Author: vermontnews

“Love is blind.” “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” Proverbs like these are woven into the fabric of American English; many of us use them in our daily lives without a second thought. But as Professor of German and Folklore Wolfgang Mieder notes, upon closer inspection, proverbs have much to tell us about our culture.

Mieder is an internationally recognized scholar and the author and editor of hundreds of books and articles on proverbs. He served as chair of UVM’s Department of German and Russian for more than three decades. 

About Faculty Feature:

What makes our faculty members tick? In this video series, get up close and personal with our professors. Hear them talk about their passions, their paths to UVM and why they love what they study, from the mysteries of Lake Champlain’s sculpin to the stories of homeless children in Pakistan.

Source: UVM News

Starting at UVM’s first summer camp for children who stutter four years ago, 13 year-old Madison Denton has grown to be a nationally recognized advocate for her peers. The project that helped spark it all: creating a pamphlet, alongside other campers, for Ben & Jerry’s employees that explained how best to interact with customers who stutter. Recently, Denton was named the 2017 National Stuttering Association Kid of the Year.

Denton served as a mentor at this year’s fourth annual summer camp offered through UVM’s Eleanor M. Luse Center for Communication. The camp provides children ages 7-12 the opportunity to interact with other children who stutter – in some cases for the first time – and to learn therapy-based self-empowerment activities like drawing pictures that represent their stuttering and characters that can defeat it. 

“The camp has been inspirational for me because you learn a lot about stuttering and interact with other people who stutter,” says Denton, whose letter writing campaign to American Girl Doll contributed to the creation of a doll who stutters named Gabriela. “Some people don’t understand stuttering and can kind of judge you, so I try to educate them because I feel like if people learn more about stuttering they won’t be as critical.”

This year’s campers created a Back-to-School Survival Guide for Kids/Students Who Stutter that the National Stuttering Association plans to distribute nationwide. In previous years, campers designed a “Stutter!” board game with questions about stuttering that was distributed to local school districts and a movie titled “Stuttercraft” based on characters from the video game “Minecraft.”

UVM students learn from campers

Danra Kazenski, clinical assistant professor of communication sciences and disorders, started the UVM camp when she arrived four years ago, also establishing the Burlington chapter of the National Stuttering Association, to increase opportunities for the approximately 6,000 Vermonters who stutter. “The goal was to help kiddos build self-acceptance,” she says. “The camp automatically shows them that they are not alone.”

Kazenski also saw the camp as an opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students in Communication Sciences and Disorders to learn first-hand what it’s like to navigate the world as a child who stutters. “I tell students that the best way to learn is to listen and really pay attention to what the kiddos are saying and be open and genuinely curious,” says Kazenski, an expert on the clinical supervision and education of students working with children and adults who stutter. “You always learn something by just hearing their stories.”

Junior Elizabeth O’Donnell, who had never worked with children who stutter prior to the camp, was struck by how much confidence campers gained just by spending time with other children who stutter. “I learned a lot about social interactions, like what you do when someone interrupts you or asks ‘why do you talk like that?’” says O’Donnell, who hopes to work with a stuttering support group in the fall. “Seeing the children gain confidence during the camp and realizing that stuttering is not something they should be embarrassed about was an amazing experience.”

Morgan Bailey, a graduate student in UVM’s speech-language pathology program, says she learned a lot about the common mistakes people make when talking with someone who stutters like trying to finish their sentences for them or nervously interrupting to break an awkward silence. “One of the biggest takeaways for me was seeing that some kids are okay with stuttering or don’t realize it, while others are very insecure about it,” says Bailey. “Because it’s very different for each child, you have to establish a baseline and figure out where they are at, and then go on from there.”

UVM’s outreach efforts continue to expand

UVM’s Stuttering Summer Camp is part of an increasing number of support options offered by the Eleanor M. Luse Center, which provides audiology and speech language services, as well as treatment for stuttering in children and adults throughout greater New England. The Center also serves as the primary training site for students in the Master of Science communication sciences and disorders.

Professor Barry Guitar, one of the world’s leading experts on stuttering, has led an adult stuttering support group for more than two decades at the clinic. The new local National Stuttering Association chapter co-founded by Kazenski hosts three support groups for kids/parents, teens, and adults, which meet monthly at UVM .

“Madison learned that she is not alone, that it’s okay to stutter,” says Sara Denton of her daughter’s camp experiences. “Now her drive is to really raise awareness about it because she thinks that people who make judgements about stuttering don’t understand it versus knowing what stuttering really means.”

Source: UVM News

Seeking to expand the applications of computational, social and data science, Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company (MassMutual) announced today that it is providing the University of Vermont (UVM) $500,000 to fund an innovative pilot program within the university’s Vermont Complex Systems Center.

The partnership with UVM focuses on three specific initiatives:

• Funding for a newly created MassMutual Ph.D. Fellowship. This four-year fellowship will provide funding for a Ph.D. student working in data science and complex systems at UVM. The MassMutual fellow will explore research at the intersection of human health and well-being, data science, and complex systems.
• Supporting faculty collaboration. Through a named research fund, MassMutual will support exploratory questions related to wellness, human behavior and networks with a team of interdisciplinary faculty in UVM’s Vermont Complex Systems Center.
• Hiring a visual data artist-in-residence. Visual data is an essential tool that communicates complex information clearly, creatively and effectively. The MassMutual Visual Data Artist-in-Residence will partner with Complex Systems Center students and faculty and with MassMutual’s data science team to create visualizations that allow people to easily understand and interact with complex data.

“We are excited to be working with the Vermont Complex Systems Center, and the world class research talent it brings to our strategic initiative of blending and applying academic and industrial capabilities to many fundamental issues,” said Sears Merritt, MassMutual’s head of data science. “Our partnership with UVM aims to enable the development of novel quantitative methods, as well as uncover new insights related to changes and patterns in human behavior and the determinants of social well-being.”

The Vermont Complex Systems Center supports data science and complex systems education through interdisciplinary learning, and the Center’s Master’s and Ph.D. level graduates have gone on to work for leading data science teams in the private sector at major US and international companies. The data science initiative with MassMutual represents the largest single corporate collaboration with the Center since its inception in 2009.

“All of us at the Vermont Complex System Center are very excited about our new and growing connection with MassMutual,” said Peter Dodds, director of the Vermont Complex Systems Center. “In this increasingly data-rich age, our students are becoming ever more valuable for companies like MassMutual, and we’re also seeing a vast landscape of basic science possibilities.”

“MassMutual’s investment in the Vermont Complex Systems Center aligns well with two critical campus priorities at UVM – STEM and Health research – so our hope is that this collaboration with MassMutual is the first step in a long-lasting partnership,” said Shane Jacobson, president and CEO of the UVM Foundation. The UVM Foundation is spearheading Move Mountains: The Campaign for The University of Vermont to raise private support for UVM as one of the nation’s best public research universities.

This new, multi-pronged initiative with the Vermont Complex Systems Center represents MassMutual’s latest effort to support data science and cyber initiatives, with the University of Vermont joining MassMutual’s expanding list of strategic university research partners.

In the past four years, MassMutual has made several investments in data science initiatives, including a $2 million, four-year program providing Mount Holyoke College and Smith College – both established leaders in educating women – the resources to hire five visiting faculty positions and support the development of a data science-focused curriculum; the opening of a state-of-the-art 5,000-square-foot data science lab in Amherst and, most recently, the MassMutual Foundation in 2016 announced a donation to UMass Amherst of $15 million over 10 years to further strengthen the university’s world-class data science and cybersecurity research and education programs in Western Massachusetts.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The field of data science draws on statistical methods to answer questions in an array of disciplines in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. Graduates work in fields ranging from medicine to environmental science, actuarial professions and statistics.

About MassMutual
MassMutual is a leading mutual life insurance company that that is run for the benefit of its members and participating policyowners.  MassMutual offers a wide range of financial products and services, including life insurance, disability income insurance, long term care insurance, annuities, retirement plans and other employee benefits.  For more information, visit www.massmutual.com.

About the Vermont Complex Systems Center
The Vermont Complex Systems Center, established in 2009, is an interdisciplinary research and teaching center at the University of Vermont that is focused on complex systems, data science/data analytics, computation, social contagion, and machine learning. Housed in the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, the Center’s research explores human behavior, relational networks, health and biology, evolutionary robotics, weather prediction, and measuring happiness, among other things. The program offers a Master’s degree in Complex Systems and Data Science, a Certificate of Graduate Study in Complex Systems, and supports Ph.D. students focused on complex systems and data science.

About The University of Vermont Foundation
The University of Vermont Foundation is a nonprofit corporation established to secure and manage private support for the benefit of the University of Vermont. The UVM Foundation, in partnership with the University, is currently engaged in a comprehensive campaign with four strategic priorities: student access and scholarship; faculty research and support; student-centered programs; and long-term investments in the physical campus. Move Mountains: The Campaign for The University of Vermont seeks to raise $500 million in private support and assert UVM’s position as one of the nation’s best public research universities. For further information about giving to UVM, contact the University of Vermont Foundation, 411 Grasse Mount, Burlington VT 05401; 802-656-2010, www.uvmfoundation.org, email foundation@uvm.edu. For corporate engagement opportunities, contact Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations Alexa Woodward at Alexa.Woodward@uvm.edu.

Source: UVM News

When you’re feeling blue, your photos turn bluer, too. And more gray and dark as well, with fewer faces shown. In other words, just like people can signal their sadness by body language and behavior—think deep sighs and slumped shoulders—depression reveals itself in social media images.

That’s the conclusion of new research showing that computers, applying machine learning, can successfully detect depressed people from clues in their Instagram photos. The computer’s detection rate of 70 percent is more reliable than the 42 percent success rate of general-practice doctors diagnosing depression in-person.

“This points toward a new method for early screening of depression and other emerging mental illnesses,” says Chris Danforth, a professor at the University of Vermont who co-led the new study with Andrew Reece of Harvard University. “This algorithm can sometimes detect depression before a clinical diagnosis is made.”

The team’s results were published Aug. 8 in a leading data-science journal EPJ Data Science.

Emotional filters

The scientists asked volunteers, recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to share their Instagram feed as well as their mental health history. From 166 people, they collected 43,950 photos. The study was designed so that about half of the participants reported having been clinically depressed in the last three years.

Then they analyzed these photos, using insights from well-established psychology research, about people’s preferences for brightness, color, and shading. “Pixel analysis of the photos in our dataset revealed that depressed individuals in our sample tended to post photos that were, on average, bluer, darker, and grayer than those posted by healthy individuals,” Danforth and Reece write in a blog post to accompany their new study. They also found that healthy individual chose Instagram filters, like Valencia, that gave their photos a warmer brighter tone. Among depressed people the most popular filter was Inkwell, making the photo black-and-white.

“In other words, people suffering from depression were more likely to favor a filter that literally drained all the color out the images they wanted to share,” the scientists write.

Faces in photos also turned out to provide signals about depression. The researchers found that depressed people were more likely than healthy people to post a photo with people’s faces—but these photos had fewer faces on average than the healthy people’s Instagram feeds. “Fewer faces may be an oblique indicator that depressed users interact in smaller settings,” Danforth and Reece note, which corresponds to other research linking depression to reduced social interaction—or it could be that depressed people take many self-portraits.

“This ‘sad-selfie’ hypothesis remains untested,” they write.

Algorithmic aid

As part of the new study, Danforth and Reece had volunteers attempt to distinguish between Instagram posts made by depressed people versus healthy. They could, but not as effectively as the statistical computer model—and the human ratings had little or no correlation with the features of the photos detected by the computer. “Obviously you know your friends better than a computer,” says Chris Danforth, a professor in UVM’s Department of Mathematics & Statistics and co-director of the university’s Computational Story Lab, “but you might not, as a person casually flipping through Instagram, be as good at detecting depression as you think.”

Consider that more than half of a general practitioners’ depression diagnoses are false—a very expensive health care problem—while the computational algorithm did far better. The new study also shows that the computer model was able to detect signs of depression before a person’s date of diagnosis. “This could help you get to a doctor sooner,” Danforth says. “Or, imagine that you can go to doctor and push a button to let an algorithm read your social media history as part of the exam.”

As the world of machine learning and artificial intelligence expands into many areas of life, there are deep ethical questions and privacy concerns. “We have a lot of thinking to do about the morality of machines,” Danforth says. “So much is encoded in our digital footprint. Clever artificial intelligence will be able to find signals, especially for something like mental illness.” He thinks that this type of application may hold great promise for helping people early in the onset of mental illness, avoid false diagnoses, and offer a new lower-cost screening for mental health services, especially for those who might not otherwise have access to a trained expert, like a psychiatrist.

“This study is not yet a diagnostic test, not by a long shot,” says Danforth, “but it is a proof of concept of a new way to help people.”

Source: UVM News

When the roof of Torrey Hall caught fire the morning of Aug. 3, burning and smoldering into the afternoon hours, UVM researchers feared that the 300,000 historic and rare plant specimens housed primarily on the top floor wouldn’t survive the blistering heat of the flames. 

Or, if by some chance they did, surely the gallons of water firefighters used to control and extinguish the fire would ruin the prized scientific collection, the third largest herbarium in New England, exceeded only by those at Harvard and Yale. 

But a $470,000 grant from the National Science Foundation secured in 2014 was used to upgrade storage of the collection, from wooden cabinets — tinder, in a fire — to cabinets designed to protect against fire and water damage. When the fire was out, a preliminary examination showed that the cabinets had done their job. The collection was safe. Only materials that had not been processed and were outside the new cabinets sustained damage.

The new storage also had an assist from the Burlington Fire Department. Briefed on the importance of the collection inside, firefighters arriving on the scene entered the burning building to cover the cabinets with tarps in an effort to further protect the collection (pictured below). The fire was ignited by soldering work under way as part of renovations on the 1863 building.

“If we didn’t have the funding support from the National Science Foundation, which provided us full replacement of the old cabinets, the material would have been incinerated. We would have lost the whole thing,” says plant biologist Dave Barrington, curator of the Pringle Herbarium. “And we have to give credit to the firefighters because they made some excellent decisions.”

The herbarium contains specimens collected by botanists dating back to Fanny Allen, widow of Revolutionary War leader Ethan Allen. It’s named for Cyrus Pringle, a native of Charlotte, Vermont, who traveled to the western frontier in the late 1800s to discover new species, braving rugged terrain, malaria, and stage coach robbers to press, dry, and ship specimens to scientists in the east. By the end of his life, he had collected more than 500,000 specimens, 12 percent of which were entirely new to science.

The collection is critical for researchers studying plant diversity and systematics, or how living things evolve and change over time. “It’s a world-renowned resource,” Barrington says. 

Two floors below, the Zadock Thompson Zoological Collections (which together with the herbarium comprise the University of Vermont Natural History Museum) were also safe from the flames and water. In total, Torrey Hall houses more than one million specimens.

The National Science Foundation grant, in addition to upgrading storage conditions for these important specimens, also provided funding to significantly expand digital imaging of the plant and animal collections, providing access to interested researchers around the globe. (Read about undergrad Gabriel Martin’s work as part of that project.)

“Everything is coming out of the building,” says Barrington, who expects the specimens to move to Jeffords Hall. In the meantime, Janie Cohen, director of the Fleming Museum, has given the herbarium access to their large Marble Court to spread out wet plants, and staff from UVM Libraries have also jumped in. A team of experts will come in to figure out how to rescue the wet material.

“It’s amazing,” says Barrington. “It takes a village, and this is one hell of a village.”

Source: UVM News