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1. Evaluating Tools for Data Management Plans: A Comparative Study of the DART Rubric and the Belmont Scorecard

   Sharma, S; Obregon, A; Shaikh, Z; Tian, Y; Finn, M; Acker, A (March 2023, Springer Nature Switzerland AG)

   Sserwanga, I (Ed.)

   Data management plans (DMPs) are required from researchers seeking funding from federal agencies in the United States. Ideally, DMPs disclose how research outputs will be managed and shared. How well DMPs communicate those plans is less understood. Evaluation tools such as the DART rubric and the Belmont scorecard assess the completeness of DMPs and offer one view into what DMPs communicate. This paper compares the evaluation criteria of the two tools by applying them to the same corpus of 150 DMPs from five different NSF programs. Findings suggest that the DART rubric and the Belmont score overlap significantly, but the Belmont scorecard provides a better method to assess completeness. We find that most DMPs fail to address many of the best practices that are articulated by librarians and information professionals in the different evaluation tools. However, the evaluation methodology of both tools relies on a rating scale that does not account for the interaction of key areas of data management. This work contributes to the improvement of evaluation tools for data management planning. 

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2. An Analysis of NSF Data Management Plan Guidelines

   Tian, Yubing; Bennett, Anastasia; Sutherland, Will; Ferguson, Amy; Ford, Morgan; Li, Jessica Nga-Kei; Yarbrough, Elizabeth; Finn, Megan; Acker, Amelia (March 2021, IDEALS, UIUC)

   This poster reports on ongoing research into the National Science Foundation’s Data Management Plan guidelines and its impact on science data lifecycles. We ask two research questions (RQs): 1) How does guidance about the formulation of DMPs vary across different research areas? And 2) How has guidance about the management of data changed since the first DMP policies were published in 2011? To this end, we collected, examined, and compared 37 DMP guidance policies from 15 different research areas. We identify the following three themes during document analysis: 1) Responsibility for the future of data; 2) Data maintenance changes over time; and 3) The use of data repositories. Based on these preliminary findings we believe that National Science Foundation guidance policies represent a unique view into changes in data management practices over the last decade. 

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3. GoFetch: Breaking Constant-Time Cryptographic Implementations Using Data Memory-Dependent Prefetchers.

   Chen, Boru; Wang, Yingchen; Shome, Pradyumna; Fletcher, Christopher W; Kohlbrenner, David; Paccagnella, Riccardo; Genkin, Daniel (August 2024, Usenix Security 2024)

   Microarchitectural side-channel attacks have shaken the foundations of modern processor design. The cornerstone defense against these attacks has been to ensure that security-critical programs do not use secret-dependent data as addresses. Put simply: do not pass secrets as addresses to, e.g., data memory instructions. Yet, the discovery of data memory-dependent prefetchers (DMPs)—which turn program data into addresses directly from within the memory system—calls into question whether this approach will continue to remain secure. This paper shows that the security threat from DMPs is significantly worse than previously thought and demonstrates the first end-to-end attacks on security-critical software using the Apple m-series DMP. Undergirding our attacks is a new understanding of how DMPs behave which shows, among other things, that the Apple DMP will activate on behalf of any victim program and attempt to "leak" any cached data that resembles a pointer. From this understanding, we design a new type of chosen-input attack that uses the DMP to perform end-to-end key extraction on popular constant-time implementations of classical (OpenSSL Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange, Go RSA decryption) and post-quantum cryptography (CRYSTALS-Kyber and CRYSTALS-Dilithium). 

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4. A Sampling-based Motion Planning Framework for Complex Motor Actions

   Sobti, S.; Shome, R.; Chaudhuri, S.; Kavraki, L.E. (July 2021, 2021 the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems)

   null (Ed.)

   We present a framework for planning complex motor actions such as pouring or scooping from arbitrary start states in cluttered real-world scenes. Traditional approaches to such tasks use dynamic motion primitives (DMPs) learned from human demonstrations. We enhance a recently proposed state of- the-art DMP technique capable of obstacle avoidance by including them within a novel hybrid framework. This complements DMPs with sampling-based motion planning algorithms, using the latter to explore the scene and reach promising regions from which a DMP can successfully complete the task. Experiments indicate that even obstacle-aware DMPs suffer in task success when used in scenarios which largely differ from the trained demonstration in terms of the start, goal, and obstacles. Our hybrid approach significantly outperforms obstacle-aware DMPs by successfully completing tasks in cluttered scenes for a pouring task in simulation. We further demonstrate our method on a real robot for pouring and scooping tasks. 

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5. Epigenetic signatures of intergenerational exposure to violence in three generations of Syrian refugees

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-89818-z  

   Mulligan, Connie J; Quinn, Edward B; Hamadmad, Dima; Dutton, Christopher L; Nevell, Lisa; Binder, Alexandra M; Panter-Brick, Catherine; Dajani, Rana (February 2026, Scientific Reports)

   Maternal trauma influences infant and adult health outcomes and may impact future generations through epigenetic modifications such as DNA methylation (DNAm). Research in humans on the intergenerational epigenetic transmission of trauma effects is limited. In this study, we assessed DNAm signatures of war-related violence by comparing germline, prenatal, and direct exposures to violence across three generations of Syrian refugees. We compared families in which a pregnant grandmother versus a pregnant mother was exposed to violence and included a control group with no exposure to war. We collected buccal swab samples and survey data from mothers and 1-2 children in each of 48 families (n = 131 participants). Based on an epigenome-wide association study (EWAS), we identified differentially methylated regions (DMPs): 14 were associated with germline and 21 with direct exposure to violence. Most DMPs showed the same directionality in DNAm change across germline, prenatal, and direct exposures, suggesting a common epigenetic response to violence. Additionally, we identified epigenetic age acceleration in association with prenatal exposure to violence in children, highlighting the critical period of in utero development. This is the first report of an intergenerational epigenetic signature of violence, which has important implications for understanding the inheritance of trauma. 

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