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Home » Publication » National security publications

National security publications

Education & learning publications October 21, 2020 Article

Improving Implementation of Programs and Practices for Children with Disabilities

SRI International October 21, 2020

This report synthesizes findings of the Model Demonstration Coordination Center (MDCC), funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs from 2005 to 2015. MDCC worked with 34 model demonstration and technology implementation grantees to identify characteristics of an effective implementation and intervention refinement process—one that moves a practice or tool from early testing to full implementation, sustained implementation, and wider adoption. Working with these 34 grantees provided MDCC with a valuable opportunity to examine experiences across a diverse set of interventions, settings, and populations as a basis for identifying strategies grantees have used to produce high-quality implementation and sustainment of interventions.

Education & learning publications March 5, 2020 Article

Digital media can help preschoolers learn real-world science skills

Claire Christensen March 5, 2020

Young children spend about two hours each day using screen-based media, about half of which is spent on educational media, according to their parents. Many studies report that children can learn a range of skills from well-designed educational media. Yet we know relatively little about whether and how well children are able to apply skills they’ve learned from digital media in the real world. This question is particularly important for subjects that involve learning about the physical world, like science. There is a small amount of evidence that children can learn science from media. At the same time, digital media differ from the real world in ways that may be challenging for children to reconcile: digital science media are two-dimensional, are often cartoon-like or anthropomorphized, and frequently focus on refuting misconceptions rather than teaching science facts. Yet there may be ways to design science media to support children in connecting their learning to the real world. A recent study conducted by Education Development Center (EDC) and SRI Education found that four- to five-year-old children can apply science skills that they learned from digital media in the real world. The study was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education’s Ready To Learn initiative, led by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS.
Photo: Burt Granofsky, EDC. A mother and child play with household objects inspired by the Cat in the Hat digital app.
n this randomized-control trial, researchers assigned 454 four- and five-year olds from low-income households to either a treatment or control group. Both groups received tablet computers with internet access. The treatment group’s tablets were loaded with resources from the third season of The Cat in the Hat Knows A Lot About That! including videos, games, and hands-on/real world activities. Researchers asked the control group to use other educational media of their own choosing. Researchers asked families in both groups to have their children use the resources for one hour per week over eight weeks.
At the beginning and the end of the study, researchers assessed the children’s science and engineering knowledge and practices using several measures, including hands-on performance-based tasks to assess their understanding in three areas:

structural stability,
forces and friction, and
how objects can be sorted based on material properties and uses.

The structural stability task provided children with a group of objects of different strengths and lengths, and asked them to choose the most suitable object for building a bridge that can support weight. The forces and friction task provided children with three differently textured slides and asked them to choose the slide that would enable a toy figure to slide down fastest. The sorting task asked children to sort items based on material properties such as color, size, shape, and use.
Photo: Burt Granofsky, EDC
Researchers found that access to Cat in the Hat resources had medium to large impacts on children’s understanding of the role of strength and length in structural stability and the influence of friction on movement down an incline. This finding suggests that young children’s experiences with manipulating objects in digital games and watching characters manipulate objects in digital videos can, in fact, transfer to off-screen contexts. Meanwhile, the study found no significant effect on the sorting task, which suggests that some skills may be more difficult for preschoolers to transfer from digital to hands-on contexts.
What helped preschoolers transfer their learning from digital videos and games to two of the hands-on tasks used in this study? The study did not attempt to disentangle which aspects of the resources were most effective, but we speculate a few reasons based on prior research.
First, the Cat in the Hat resources used in this study—videos, games, and hands-on activities—were intentionally developed to support young children’s understanding of physical science and engineering. The resources are aligned with the K-12 Next Generation Science Standards and the Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework. They focus on physical science and engineering concepts, which lend themselves to visual depiction. Each resource focuses on one or two focal concepts. Characters model the associated practices and vocabulary realistically, even though they are often in fanciful contexts. This focused, deliberate approach may support children’s deeper learning.
In addition, children found the Cat in the Hat materials to be engaging and fun, evidenced by the fact that over half of the children in the treatment group (59%) engaged with the Cat in the Hat games and videos for more than 20 hours over the eight week study. Parents also reported that treatment children watched the Cat in the Hat videos on other platforms, such as Netflix and YouTube, and a few parents said their children mimicked the activities they saw in the media with their toys. Children who are more engaged may learn more: researchers found some evidence that the more time children watched the “Bridge-a-rama” videos and played the “Slidea-ma-zoo” games, the more they outperformed our predictions on the related assessments, although this relationship was not linear and weakened at very high levels of use. Why did families find the materials engaging? It could be the show’s entertaining narratives. Studies show that children are more likely to retain educational concepts if the digital media follow a plot or a narrative and are therefore able to keep them engaged. The Cat in the Hat himself may also have engaged children—children tend to learn more from characters they know and like.
Photo: Burt Granofsky, EDC. Children play with household objects inspired by the Cat in the Hat digital app.
Further, children may have benefitted from the inclusion of both videos and digital games in this study as both have strengths for supporting learning. Studies have found that young children can transfer skills from game-like digital activities to the real world. Videos may be even more effective than games for supporting transfer of hard-to-learn skills, perhaps because playing games demands more working memory capacity. Games may be more effective for helping preschoolers transfer their learning to similar tasks, whereas videos may be more effective for helping preschoolers transfer their learning to different tasks. The mix of both videos and games in this study may have exposed children to the same ideas in multiple ways, supporting their ability to think flexibly about science content.
This study suggests that children may be able to apply skills learned from high-quality digital STEM media in off-screen, hands-on situations. Based on prior research, we speculate that media can help children connect digital to real-world learning by providing focused educational content in the context of engaging narratives that span digital videos and games.

Biomedical sciences publications September 22, 2018 Article

Development of a biodosimeter for radiation triage using novel blood protein biomarker panels in humans and non-human primates

Harold Javitz September 22, 2018

Purpose : In a significant nuclear event, hundreds of thousands of individuals will require rapid triage for absorbed radiation to ensure effective medical treatment and efficient use of medical resources. We are developing a rapid screening method to assess whether an individual received an absorbed dose of ≥2 Gy based on the analysis of a specific panel of blood proteins in a fingerstick blood sample.
Materials and methods : We studied a data set of 1051 human blood samples obtained from radiotherapy patients, normal healthy individuals, and several special population groups. We compared the findings in humans with those from irradiation studies in non-human primates (NHPs).
Results : We identified a panel of three protein biomarkers, salivary alpha amylase (AMY1), Flt3 ligand (FLT3L), and monocyte chemotactic protein 1 (MCP1), which are upregulated in human patients receiving fractionated doses of total body irradiation (TBI) therapy as a treatment for cancer. These proteins exhibited a similar radiation response in NHPs after single acute or fractionated doses of ionizing radiation.
Conclusion : Our work provides confidence in this biomarker panel for biodosimetry triage using fingerstick blood samples and in the use of NHPs as a model for irradiated humans.

Artificial intelligence publications January 1, 2018 Journal Article

Evaluation of reaction gap-filling accuracy by randomization

Mario Latendresse, Peter Karp January 1, 2018

Completion of genome-scale flux-balance models using computational reaction gap-filling is a widely used approach, but its accuracy is not well known.
We report on computational experiments of reaction gap filling in which we generated degraded versions of the EcoCyc-20.0-GEM model by randomly removing flux-carrying reactions from a growing model. We gap-filled the degraded models and compared the resulting gap-filled models with the original model. Gap-filling was performed by the Pathway Tools MetaFlux software using its General Development Mode (GenDev) and its Fast Development Mode (FastDev). We explored 12 GenDev variants including two linear solvers (SCIP and CPLEX) for solving the Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problems for gap filling; three different sets of linear constraints were applied; and two MILP methods were implemented. We compared these 13 variants according to accuracy, speed, and amount of information returned to the user.
We observed large variation among the performance of the 13 gap-filling variants. Although no variant was best in all dimensions, we found one variant that was fast, accurate, and returned more information to the user. Some gap-filling variants were inaccurate, producing solutions that were non-minimum or invalid (did not enable model growth). The best GenDev variant showed a best average precision of 87% and a best average recall of 61%. FastDev showed an average precision of 71% and an average recall of 59%. Thus, using the most accurate variant, approximately 13% of the gap-filled reactions were incorrect (were not the reactions removed from the model), and 39% of gap-filled reactions were not found, suggesting that curation is still an important aspect of metabolic-model development.

Artificial intelligence publications January 1, 2018 Journal Article

How accurate is automated gap filling of metabolic models?

Peter Karp, David Weaver, Mario Latendresse January 1, 2018

Reaction gap filling is a computational technique for proposing the addition of reactions to genome-scale metabolic models to permit those models to run correctly. Gap filling completes what are otherwise incomplete models that lack fully connected metabolic networks. The models are incomplete because they are derived from annotated genomes in which not all enzymes have been identified. Here we compare the results of applying an automated likelihood-based gap filler within the Pathway Tools software with the results of manually gap filling the same metabolic model. Both gap-filling exercises were applied to the same genome-derived qualitative metabolic reconstruction for Bifidobacterium longum subsp. longum JCM 1217, and to the same modeling conditions — anaerobic growth under four nutrients producing 53 biomass metabolites.
The solution computed by the gap-filling program GenDev contained 12 reactions, but closer examination showed that solution was not minimal; two of the twelve reactions can be removed to yield a set of ten reactions that enable model growth. The manually curated solution contained 13 reactions, eight of which were shared with the 12-reaction computed solution. Thus, GenDev achieved recall of 61.5% and precision of 66.6%. These results suggest that although computational gap fillers are populating metabolic models with significant numbers of correct reactions, automatically gap-filled metabolic models also contain significant numbers of incorrect reactions.
Our conclusion is that manual curation of gap-filler results is needed to obtain high-accuracy models. Many of the differences between the manual and automatic solutions resulted from using expert biological knowledge to direct the choice of reactions within the curated solution, such as reactions specific to the anaerobic lifestyle of B. longum.

Artificial intelligence publications January 1, 2017 Article

The EcoCyc Database: Reflecting New Knowledge About Escherichia Coli K-12

Mario Latendresse, David Weaver, Peter Karp January 1, 2017

EcoCyc (EcoCyc.org) is a freely accessible, comprehensive database that collects and summarizes experimental data for Escherichia coli K-12, the best-studied bacterial model organism. New experimental discoveries about gene products, their function and regulation, new metabolic pathways, enzymes and cofactors are regularly added to EcoCyc. New SmartTable tools allow users to browse collections of related EcoCyc content. SmartTables can also serve as repositories for user- or curator-generated lists. EcoCyc now supports running and modifying E. coli metabolic models directly on the EcoCyc website.

Artificial intelligence publications January 1, 2016 Article

The MetaCyc database of metabolic pathways and enzymes and the BioCyc collection of pathway/genome databases.

Mario Latendresse, David Weaver, Peter Karp January 1, 2016

The MetaCyc database (MetaCyc.org) is a freely accessible comprehensive database describing metabolic pathways and enzymes from all domains of life.

National security publications January 1, 2016 Article

Pathway collages: personalized multi-pathway diagrams

David Weaver, Peter Karp January 1, 2016

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence Center, AIC

National security publications December 1, 2015 Article

Topside Equatorial Ionospheric Density, Temperature, and Composition under Equinox, Low Solar Flux Conditions

SRI International December 1, 2015

We present observations of the topside ionosphere made at the Jicamarca Radio Observatory in March and September 2013, made using a full-profile analysis approach. Recent updates to the methodology employed at Jicamarca are also described. Measurements of plasma number density, electron and ion temperatures, and hydrogen and helium ion fractions up to 1500 km altitude are presented for 3 days in March and September. The main features of the observations include a sawtooth-like diurnal variation in ht, the transition height where the O+ ion fraction falls to 50%, the appearance of weak He+ layers just below ht, and a dramatic increase in plasma temperature at dawn followed by a sharp temperature depression around local noon. These features are consistent from day to day and between March and September. Coupled Ion Neutral Dynamics Investigation data from the Communication Navigation Outage Forecast System satellite are used to help validate the March Jicamarca data. The SAMI2-PE model was able to recover many of the features of the topside observations, including the morphology of the plasma density profiles and the light-ion composition. The model, forced using convection speeds and meridional thermospheric winds based on climatological averages, did not reproduce the extreme temperature changes in the topside between sunrise and noon. Some possible causes of the discrepancies are discussed.

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