Research

In their paper, “BirdSoundsDenoising: Deep Visual Audio Denoising for Bird Sound,” the researchers described how they created a deep visual audio denoising (DVAD) model using a dataset of 15,300 bird sounds—varying in length from 1 second to 15 seconds—that strips out the background noise, in this case natural sounds like wind and rain, to produce clean bird sounds.

The researchers presented their model in January at the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) conference in Hawaii. Dr. Zhang said the model is robust enough to apply to human speech, especially to background noise that is particularly damaging to speech intelligibility for people with difficulty hearing.

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She and her co-authors Dr. Dana Shai, principal investigator of the research and a professor at the Academic College Tel Aviv Yaffo, and Dr. Anita Bundy, department head in occupational therapy at Colorado State University, will receive the award in April from the American Journal of Occupational Therapy at the AOTA INSPIRE 2023 conference in Kansas City.

In the study, the researchers showed that children’s playfulness is evident as early as 6 months and continues to develop through 24 months, depending on cognitive growth. The results were based on the examination of 86 children from middle- to upper-income families.

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In the paper, “Cascading Traffic Jamming in a Two-Dimensional Motter and Lai Model,” published in Physical Review E in August, Professors Gabriel Cwilich and Sergey Buldryev found that a group of “nodes,” or an intersection of several streets or roads, became congested, or failed, in a small circle and then expanded quickly in various directions.

To study the phenomenon, Cwilich and Buldryev used the Motter and Lai model of cascading failures, which are catastrophic processes that can destroy the functionality of a system, including electric power grids, communications networks and traffic patterns.

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Fatigue plays a significant role in how people with Multiple Sclerosis and their clinicians perceive and identify cognitive difficulties, according to a recently published paper co-authored by Dr. Marissa Barrera, assistant dean of health sciences and director of the Katz School’s M.S. in Speech-Language Pathology.

Fatigue may be a greater driver of a patient’s perception of cognitive difficulties, whereas a clinician’s perception may be affected by multiple factors, including cognitive and behavioral difficulties, according to the authors of the paper, “Cognitive Impairment in People with Multiple Sclerosis: Perception vs. Performance,” published in the journal Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders.

Read more about this peer-reviewed study. 

Dr. Ran Drori, assistant professor of chemistry in YU’s Stern College for Women and the Katz School’s M.A. in Physics, is  studying the unique ability of ice-binding proteins, or antifreeze proteins, to both accelerate and inhibit the growth of ice using a microscope-mounted cold stage, which holds a temperature-controlled sample and is 10 times more powerful than the industry standard.

Read the entire story in the Katz blog.

As part of the course Geospatial Time Series Analysis, Surbhi Nayak, a student in the Katz School’s M.S. in Data Analytics and Visualization program, led a team that collected 20 years of satellite temperature data for S&P Global, a publicly traded firm based in Manhattan.

The team focused their analysis on areas in Northern California that have been affected by wildfire, with the goal of applying a digital lens to low-resolution forecasts of climate models. The forecasts are important for managing corporate assets.

Read about the students' machine learning model. 

SPEECH-LANGUAGE PATHOLOGY

Dr. Marissa Barrera, Assistant Dean of Health Sciences and Program Director

In her lecture, “Redefining Speech-Language and Swallowing Therapy: Implementing Advanced Technologies to Support Patient Outcomes,” at the 2022 annual meeting of the Consortium of Multiple Sclerosis Centers in National Harbor, MD, Dr. Barrera highlighted advanced technologies that help clinicians provide high-quality treatments for individuals with Multiple Sclerosis. Topics included the use of robotics, surface electromyography and ultrasound to provide better care for patients with speech and swallowing disorders.

See the entire list of faculty in the Katz blog.

An interdisciplinary Katz School research team is investigating the potential for wearable devices to facilitate rehabilitation for stroke patients who have lost mobility in their arms.

Dr. Sai Praveen Kadiyala, postdoctoral research fellow in Artificial Intelligence, and Ziyang Guo, master’s student in Data Analytics and Visualization, are creating a model to study how signals from the brain collected through electrodes placed on wearable devices can accurately predict the little movements that healthy people take for granted, like reaching for a toothbrush or trying on new shoes.

The team is melding medicine, science and engineering to better understand how a device, such as a 3D-printed robotic hand, or exoskeleton, in combination with surface electromyography (sEMG) sensors that measure physiological responses can facilitate efficient and accurate clinical decision-making for patients at home.

"If there is a lack of signaling in a patient’s sEMG when they perform a particular gesture,” said Guo, "then therapists could focus on training them on that gesture. In this way, the rehabilitation process to restore function becomes more efficient."

Read the entire story in the Katz blog. 

Energy harvesting devices, which consist of systems of oscillating beams in, for example, skyscrapers, trains and bridges, are made up of piezoelectric materials, which produce an electric charge under mechanical stress. “The oscillations in materials when they vibrate produce electricity that can be stored in batteries or capacitors,” explained Akingbade.

Akingbade, whose research is supported by an NSF grant awarded to Yeshiva University mathematics professors Marian Gidea, Edward Belbruno, and Pablo Roldan, is creating a mathematical model that will try to determine the right amount of outside force on these beams that would overcome the effects of internal friction, which stops the beams from vibrating.

Dr. Gidea, a former NSF mathematical sciences program director and Akingbade’s advisor, said that Akingbade’s approach is unique in that most researchers neglect the effect of friction in mathematical models on dynamical systems that describe, for example, the swinging of a clock pendulum or the flow of water in a pipe.

Read more in the Katz School blog. 

Studies have shown a strong correlation between incidences of hate speech and hate crimes. “We want to create an index like the Dow Jones Industrial Average for anti-Semitic hate speech,” said Catlin. “We could make the world a less toxic place and hopefully a safer place by having a high-quality database that’s widely available."

Anti-Semitic incidents have risen sharply in the United States in recent years. The Anti-Defamation League, a New York-based Jewish civil rights group, found that there were 2,717 such incidents in 2021, up 34 percent since 2020.

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