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1. AISL NYSCI Summative Evaluation Report: Designing for Narrative and Cultivating Empathy in Museum-Based Settings: Supporting Girls’ Engagement in Engineering Practices

   Peppler, K.; Keune, A.; Dahn, M. (January 2020, NSF Evaluation Report)

   This report summarizes findings from the summative evaluation of the NSF-AISL funded Narrative Elements Shaping Engineering Engagement design-based research project led by NYSCI. The evaluation examined if and how narrative design elements experimented with by NYSCI and partner teams impacted 7-14-year-old girls’ expressions of empathy and engagement with engineering across different museum activities and settings. Using observation and semi-structured interview methods with 202 girls across three museum settings, the evaluation was designed to: 1) understand whether and how narrative-based elements influence engagement in engineering activities for 7 to 14-year-old girls across three engineering design activities;2) highlight whether and how museum settings influence engagement with engineering practices for 7 to 14-year-old girls; 3) investigate the relationship between engineering practices, narrative practices, and empathy markers for 7 to 14-year-old girls within the designed engineering activities; 4) research how activity designs influence girls’ narrative practices, engineering practices, and empathy markers across activities and museums. To study these related goals involving the intertwined relationship between narrative, engineering, empathy, two conditions (i.e., initially defined as narrative and non-narrative) of three select engineering design activities were observed within one museum, and one activity was implemented across two additional museum sites. 

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2. Hook formulae from Segre–MacPherson classes

   https://doi.org/10.5802/alco.428  

   Mihalcea, Leonardo C; Naruse, Hiroshi; Su, Changjian (January 2025, Algebraic Combinatorics)

   Nakada’s colored hook formula is a vast generalization of many important formulae in combinatorics, such as the classical hook length formula and the Peterson’s formula for the number of reduced expressions of minuscule Weyl group elements. In this paper, we use cohomological properties of Segre–MacPherson classes of Schubert cells and varieties to prove a generalization of a cohomological version of Nakada’s formula, in terms of smoothness properties of Schubert varieties. A key ingredient in the proof is the study of a decorated version of the Bruhat graph. Weights of the paths in this graph give the terms in the generalized Nakada’s formula, and the summation over all paths is equal to the equivariant multiplicity of the Chern–Schwartz–MacPherson class of a Richardson variety. Among the applications we mention an algorithm to calculate structure constants of multiplications of Segre–MacPherson classes of Schubert cells, and a skew version of Nakada–Peterson’s formula. 

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3. Micro-Expression Classification based on Landmark Relations with Graph Attention Convolutional Network

   Kumar, Ankith Jain; Bhanu, Bir (June 2021, Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops)

   null (Ed.)

   Facial micro-expressions are brief, rapid, spontaneous gestures of the facial muscles that express an individual's genuine emotions. Because of their short duration and subtlety, detecting and classifying these micro-expressions by humans and machines is difficult. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed that exploits relationships between landmark points and the optical flow patch for the given landmark points. It consists of a two-stream graph attention convolutional network that extracts the relationships between the landmark points and local texture using an optical flow patch. A graph structure is built to draw out temporal information using the triplet of frames. One stream is for node feature location, and the other one is for a patch of optical-flow information. These two streams (node location stream and optical flow stream) are fused for classification. The results are shown on, CASME II and SAMM, publicly available datasets, for three classes and five classes of micro-expressions. The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for 3 and 5 categories of expressions. 

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4. Examining the Potential of Cartoon-Based Simulations for Studying Mathematics Teachers’ Handling of Student Emotions: A Replication Study

   https://doi.org/10.1163/26670127-bja10013  

   Brown, A M; Bardelli, E; Herbst, P G; Dimmel, J K (November 2023, Implementation and Replication Studies in Mathematics Education)

   Abstract Technology-mediated simulations of teaching are used increasingly to represent practice in the context of professional development interventions and assessment. Some such simulations represent students as cartoon characters. An important question in this context is whether simplified cartoon representations of students can convey similar meanings as real facial expressions do. Here, we share results from an implementation and replication study designed to observe whether and how (1) cartoon-based representations of emotion using graphical facial expressions can be interpreted at similar levels of accuracy as photo representations of emotions using actors and (2) the inclusion of markers of student emotions in storyboard-based scenarios of secondary mathematics teaching affects teachers’ appropriateness rating of the actions taken by a teacher represented in the storyboard. We show graphical representations of emotions can evoke particular intended emotions and that markers of student emotions in representations of practice could cue mathematics teachers into particular judgments of action. The Impact Sheet to this article can be accessed at10.6084/m9.figshare.24219964 

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5. Estimating phylogenies from genomes: A beginners review of commonly used genomic data in vertebrate phylogenomics

   https://doi.org/10.1093/jhered/esac061  

   Carter, Javan K; Kimball, Rebecca T; Funk, Erik R; Kane, Nolan C; Schield, Drew R; Spellman, Garth M; Safran, Rebecca J (January 2023, Journal of Heredity)

   Springer, Mark (Ed.)

   Abstract Despite the increasing feasibility of sequencing whole genomes from diverse taxa, a persistent problem in phylogenomics is the selection of appropriate genetic markers or loci for a given taxonomic group or research question. In this review, we aim to streamline the decision-making process when selecting specific markers to use in phylogenomic studies by introducing commonly used types of genomic markers, their evolutionary characteristics, and their associated uses in phylogenomics. Specifically, we review the utilities of ultraconserved elements (including flanking regions), anchored hybrid enrichment loci, conserved nonexonic elements, untranslated regions, introns, exons, mitochondrial DNA, single nucleotide polymorphisms, and anonymous regions (nonspecific regions that are evenly or randomly distributed across the genome). These various genomic elements and regions differ in their substitution rates, likelihood of neutrality or of being strongly linked to loci under selection, and mode of inheritance, each of which are important considerations in phylogenomic reconstruction. These features may give each type of marker important advantages and disadvantages depending on the biological question, number of taxa sampled, evolutionary timescale, cost effectiveness, and analytical methods used. We provide a concise outline as a resource to efficiently consider key aspects of each type of genetic marker. There are many factors to consider when designing phylogenomic studies, and this review may serve as a primer when weighing options between multiple potential phylogenomic markers. 

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