Husky Highlights Seminar Series
Husky Highlights is a seminar series meeting several times a quarter to feature UW Bothell faculty and staff who are making advances in research, scholarship and creative practice. These events are often provided virtually and open to the public. Each speaker will present for about 25 minutes with a 10 minute Q&A section afterward. Recordings may be available, depending on speaker preference.
May 25, 2023, 7-8pm
Bobcats? In My Neighborhood? What community science can tell us about the surprising wildlife of Northshore, its significance to people, and how we can conserve it.
-Dr. David Stokes
-UW Bothell EERC in St. Edward State Park
When we think about wildlife and wildlife habitat, we usually think of faraway places—vast pristine lands such as national parks and wilderness areas. We don’t often think about the urban areas where most of us live. However, the nearby nature in our cities has great potential to support wildlife, although that potential is not widely recognized. In this talk, I will present results from four years of wildlife research involving UW Bothell students and community scientists in the Northshore area—Kirkland, Kenmore, and Bothell. Our study documents the existence of a surprisingly diverse array of wildlife species in our parks and neighborhoods, including bobcats, flying squirrels, otters, and chipmunks. In addition to summarizing what we have learned, I will discuss the importance our local wildlife and how we can better share the habitat we occupy with our local wildlife to ensure that it persists into the future.
Learn more about the Northshore Wildlife Science Network.
Event Details:
A Discover Pass is required to park. If you do not have an annual pass, day parking can be purchased, on-site, for $10. For more Discover Pass information visit: https://www.parks.wa.gov/167/Discover-Pass.
The event will be at the UW Bothell EERC in St. Edward State Park. It is a brick building north of The Lodge.
14445 Juanita Drive N.E.
Kenmore, WA 98028
GPS: 47.73347567219924, -122.25645048347185
This event is full and no longer open for registration.
October 2023
A Deep Learning Approach for ECG Authentication on Implantable Medical Devices
-Dr. Geethapriya Thamilarasu
Past Presentations 2022-2023
Thursday, April 27, 2023, Fulbright Scholars edition
Viewing America from Japan
Teaching American ethnic studies—history and literature—at three universities in Japan provided a unique and fascinating opportunity to see that material from the other side of the Pacific Ocean. I brought my expertise in Asian American literature, especially Japanese American literature, to my students in Japan, and they, in turn, pointed out aspects of the history and stories that reflect elements of Japanese culture with which I was unfamiliar. By sharing their views of America, the students helped me understand my own country with a bit more nuance, and I hope our work together deepened and complicated their understanding of race, ethnicity, and power in the United States.
-Dr. Salwa Al-Noori, Biological Sciences - 2022 Fulbright US Scholar award to Jordan.
Culturally-Responsive STEM Teaching Focused on MENA-US Learning Spaces - Promoting International Collaboration and Globalized Perspectives.
As a Fulbright Scholar in Jordan, I had the privilege of conducting a semester-long teaching-focused grant at the Hashemite University where I engaged in teaching, pedagogy, faculty development activities, and other contexts that allowed me to engage in educational and cultural exchange. This included instruction of two STEM courses (undergraduate and graduate level) in the Department of Biology and Biotechnology at the Hashemite University College of Science. Leveraging my experience developing and teaching similar courses at the University of Washington provided an excellent framework to explore similarities and differences across these learning spaces and the associated pedagogical adaptations involved in instruction and communication of content knowledge and skills as approaches to optimizing learning. This includes, but is not limited to, approaches relating to use of language and culturally-relevant contexts. Through my interaction with students, as well as from engaging in interdisciplinary collaboration with faculty and staff, through developing a Learning Community model and leading various workshops, I was able to gain an understanding of the format and structure of tertiary-level education in Jordan. This experience has expanded my understanding of the role of culturally-responsive and culturally-relevant pedagogy that integrates cultural values and norms to support inclusive learning environments. Furthermore, the opportunity to engage in exchange of perspectives on culturally-responsive teaching and develop new tools that are important for optimizing learning spaces. informs not only my teaching of students from MENA backgrounds, but students of all cultures.
-Dr. Wanda Gregory, School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences , 2022 Fulbright-National Science Foundation Arctic Research Award and a 2022 Fulbright Specialist Award
Dr. Gregory will share her 5-month experience in Iceland after receiving the prestigious scholarship. Along her journey, she taught Black Mirror, a University of Washington Bothell course, and furthered her research on Virtual Realty to help aid patients with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), a life-threatening chronic disease that weakens the nervous system.
To learn more about Dr. Gregory's journey on Fulbright, her research, and Black Mirror, please check out her article.
April 18, 2023
The stakeholder-corporation: a theoretical analysis
When externalities are present, is the inclusion of the affected stakeholders in the firm's decision process a better solution than the shareholder governance? Is it better than government regulation? The paper proposes a theoretical framework to address these questions. It shows that, under certain conditions, the following Coase-type equivalence obtains: if accurate (market) information about the stakeholders' surplus can be obtained then, whether the information is used in the interest of shareholders or that of the stakeholders, the outcome in each case is a socially-efficient allocation. Similarly, the same information can also be used by a government to design the appropriate taxes and subsidies that incentivize shareholder-focused firms to make socially optimal choices. The paper therefore points out that the attribution of inefficiency to the shareholder-focused objective of the firm may be misguided, as the inefficiency is due to ad-hoc implicit restrictions on the set of strategies the firm can employ, rather than its focus on shareholders' welfare.
Reducing the performance costs of interruptions: an intervention study
Interruptions have become part of the daily work life of many employees. Yet, working with frequent interruptions can be stressful and tends to be detrimental to performance. This research explores how some of these effects can be prevented or diminished through a series of interventions, both at the individual and at the organizational level. Learn more about Dr. Leroy's work and interviews.
March 8, 2023
An Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators
-Dr. Jennifer Atkinson
This project brings together a collection of research and college-level teaching resources related to the emotional dimensions of climate education. With feelings of climate anxiety, grief, fear, and guilt on the rise, educators across disciplines increasingly need resources to help students develop the emotional resilience to stay engaged in issues of ecological degradation. They need these skills not just to survive the turbulence, but to do the work needed to mitigate the causes of the turbulence in the first place. Last year we circulated a CFP (call for papers) for our edited collection - An Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators – and we are now in the process of editing 30+ contributions from scholars, educators, activists, educational staff, artists, game designers and others who are integrating emotion into climate justice programming and teaching. The tools in this collection will be useful across disciplines (as well as in co-curricular settings) and range from full teaching modules to short group activities, suggested readings/assignments, student testimonials, games, movement and arts-based activities, and other resources.
Periscope Video Lessons: Looking into learning in best-practices physics classrooms -Dr. Rachel E Scherr, School of STEM
-Dr. Blakely Tsurusaki, School of Educational Studies
-Dr. Rejoice Akapame, School of STEM and School of Educational Studies
Periscope Video Lessons is a collection of video-based lessons to connect authentic events from best-practices physics classrooms to key questions of teaching and learning. Released in 2013, Periscope is now widely used by faculty who supervise graduate or undergraduate instructional assistants, lead faculty development, seek to improve teaching in their department, or want to improve their own teaching. With support from a UW Bothell Scholarship, Research, and Creative Practice award, Dr. Scherr, the creator of Periscope, worked with Dr. Blakely Tsurusaki and Dr. Rejoice Akapame to enhance the breadth and contemporary relevance of Periscope lessons by (1) increasing the number of Periscope lessons supporting equity education in STEM, (2) articulating their alignment with a clear educational equity framework, and (3) producing remote-friendly lesson formats to support online instruction. Periscope lessons are being used in current pedagogy courses for UW Bothell STEM Peer Facilitators and in similar courses nationwide, directly influencing more than 600 physics faculty and thousands of undergraduate instructional assistants.
February 7, 2023
Towards high-quality inference services in mobile edge computing
Deep neural networks (DNN) have enabled dramatic advancements in mobile applications such as real-time video analytics, speech recognition, and autonomous navigation. In order to facilitate mobile devices in executing complex inference jobs under strict latency requirements, edge intelligence has been proposed to offload DNN inference tasks from end devices to more powerful edge servers for accelerated and high-quality inference. However, state-of-the-art edge intelligence solutions still need to overcome the challenges of interrupted and downgraded inference quality, given continual user and edge server movement. In this project, we designed and developed various innovative schemes to help improve the performance of edge intelligence, leveraging techniques that include model selection, dynamic batching, frame resizing, and server handover handling. Our solutions have been implemented and evaluated via extensive simulation and testbed experiments, demonstrating promising advancement over existing solutions. These achieved results also laid the ground for our ongoing research in vehicular edge computing.
Gizmo 2.0 – a cross-disciplinary robot for enhancing recovery after stroke-induced hemispatial neglect
Stroke induces a variety of functional impairments, including motor function, depression, and hemispatial neglect (HSN). Our team’s long-term central question is, does there exist a way of accelerating its recovery, beyond that provided by current therapy? To solve the main problem, three parties synergistically worked: design and development of robots (Gizmo 1 and Gizmo 2), cloud interface research, and sensory feedback collection/processing (EEG and camera). Thanks to a grant-funded workforce, the team has been able to finalize a pilot project (Gizmo 1) for upper arm rehabilitation and we are waiting to soon perform a final human test. We are in the middle of assembling our final product generation of Gizmo 2.0, designed for HSN patients, with sufficient functionality to demonstrate its ability to simultaneously (a) interface with EEG and (b) track face, (c) provide visual, auditory and tactile feedback, (d) as tested on healthy volunteers in 2023. With participants from computer science, engineering, industrial design, and health studies, we offered ourselves as a model of cross-disciplinary scholarship.
January 26, 2023
Fulbright Scholars: Teaching American & Ethnic Studies in Slovenia
As a Fulbright Scholar in Slovenia, I worked closely with students and scholars in the Faculty of Arts / Filozofska Fakulteta at the University of Ljubljana. My talk will address some of the pedagogical challenges and possibilities of engaging in collaborative “translation” of Ethnic Studies and American Studies approaches to race and racialization, whiteness, migration, xenophobia, and the Black Radical Tradition in a Slovenian and Balkans context and in a teaching and learning environment radically different from UWB. In the process, I will discuss some of difficulties of international exchange in relation to Covid, war, and bureaucracy, as well as strategies for sustaining international partnerships.
Fulbright Scholars: Trains, cabs, and conversations, a Sojourn to remember
As a Fulbright scholar in Morocco from July-November 2021 the focus of my research project was on digital feminist activism, or fourth wave feminism, in Morocco. This feminist wave first emerged in the country the shape of the 2011 Arab Spring-inspired February 20th (M20) movement which signaled a major break from previous modes of feminist activism. Over time, while the M20 movement petered out, it created the conditions for fourth wave feminism to break out, passing on the baton to other stakeholders in the country (e.g., Marokkiates, and Moroccan Outlaws, etc.) fighting for gender rights in Morocco.
In addition to being affiliated with the Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdella, Fez, the university and the city where I carried out this project through interviews and participant observations, I was also invited to give talks, panel presentations, and seminars in a number of universities across in the country.
One of the most abiding memories of Morocco, then, is my travels in the country, as I literary zigzagged across its varied terrain, hopping from cabs to trains to university lecture theaters to community organizations, being welcomed at every step of the way to engage in conversations with students, faculty, activists, artists, and more.
January 17, 2023
Little Redfish Lost and Found: The rediscovery of Bothell’s own native salmon
-Dr. Jeffrey Jensen
Native kokanee salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) were once abundant in the Lake Washington/Sammamish Basin in Washington state. Based on historical accounts of local indigenous groups and early European settlers, kokanee salmon were by far the most abundant local salmon and were important culturally and as a food source. Three runs of kokanee were present – an “early run” in Lake Sammamish that was declared extinct in 2002; a “middle run” in Lake Washington and Sammamish River tributaries (including North Creek) that was thought to have been eliminated decades ago; and a “late run” that struggles along in Lake Sammamish. This research, supported by a UW Bothell Scholarship, Research, and Creative Practice (SRCP) Seed Grant, resulted in the surprising rediscovery of the kokanee “middle-run” and represents a rare good-news story of a salmon population surviving unrecognized after over a century of environmental degradation. Genetic analysis, and comparison with other O. nerka populations throughout the Pacific Northwest, indicates that a kokanee population spawning primarily in North Creek and the Sammamish River is genetically distinct and native to the Lake Washington basin. These kokanee currently have a very limited spawning area and their biology is poorly known - further research is required to protect this unique, local, and historically important population.
UW Bothell at the Environmental Education and Research Center (EERC) in Saint Edward State Park: Navigating the Partially Uncharted Waters of an Interinstitutional Initiative
-Dr. Santiago Lopez
The University of Washington Bothell has launched a new program called the Environmental Education and Research Center (EERC) in close collaboration with WA State Parks. With the aim of increasing public understanding, scientific knowledge, environmental justice, and a sense of connectedness to the natural world, the EERC aims at hosting a variety of widely interdisciplinary and equity-centered environmental education and research initiatives. The EERC was expected to be launched by the end of June 2021. However, due to pandemic-related chain supply problems that caused major delays in the physical space's development, the EERC building's renovation only concluded in March 2022. Since this is a joint project between two governmental institutions, a written agreement outlining the obligations of each party was necessary to formally start operations at the EERC. The agreement was finally signed by both parties in Nov 2022. In this presentation, I will share information about the status of the EERC and provide a historical account of its development and its operational structure. I will also provide information about how we envision UW Bothell and community can engage in teaching, research, and service. At the end of the presentation, participants will have the opportunity to share their thoughts about what they consider critical to meaningfully engage with the EERC and its programming through a short survey.
Dr. Lopez is an Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at UW Bothell and serves as the Faculty Director of the Environmental Education and Research Center.
December 6, 2022
The Value of Crowdfunding to Microfinance
This study investigates the effect of crowdfunding on the performance of microfinance institutions (MFIs). Microfinance is a potential remedy to alleviate global poverty and promote financial inclusion for underserved social groups. Such efforts are led by MFIs. Traditionally, MFIs are often funded by government subsidies, which could undermine MFIs’ incentive to improve financial performance. In recent years, MFIs resorted to lending-based crowdfunding as a new source of funding. Meanwhile, it remains unclear how crowdfunding, as an innovative financing mechanism operating on digital platforms, would improve the financial performance of MFIs without compromising their social mission of alleviating poverty. To address this issue, we compile and analyze a panel dataset from a leading crowdfunding platform for microfinance. We find that MFIs’ partnership with crowdfunding improves their operational scale and financial performance without sacrificing social outreach. Moreover, improved financial performance is mediated by operational efficiency, and non-government organizations benefit more from crowdfunding partnerships in financial performance than other types of MFIs. In addition, we perform text analysis on crowdfunding narratives, employ weak supervision to assess the pragmatic and moral legitimacy of crowdfunding projects, and show how they affect MFIs’ operational focus.
Fast, Accurate, and Fully Automated Macromolecular Complex Structure Prediction and Determination from 3D Cryo-EM
-Dr. Dong Si
Information about the macromolecular structure and related molecular mechanisms can assist in the understanding of its function in a living cell and the drug development processes. To obtain such structural information, we present DeepTracer, a fully automatic deep learning-based platform for fast de novo macromolecular complex structure determination from high-resolution cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) density maps. It is a fully automated pipeline and users can perform cryo-EM data processing, target identification, and structure predictions through the intuitive graphical web server. The web service is globally accessible at https://deeptracer.uw.edu.
November 29, 2022
The Power of Prose: A Case Study of a High Impact Writing Classroom
-Dr. Julie Shayne
In spring 2022 I taught what felt like a fantasy class – “The Power of Feminist Writing.” With funding from the Office of Connected Learning I was able to bring in authors from Seattle and beyond to work with my students on the whys and hows of feminist writing. The class was for advanced undergraduates, and high impact for all of us involved; myself and the guests included. This talk is about the origin of the class; the portfolio based assignment; the freedom I gave the students; and the high impact results from all of this.
Polynomials that preserve nonnegative matrices of a fixed order.
-Dr. Pietro Paparella
In further pursuit of a solution to the celebrated nonnegative inverse eigenvalue problem, in 1978, R. Loewy and D. London posed the problem of characterizing all polynomials that preserve all nonnegative matrices of a fixed order. It is clear that the set of all polynomials that preserve all n-by-n nonnegative matrices contains polynomials with nonnegative coefficients, however, it is known that this set contains polynomials with negative entries. In this talk, novel results are presented concerning the coefficients of the polynomials belonging to this set. The two-by-two case and implications for further research are discussed. This is joint-work with former UWB undergraduate student Benjamin J. Clark (currently in the PhD program in mathematics at Washington State University).
References:
B. J. Clark and P. Paparella. Polynomials that preserve nonnegative matrices of order two. Mathematics Exchange, to appear.
B. J. Clark and P. Paparella. Polynomials that preserve nonnegative matrices. Linear Algebra Appl., 637:110–118, 2022.
November 1, 2022
What do we learn from the ocean soundscape?
-Dr. Shima Abadi
.jpg?lang=en-US "Watch video on YouTube")
Ocean soundscape reveals important information about marine life, natural phenomena, and the human footprint in the ocean. Understanding the ocean soundscape in continental margins is a challenging task due to the steep continental slope, range-dependent ocean bottom properties from shallow water to deep ocean, and frequent seismic activities in the subduction zone. In this presentation, I use seven years of underwater acoustic recordings off the coast of Washington and Oregon to characterize the ocean soundscape in the Northeast Pacific continental margin and identify its seasonal, spectral, and spatial patterns.
A Crowdsensing Platform for Ubiquitous Taste Recognition
-Dr. Afra Mashhadi
The capabilities offered by present-day instruments for chemical sensing (i.e, e-tongues) are limited due to their stationary and bulky design. This imposes limitations such that the liquid cannot be tested outside of the lab condition and in the real setting/environment. These instruments are capable of measuring sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami flavors in an objective manner but are not yet capable of assessing the hedonic aspect of taste without additional data derived from human trials. Furthermore, the current data acquisition techniques, by design, create a disparity between the sampled data and human labels that are assigned to describe the taste signature of the liquid. Closing this gap is crucial, as most commercial applications of taste profiling rely on both subjective and objective data. In this talk, we will present the design and preliminary analysis of building a crowdsensing platform for supporting collection of liquid profiles. Our system is designed for enabling collection of hedonic labels from users and a machine learning algorithm to cluster liquids with similar taste profiles together.