Science Foundation Sethuraman Panchanathan;NYC Deputy Mayor for Housing,Economic Development,and Workforce Maria Torres-Springer—and Turing Prize-winning AI scientist and NYU faculty member Yann LeCun convened at NYU’s Greenwich Village campus to mark the new partnership and launch a“Digital Vision Forum”with leading thinkers on AI and digital governance from around the world.Senator Charles Schumer participated in the proceedings via video.The event also importantly marked the anniversary of the first Digital Vision Forum,which was held precisely ayear ago at NYU to initiate the partnership between NYU,the Republic of Korea,and KAIST,an event that also featured remarks by President Yoon.Today’s historic event positions NYU,New York City,and Korea at the forefront of the global science and tech ecosystem of the future.NYU President Mills said,“We are honored to bring together leaders in government,academia,and industry to commemorate avital and historic partnership that will propel scholarship and advancements in technology.We are thrilled by this partnership,which exemplifies both NYU’s commitment to global learning and research as well as our role in fueling the growth of New York City’s tech,science,and innovation sector.”Senator Schumer said,“I want to commend President Yoon and my friend,NYU President Linda Mills,on today’s announcement of ahistoric joint research program between NYU and the South Korean government.The partnership is apartnership made in heaven:NYU,one of the nation’s leading research institutions,and South Korea,one of America’s strongest allies and partners,and also aleader in research and science,collaborating on one of the most important issues of our time,artificial intelligence.”NSF Director Panchanathan said,“As our two presidents affirmed at the State Visit in April,the U.S.and the Republic of Korea have atruly global alliance that champions democratic principles,enriches economic cooperation,and empowers technological advances.NSF shares in President Yoon‘s conviction that human values are important in the development of new technology.Values including openness and transparency,and the creation of AI tools that are responsible and ethical,without bias,and protect the security and privacy of our people.”The research effort—the ROK Institutions-NYU AI and Digital Partnership—aims to conduct world-class research in AI and digital technologies.The partnership is expected to be headquartered at NYU. 查看详细>>

Students whose brainwaves are more in sync with their classmates and teacher are likely to learn better than those lacking this“brain-to-brain synchrony,”shows anew study by ateam of psychology and education researchers.The findings,which appear in the journal Psychological Science,offer new insights into the learning process.“This is the first study to show that the extent to which students’and teachers’brainwaves are in sync during real-world learning can predict how well students retain information from class,”says lead author Ido Davidesco,an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education and aformer postdoctoral fellow at New York University,where the study was conducted.“Much of human learning happens when we interact with others,but very little is known about how this process is reflected in the brain activity of students and teachers,”adds Suzanne Dikker,a research professor at NYU’s Department of Psychology and one of the paper’s senior authors.“This work reveals that students whose brainwaves are more in sync with their peers and teacher are likely to learn better.”Our understanding of how the brain supports learning in asocial setting is limited because learning is typically studied in individual participants in controlled laboratory settings.In the Psychological Science paper,the team sought to study brain function in areal-world,group context.To do so,the researchers used electroencephalography(EEG),a commonly used method where acap with electrodes is placed on the head.This method allowed the researchers to track the electrical brain activity of small groups of undergraduate students and an instructor—none of the participants knew each other prior to the study.In these sessions,the instructors gave short lectures on avariety of scientific topics;during the lecture period,both the students’and the instructors’brainwaves were monitored.Afterwards,students took multiple-choice tests to gauge what they had learned.The researchers found that as students were listening to the lecture,their brainwaves became in sync with one another.Moreover,the researchers observed such“brain-to-brain synchrony”—similar brain-activity patterns over time—between the students’brainwaves and when comparing students’brainwaves to the teacher’s brainwaves.Critically,students whose brain activity was more in sync with their peers and with the teacher learned better—as shown in higher post-lecture test scores.In fact,the researchers were able to effectively predict which test questions students would answer correctly based on how in sync their brainwaves were during the moments of the lecture that corresponded to each question.The authors emphasize that it’s the connection among students and to their instructor that is telling about the learning process.In fact,the researchers could not derive how well students retained information from looking at individual students’brainwaves—only synchrony in brainwaves between students and teachers predicted how well students learned. 查看详细>>

One of the participants in powerful new research into how clinicians can better serve highly marginalized individuals with HIV gave NYU researchers asense of their everyday struggles:He punctures the foil top on his medication bottle as soon as he gets it,making it worthless in the black market for pharmaceuticals.While he could have used the$125 or so that he could get from adisreputable pharmacy,he was determined not to impede his goal of achieving an undetectable HIV viral load level.“Most of those who enrolled in our research projects live on the razor’s edge of poverty,”explains Professor Marya Gwadz associate dean for research at NYU Silver and director of the school’s Intervention Innovations Team who led the study—called Heart to Heart—aimed at increasing overall HIV medication uptake among those living with HIV who face serious impediments to doing so.“They are not always in aplace where HIV can be their priority.”Gwadz,a psychologist,and her team of master’s-level mental health professionals and researchers were still able to recruit hundreds Black and Latino persons of low socioeconomic status and unsuppressed HIV viral levels into the research study,conducted from aclinic in Manhattan’s Union Square.The goal was to determine the best behavioral-therapeutic components for increasing rates of HIV viral suppression in this population,with the knowledge that not all persons living with HIV are able or may even wish to do so.Six different intervention components were tested,based on existing evidenced-based strategies;they were modified using aconceptual model Gwadz’s team developed,tailored to this hard-to-reach and understudied cohort’s particular impediments to HIV care and medication use.The model,called the Intervention Innovations Team Integrated Conceptual Model—or the IIT-ICM,for short—blends critical race theory and harm reduction and self-determination approaches,showing that aperson’s health issues,such as falling short of HIV viral suppression,are the downstream effects of upstream structural factors such as poverty,according to Gwadz.That is afundamentally de-stigmatizing message,she says,along with being more accurate than placing the source of health problems at the feet of the individual.The results of Heart to Heart are so far encouraging,according to Gwadz,with 40%of the 512 study participants showing suppressed HIV viral loads during the course of their approximately one-year enrollment in the study.The team does not expect that all the components are needed to increase the rates of HIV viral suppression.So,compatible studies are planned to uncover the most cost-effective combination of intervention components for clinicians to use in clinical and social service settings.“The US public health system wants to end the HIV epidemic by 2030,”noted Gwadz.“We can’t do that without bringing these people who face the greatest barriers onto the HIV care continuum.”NYU News spoke with her about her research with respect to the national goal:Why did you focus on this particular subpopulation?Experts have shown that HIV travels along the“fault lines”of society—mainly related to poverty,racial and other forms of discrimination,and stigma.So,currently most people living with HIV or who contract HIV are Black and Latino,with sexual minorities overrepresented compared to their numbers in the general population.The reasons for this are not due to risky individual behavior,but rather to societal factors.I’m interested in understanding and disrupting that glaring problem. 查看详细>>

Black women with symptoms of depression more often report sleep disturbances,self-criticism,and irritability than stereotypical symptoms such as depressed mood,according to anew study led by researchers at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing and Columbia University School of Nursing.“Based on our findings,it’s possible that health care providers may miss depression symptoms in Black women,resulting in underdiagnosis and undertreatment,”said Nicole Perez,PhD,RN,a psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner and postdoctoral associate at NYU Rory Meyers College of Nursing and the lead author of the study published in Nursing Research.Depression is diagnosed based on symptoms that patients report during an evaluation by ahealth provider.Common symptoms include low mood,loss of interest in activities,changes in appetite or sleep,and feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness.But symptoms of depression can vary from one person to the next—and there are more than 1,500 possible combinations of symptoms that meet criteria for adepressive disorder,meaning that patients can share the same diagnosis and have no symptoms in common.As aresult,depression often gets overlooked and undertreated.Moreover,research exploring variations in depression symptoms has been predominantly conducted in white people,increasing the chances that depression will be missed among racial and ethnic minority populations.The Nursing Research study aimed to address this research gap by exploring variations in depression symptoms among Black women,a population that is understudied despite being at increased risk for depression.The researchers analyzed data from 227 Black women who were screened for depression as part of the Intergenerational Impact of Psychological and Genetic Factors on Blood Pressure(InterGEN)study,a study of Black mothers and children that seeks to understand the genetic,psychological,and environmental factors that contribute to high blood pressure.Black women in the study with greater depressive symptoms were more likely to report somatic symptoms(e.g.fatigue,insomnia,decreased libido)and self-critical symptoms(e.g.self-hate,self-blame)than stereotypical depression symptoms such as feelings of hopelessness or depressed mood.They also reported experiencing anhedonia(an inability to experience pleasure)and irritability.While the researchers caution that the results cannot be generalized to all Black women,given that the study participants were younger and had relatively low levels of depression,their findings demonstrate the heterogeneity in depression symptoms and need for screening tools that account for this variation.Notably,symptoms experienced by Black women may not be adequately assessed in clinical practice using standard screening tools,especially those that focus on feeling depressed without addressing somatic and self-critical symptoms.“My hope is that these findings contribute to the growing dialogue of how depression can look different from person to person,and raise awareness of the need for more research in historically understudied and minoritized populations,so that we can better identify symptoms and reduce missed care and health disparities,”added Perez.Jacquelyn Taylor of Columbia University School of Nursing and Center for Research on People of Color,the Nursing Research study’s senior author,led the InterGEN study with Cindy Crusto of Yale School of Medicine and University of Pretoria.Additional study authors include Gail D’Eramo Melkus,Fay Wright,and Gary Yu of NYU Meyers;Allison Vorderstrasse of University of Massachusetts Amherst;and Yan Sun of Emory University School of Public Health.The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health(R01NR013520 and TL1TR001447). 查看详细>>

Identification with one’s nation predicts both greater engagement with public health behaviors,such as masking and social distancing,and support for public health policies.Analysis of 67 Countries Shows Those Who Identify More Strongly with Their Nation Report Greater Engagement with Public Health Behaviors and Support for Public Health Policies Identification with one’s nation predicts both greater engagement with public health behaviors,such as masking and social distancing,and support for public health policies,finds an analysis of attitudes across 67 countries.The research,which appears in the journal Nature Communications,suggests that national identities play asignificant and positive role in battling aglobal pandemic.“History has undoubtedly shown that nationalism can be adestructive force,”observes Jay Van Bavel,a professor of psychology at New York University and one of the paper’s authors.“But research has also revealed that there is apro-social side to group identity.This study points to anew and promising possibility—that national identity can be useful in effectively addressing the current pandemic and may serve as apublic health resource in the future.”“We see the positive effects,especially for those who feel genuinely proud and close to their nation,rather than those who are mostly concerned about how others see their country,”adds Aleksandra Cichocka,director of the Political Psychology Lab at the University of Kent and one of the paper’s authors.“National Identity as measured reflects what it means to be part of anation for each person,”says Paulo Sérgio Boggio,director of the Social and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Brazil’s Mackenzie Presbyterian University and one of the paper’s authors.“Valuing this can foster the collective feeling of the population in the fight against COVID.In real life,this can be seen in countries like New Zealand,whose Prime Minister,Jacinda Ardem,has emphasized each one’s role as amember of alarger group that is the country itself.”The study’s international team of more than 200 researchers,who also come from Australia’s University of Sydney,Germany’s Ludwig Maximilian University,and the United Kingdom’s University of St.Andrews,among other institutions,recognized the productive role national identity might play in responding to awidespread crisis—in this case,the coronavirus pandemic.While COVID-19’s impact has been global,policies and calls for practices to address it have largely been implemented by individual nations,raising the question of the role national identity plays in responding to country-based public health measures. 查看详细>>

New York University physicists have created new techniques that deploy machine learning as ameans to significantly improve data analysis for the Large Hadron Collider(LHC),the world’s most powerful particle accelerator.“The methods we developed greatly enhance our discovery potential for new physics at the LHC,”says Kyle Cranmer,a professor of physics and the senior author of the paper,which appears in the journal Physical Review Letters.Located at the CERN laboratory near Geneva,Switzerland,the LHC is probing anew frontier in high-energy physics and may reveal the origin of mass of fundamental particles,the source of the illusive dark matter that fills the universe,and even extra dimensions of space.In 2012,data collected by the LHC backed the existence of the Higgs boson,a sub-atomic particle that plays akey role in our understanding of the universe.The following year,Peter Higgs and François Englert received the Nobel Prize in Physics in recognition of their work in developing the theory of what is now known as the Higgs field,which gives elementary particles mass.NYU researchers,including Cranmer,had searched for evidence of the Higgs boson using data collected by the LHC,developed statistical tools and methodology used to claim the discovery and performed measurements of the new particle establishing that it was indeed the Higgs boson.The new methods outlined in the Physical Review Letters paper offer the possibility for additional,pioneering discoveries. 查看详细>>