Eighth Annual Three Minute Thesis Competition

[Speaker: Nicole Capozziello] This is a leaf. To be specific, this is a Norway maple leaf that I picked up on my street on the West Side of Buffalo. Every fall, my street is covered in leaves. Leaves that I get to watch change color, flutter to the ground, crunch under foot, and not rake or bag because I'm a renter. My street is covered in leaves because my neighborhood has some of the highest level of tree canopy of anywhere in the city. And like probably everyone else on my street, I take this for granted. However, bountiful tree cover and surrounding nature is not the norm for every city resident. In fact, according to the nonprofit, American Forests, a map of tree cover in America's cities is too often a map of income and race. Perhaps it isn't surprising then that, here in Buffalo, the lowest level of tree canopy and the majority of the city's 8,000 vacant lots, are concentrated on the East Side, where 85% of the city's Black population lives. This area has higher rates of poverty and unemployment than the city at large, leading Buffalo to be among the most segregated cities in the country. We talk a lot about certain kinds of inequity in Buffalo, disparities in food access, housing, graduation rates. But what is often ignored is that this inequity extends to the ground beneath our feet and the trees above our heads. So at this point you might be asking, "So what?" Well, this inequity in nature access isn't without history or consequence. People living in nature-deprived areas have higher levels of depression and heart disease, and community-level problems like a lack of neighborhood cohesion. And, more importantly, this has impacts on people's bodies, minds, and spirits that we haven't bothered to learn about. In my research, I'm looking at East Side residents' experiences of nature, particularly around vacant land. In my work, it was imperative for me to center community members' experiences. I'm doing that using an array of qualitative methods. Interviews, a walking tour, and a community visioning workshop. In my work... This work isn't just interesting to me, but it's important. Little research has explored people's experiences in depth. As an East Side community leader expressed to me, "People know they want their neighborhoods "to be different, to be better, "but we don't paint a picture broad enough "of what spaces could be. "If you can't imagine something, "how can you build it?" With this research, I wanna play a small role in envisioning the new. So, yes, this is a leaf, but it is also a symbol of beauty, of potential, of justice.

(audience applauding)

[Speaker: Abhipsa Chakraborty] Let's take a moment and read the text here. Think about what you hear, and the gramophone began. A, B, C, A, B, C. Now let me ask you a question. What sense organs do we use when we read a novel? Our common sense says that we read with our eyes, right? But what if I told you our ears are equally at work when we reading a text? This is the premise that inspired my research. My dissertation examines novels written in English in the early 20th century based on the influences of the sound technology of the time. In my research so far, I have found in over 30 novels written across three countries, England, Ireland, and India, that sound technologies such as the gramophone, the phonograph, telephone, and the radio profoundly impacted upon these writings. More specifically, the choice of content and the techniques used in these novels made the writing especially heavy and dense with a strong auditory component. It's almost as though the words on the page summon you as a reader to listen to their melody, their music, the silence and the echoes. And this is not all. My research also shows that the sound component in these novels was actively used by these authors to fight back against the government and social evils. So the goal of my research is to prove that we read as much with our ears as with our eyes. But why is this important? In today's day and age of chronic attention deficit, more and more people, and I see a lot of my students too, are taking to audio books and podcasts instead of reading books. Now, while there is a strong opinion in the academic community that listening to audio books offers an experience of lesser value than reading books, I am here to show through my research that novels have always invited the ears of the reader as much as their eyes to take in the full experience of the book. Therefore, the debate about the value and the serious experience offered by audio books needs to be urgently reconsidered. The question I will leave you with today is the next time you pick up a book, will you hear it or read it? Thank you.

(audience applauding)

[Speaker: Greg Congdon] Recently in California, some historical clay brick buildings were damaged by a moderate earthquake. This is despite the fact that the earth, that the buildings had been upgraded to resist stronger earthquakes. In general, the buildings did not collapse. However, the damage was just severe enough that falling bricks can pose a pretty significant hazard to people who are in the building or even around the building. In addition, there's also a risk that people could be displaced from their homes because the building is too severely damaged to provide adequate shelter. Given that these historical clay brick buildings are common in most of our cities across the country, this is an issue which needs to be investigated and subsequently addressed. Masonry can come in many different forms. For historical buildings, it's most commonly something called unreinforced clay brick masonry buildings. Now, these buildings tend to look very nice. These are the ones that really catch your eye going down Main Street. They also tend to last for a very, very long time. However, they can be problematic in earthquake regions. This is because they're both very heavy and very brittle, which is the worst possible combination for surviving an earthquake. As a result, we're not generally allowed to build new unreinforced masonry buildings. However, we're still left with some pretty important issues. The first one, what do we do about the buildings that have already been built? Do we continue strengthening and upgrading them in the same way that we've been doing for the last 50 years? Or, based upon the damage that was recently observed in California, do we need to change and improve our approach to strengthening these buildings? In my research group, we took a look at some of the damage, which was observed in California, and identified what we thought to be some of the key weaknesses in the strengthening strategies that are used by practicing engineers today. In my research, I've taken this a step further and I actually designed and built an unreinforced masonry building on the shaking table in the earthquake research lab here on campus. I designed the building to be as similar as possible to a lot of the buildings that you could find across the country. Then I designed some simple strengthening measures, which were minimally invasive based upon approaches that a lot of engineers would actually use if they were looking to improve one of these buildings in the real world today. This included connecting the walls to the roof and to hold the building together, kind of like a belt, and also putting some braces against the walls to prevent them from collapsing in or out of the building. I then subjected this building to earthquakes on the shaking table. This enabled us to reproduce some of the damage that was actually observed in real buildings in California and study them in real time in a way that we can truly identify what the actual weaknesses is for our strengthening strategies. I'm confident that my research in shaking masonry buildings will help engineers save them for future generations.

(audience applauding)

[Speaker: Jack Reeves] This is Mark Stecker. I have the pleasure of knowing Mark through his work in multiple sclerosis advocacy. Mark's a former director of DVD production at an international music company based in New York City. When he wasn't busy with his job or spending time with his wife, Mark liked taking his dog, Stella, for long walks along the Hudson River. One cold Sunday in March, 2003, Mark was walking Stella when he noticed his right leg buckling causing him to limp. He went to the doctor to get it checked out. Two months and many appointments later, Mark was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Mark's doctors thought a flare-up of brain inflammation may have contributed to his limp. In flare-ups, the immune cells patrolling your blood, the ones that are supposed to protect your body from infections instead invade and attack your brain. Mark was prescribed a drug designed to prevent flare-ups with hope that would also prevent future symptoms. But despite the medication, less than four years after his diagnosis, Mark was forced to retire from his job due to increasing disability. One year after that, he was wheelchair bound. Now, Mark's story is unfortunately not unique. While current multiple sclerosis drugs are very good at minimizing flare-ups, they don't prevent long-term disability. So why is this the case? What is happening in the brains and bodies of people like Mark that cause them to continue getting worse? This question has challenged scientists and doctors for decades, but there has been progress. Scientists currently theorize that a major driving force behind multiple sclerosis disability comes from a different type of brain inflammation called smoldering inflammation. In smoldering inflammation, the damage is caused by cells already within the brain rather than external invaders. And as its name suggests, smoldering inflammation slowly eats away at the brain tissue over many years. If this theory is true, it provides a new target for multiple sclerosis drugs, and a new hope for people like Mark. In my research, I detect smoldering inflammation using specialized brain imaging. By using previously collected data, I compare how much smoldering inflammation each person has to how their disability progresses over time. And so far, the results are promising. I've found that just as theorized, people with more smoldering inflammation have greater disability increases over 10 years. And I've also found the appearance of new smoldering inflammation is linked with reducing size of crucial brain areas. Now this can lead to problems down the road in everything from walking to memory. So what's next? Well, I'm currently exploring an important question. Why do some people have a lot of smoldering inflammation while others have very little? Mark's disability is irreversible, but he still dreams of a day where a cure for multiple sclerosis has been discovered so future generations don't have to suffer. I hope my work contributes to that cure.

(audience applauding)

Sagarika Suresh

https://youtu.be/EE4pLOHMv94

[Speaker: Sagarika Suresh] I'm sure most of us have used a chat bot at least once in our lifetime. Now, by show of hands, how many of you here have successfully got your user queries resolved by a chat bot? I don't see many hands up there. Studies have shown that 91% of user queries have almost never been resolved by chat bots. In fact, 99% of users prefer user interactions over chat bot interactions. So why is it that then chat bots are being introduced to spaces that actually require human role intervention, spaces such as healthcare? Companies are making millions of dollars in revenue by selling companion agents to patients with marginalized healthcare populations. Patients who are facing sexually transmitted diseases, as well as mental health issues. During my study, I conducted a simulation where we behaved as mental health patients with these chat bots. We noticed that these chat bots were learning and adapting to user behavior. So if I behave like a mental health patient who was feeling suicidal, the chat bot would in turn reply back in a suicidal manner with me. The results from these simulation studies were extremely shocking to us. So we went ahead and interviewed two sets of researchers that is AI experts, as well as therapists. The AI experts suggested that the reason why they were building these tools is because there was lack of therapy out there. And even if there was therapy, it was extremely expensive in nature. The AI experts on the other hand, suggested that the reason why they were actually... The therapist on the other hand suggested that the reason why chat mental health patients reach out to chat bots is because they feel stigmatized about their situation. The chat bots, in turn, were cutting them off from role human interaction and thereby making them and their situations much more worse. So during my PhD research, we built a clinically validated chat bot that learned from various therapy use cases, especially catering towards marginalized healthcare populations. So we realized that the user interactions with these clinically validated chat bots were much more richer, safer, and contextually much more better. However, the problem is far from being solved. There are still many chat bots out there that are non clinically validated. So my research further goes on to bring in governance policies principles, as well as frameworks in such a way that we make these already existing AI systems digitally healed. I believe that AI should be available to all, especially marginalized healthcare population, and the only way we can achieve this is through human and AI collaboration. Thank you so much.

(audience applauding)

[Speaker: Sagarika Suresh] I'm sure most of us have used a chat bot at least once in our lifetime. Now, by show of hands, how many of you here have successfully got your user queries resolved by a chat bot? I don't see many hands up there. Studies have shown that 91% of user queries have almost never been resolved by chat bots. In fact, 99% of users prefer user interactions over chat bot interactions. So why is it that then chat bots are being introduced to spaces that actually require human role intervention, spaces such as healthcare? Companies are making millions of dollars in revenue by selling companion agents to patients with marginalized healthcare populations. Patients who are facing sexually transmitted diseases, as well as mental health issues. During my study, I conducted a simulation where we behaved as mental health patients with these chat bots. We noticed that these chat bots were learning and adapting to user behavior. So if I behave like a mental health patient who was feeling suicidal, the chat bot would in turn reply back in a suicidal manner with me. The results from these simulation studies were extremely shocking to us. So we went ahead and interviewed two sets of researchers that is AI experts, as well as therapists. The AI experts suggested that the reason why they were building these tools is because there was lack of therapy out there. And even if there was therapy, it was extremely expensive in nature. The AI experts on the other hand, suggested that the reason why they were actually... The therapist on the other hand suggested that the reason why chat mental health patients reach out to chat bots is because they feel stigmatized about their situation. The chat bots, in turn, were cutting them off from role human interaction and thereby making them and their situations much more worse. So during my PhD research, we built a clinically validated chat bot that learned from various therapy use cases, especially catering towards marginalized healthcare populations. So we realized that the user interactions with these clinically validated chat bots were much more richer, safer, and contextually much more better. However, the problem is far from being solved. There are still many chat bots out there that are non clinically validated. So my research further goes on to bring in governance policies principles, as well as frameworks in such a way that we make these already existing AI systems digitally healed. I believe that AI should be available to all, especially marginalized healthcare population, and the only way we can achieve this is through human and AI collaboration. Thank you so much.

(audience applauding)

[Speaker: Shiqi Zhou] Hello everyone. Have you ever noticed that while many cancer treatment work effectively for some patients, but they might not work for others? Providing the same therapy to all patients, it's like providing the one-size-fits-all shoes to everyone. Sometimes it just not fit right. But all of us are unique, we need more personalized solution. This is where my project comes in, a delivery system to support the personalized cancer vaccine development. Think about all the cells in our body. Cell membranes are made of something called lipid, we use lipid to form tiny, tiny bubbles called liposomes. Liposomes have been proved to be safe material, even for small animal use, and they are also very good carrier for vaccine antigens and adjuvants. Just like a bus, all the antigens are the passenger on the bus, while the adjuvants, they are the GPS, guiding the bus, bring passengers to the right place. We're in the right place. How cancer cells survive in patient's body, by turning off the immune system. If we can bring the correct passenger to the immune cells, we can turn this on again. We engineered our bus for fast and stable loading of passengers. With the accurate GPS, we can even choose which immune cells we wanna turn on. Current technologies can help us to find like hundreds, or even thousands of possible passengers. But testing and delivering them one by one is time consuming with a very high cost. Using our bus with the accurate GPS, lots of possible passengers could be delivered at the same time. Even if there is only one passenger can turn on the immune system, our body will start to find and kill cancer cells. Like, so far, we have cured several type of cancer for my study. Yes, like breast cancer, colon, skin, and kidney cancer. And this is only the beginning. We keep upgrading our bus for more accurate delivery, better cancer killer results, and more human related studies. Just at this moment, we have clinical trials ongoing in South Korea. Just think about how exciting it can be if we are able to provide a cancer vaccine for someone we know. From our lab work to cancer vaccine for human use, it's a very challenging journey. There are only four vaccine approved to prevent cancer, and three vaccine to treat cancer patients. But nothing has stopped researchers from finding a solution for cancer. We are providing a reliable delivery system to support the personalized cancer vaccine development. Some day, we will be able to treat cancer like a normal cold. I believe, all researchers believe, this day isn't too far away, thank you.

(audience applauding)