Commentary: Reflections on Being a Professor-in-Residence

Deciding what to do during a sabbatical is one of the most exciting times for professors. An opportunity to recharge and renew and develop professional skills is an important contributor to staying current and relevant in research and in the classroom. This paper describes a professor-in-residence (PiR) sabbatical experience that was somewhat non-traditional. Instead of visiting an academic institution, a PiR sabbatical involves becoming embedded in a company (in this case, a small software company) and is the flip-side to the executive-in-residence concept popular in many business schools. This paper describes the experience and provides suggestions and insight for professors, hosts, and institutions when considering sabbatical options and how to plan for them

Streaming the International Silver Platter Doctrine: Coordinating Transnational Law Enforcement in the Age of Global Terrorism and Technology

The dramatic expansion of technology and globalization over the last thirty years has not only facilitated transnational terrorist operations, but also has transformed the countermeasures utilized by law enforcement and amplified the need for counterterrorism coordination between foreign and domestic authorities. Crucially, these changes have altered the fourth amendment calculus, set out by the international silver platter doctrine, for admitting evidence seized in U.S.-foreign cooperative searches abroad. Under the international silver platter doctrine, courts admit the evidence gathered by foreign authorities abroad unless the unreasonable search is deemed a joint venture between U.S. and foreign authorities. Notably, the legal framework governing joint ventures is based on standards and guideposts used when coordination between different law enforcement entities was almost always physical rather than technological. This Note argues that in the twenty-first century, technology and the pervasive transnational terrorist threat have broadened the scope of the international silver platter doctrine, reduced the impact of its joint venture exception, and consequently rendered the Fourth Amendment, in practice, virtually inapplicable to most transnational terrorism investigations. Applying this antiquated legal doctrine to this novel context narrows the range of activities encompassed in the joint venture exception and in turn allows more evidence gathered in unreasonable searches to be presented in U.S. federal courts. While this Note argues that the rise of international terrorism and heightened transnational law enforcement cooperation demands to some extent a broad international silver platter doctrine and a narrow joint venture exception, it also stresses that at some point Congress must legislate to preserve a baseline of fourth amendment values governing cooperative searches of Americans abroad

Learning Rich Geographical Representations: Predicting Colorectal Cancer Survival in the State of Iowa

Neural networks are capable of learning rich, nonlinear feature representations shown to be beneficial in many predictive tasks. In this work, we use these models to explore the use of geographical features in predicting colorectal cancer survival curves for patients in the state of Iowa, spanning the years 1989 to 2012. Specifically, we compare model performance using a newly defined metric -- area between the curves (ABC) -- to assess (a) whether survival curves can be reasonably predicted for colorectal cancer patients in the state of Iowa, (b) whether geographical features improve predictive performance, and (c) whether a simple binary representation or richer, spectral clustering-based representation perform better. Our findings suggest that survival curves can be reasonably estimated on average, with predictive performance deviating at the five-year survival mark. We also find that geographical features improve predictive performance, and that the best performance is obtained using richer, spectral analysis-elicited features.Comment: 8 page

Exploring the movement dynamics of deception

Both the science and the everyday practice of detecting a lie rest on the same assumption: hidden cognitive states that the liar would like to remain hidden nevertheless influence observable behavior. This assumption has good evidence. The insights of professional interrogators, anecdotal evidence, and body language textbooks have all built up a sizeable catalog of non-verbal cues that have been claimed to distinguish deceptive and truthful behavior. Typically, these cues are discrete, individual behaviors—a hand touching a mouth, the rise of a brow—that distinguish lies from truths solely in terms of their frequency or duration. Research to date has failed to establish any of these non-verbal cues as a reliable marker of deception. Here we argue that perhaps this is because simple tallies of behavior can miss out on the rich but subtle organization of behavior as it unfolds over time. Research in cognitive science from a dynamical systems perspective has shown that behavior is structured across multiple timescales, with more or less regularity and structure. Using tools that are sensitive to these dynamics, we analyzed body motion data from an experiment that put participants in a realistic situation of choosing, or not, to lie to an experimenter. Our analyses indicate that when being deceptive, continuous fluctuations of movement in the upper face, and somewhat in the arms, are characterized by dynamical properties of less stability, but greater complexity. For the upper face, these distinctions are present despite no apparent differences in the overall amount of movement between deception and truth. We suggest that these unique dynamical signatures of motion are indicative of both the cognitive demands inherent to deception and the need to respond adaptively in a social context