Scientific Sense ®

Cosmic Microwave Background, The Atacama Cosmology Telescope,  The CCAT-Prime Submillimeter Observatory, and The Simons Observatory Dr. Michael Niemack is an Associate Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Cornell University. His research interests include Cosmology, inflation, dark energy, dark matter, neutrinos, galaxy clusters, and galaxy evolution using cosmic microwave background (CMB) and sub-mm measurements.

The evolution of the universe, expansion, accelerated expansion, the use, and misuse of the cosmological constant, dark energy, dark matter, the dark energy survey, and what could be in store for cosmology in the coming years. Prof. Josh Frieman is Head of the Particle Physics Division at Fermilab, a Department of Energy national laboratory near Chicago that carries out fundamental research in high-energy physics. He is also Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics in the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago and is currently President of the Aspen Center for Physics. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Economic Rewards to Motivate Blood Donations, Rewarding Volunteers: A Field Experiment, and Societal support for monetary compensation for plasma and kidney donors. Prof. Mario Macis is a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include how economic incentives interact with psychological factors and social norms to drive individual behavior and policy-relevant outcomes. In particular, he studies the role of incentives in shaping pro-social behavior and attitudes toward morally controversial exchanges. Recently, these two lines of work converged into a research agenda aimed at understanding what determines social support for market-based solutions to social problems.

How Machine Learning and Blockchain are Redesigning the Landscape of Professional Knowledge and Organisation, and Globalisation, Law, and Lawyers in a Time of Crisis Prof. John Flood is a Professor of Law and Society at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. He is also an adjunct professor of law at the Queensland University of Technology and a research associate at the University College London Centre for Blockchain Technologies. He researches the legal profession, globalization of law, and the role of technology in law.

Heterogeneity introduced by EHR system implementation in a de-identified data resource from 100 non-affiliated organizations and Rates and Predictors of Using Opioids in the Emergency Department to Treat Migraine in Adolescents and Young Adults Dr. Mark Hoffman is a research associate professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is also Chief Research Information Officer in the Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City. His research interests include health data de-identification, sharing, and visualization.

Does Crowdfunding Benefit Entrepreneurs and Venture Capital Investors?,  Promoting Solar Panel Investments: Feed-in-Tariff vs. Tax-Rebate, R&D Investments in the Presence of Knowledge Spillover and Debt Financing: Can Risk Shifting Cure Free Riding? Prof. Volodymyr Babich is a Professor of Operations and Information Management at Georgetown University. Prof. Babich’s research interests are the interface of operations and finance, supply risk management, supply chain management, stochastic modeling, and risk management. He serves as an associate editor for Management Science, M&SOM, and Naval Research Logistics, and as a senior editor for Production and Operations Management journals.

The electric grid: infrastructure, risk management, security, and upgrading, optimization of scheduling, storage, pricing and production flexibility, co-optimization of electric bus transportation, storage, and water distribution systems. Dr. Masood Parvania is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair for Research and Advancement at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Utah. His research interests are on the applications of mathematical optimization methods, calculus of variations, and scientific computing to the operation and planning of interdependent critical infrastructure, cyber-physical power, and energy systems, and modeling and integration of distributed renewable energy resources.

The early evolution of the universe, leptogenesis, baryogenesis, and nucleosynthesis in the big bang and particle physics mysteries Prof. Keith Olive is a theoretical physicist, and director at the William I Fine Theoretical Physics Institute, University of Minnesota, specializing in particle physics and cosmology. His main topics of research are big bang nucleosynthesis, particle dark matter; big bang baryogenesis, and inflation.

Adversarial Models for Opponent Intent Inferencing, Intelligence Analyses, and the Insider Threat,  and Discriminating deception from truth and misinformation: an intent-level approach Prof. Eugene Santos who is a  Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth College. Dr. Santos’ work on artificial intelligence intersections with the areas of information, cognition, human factors, and mathematics. His current focus is on computational intent, dynamic human behavior, and decision-making with an emphasis on learning nonlinear and emergent behaviors and explainable AI. Dr. Santos has applied his work with the goal of a better understanding of how we, both as individuals and our society, can best leverage knowledge through AI to improve our world for social good. He is a Fellow of the AAAS and IEEE.

A brief history of the universe and its possible death scenarios, WMAP, ACT, and WFIRST projects, inflation, dark energy, dark matter, and alternative theories, and artificial intelligence to aid cosmology and astrophysics. Prof. David Spergel is the director of the Center for Computational Astrophysics at Flatiron Institute and Emeritus Professor Princeton University. His research interests range from the search for planets around nearby stars to the shape of the universe. Using microwave background observations from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, he has measured the age, shape, and composition of the universe. He is currently co-chair of the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) science team. WFIRST will study the nature of dark energy, complete the demographic survey of exoplanets, characterize the atmospheres of nearby planets and survey the universe with more than 100 times the field of view of the Hubble Space Telescope.