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Read the Gabriela Marcu spotlight at the Bren School–SURF-IT gets a shout-out! CONGRATS Gabriela! http://www.ics.uci.edu/community/news/spotlight/spotlight_marcu.php

The idea that violent video games lead to aggressive behavior sounds, for all its potential truth, a bit like a relic of hysteria from a bygone age (to my ears, anyway). But what if the correspondence between gaming and behavior is true? Would we then be able to develop a video game that could promote altruistic behavior?

This summer, SURF-IT researcher Marissa Holmbeck has been investigating the possibility of just such a game for PolySci Prof. Kristen Monroe. The first part of her work was to research the literature about the correlation between violence and video games, most of which can be found in psychology journals. This research included a test done to distinguish the effects of virtual reality and PC video games on behavior: the virtual reality game produced more levels of aggression during and after the game, supporting the correlation of game and behavior. Naysayers should note that the literature was generally bolstered by quantitative analysis, e.g. of subjects’ testosterone levels and amygdala response.

After having researched the correspondence between video games and behavior, the next step was to “try to give a reason why this game should be developed,” Marissa explains. Her answer? A concept called “social support.” It’s essentially a fancy term for friendship—for “knowing others will be there when you need their help.”

Having watched a good number of mutli-player team games that were plenty violent (World of Warcraft, anyone?), I had to wonder why the violent video games didn’t also encourage social support. Marissa helpfully explains that the positive effects of working in a team were countered by the fact that the goal of the teamwork was usually to, you know, go destroy a civilization or kill someone. Her research uncovered similar stories from primate studies, wherein primates would use cooperation for negative means—for dominance, for example.

This is not what Prof. Monroe has in mind for her video game project. But primates have also been shown to cooperate in altruistic behavior, providing the background of the argument that it would be possible to promote collaborative altruism in humans. Believe it or not, the existence of altruism is something debated in the scientific community—it just does not make sense in terms of natural selection and evolution. Some have hypothesized that altruism occurs because of the perception of future rewards (e.g., showing benevolence towards others at your expense makes you a more attractive mate). It might also, as one famous study suggests, have to do with reciprocity. Prof. Monroe’s own research interviewing holocaust rescuers indicates that one’s sense of identity—the sense of how you relate to other people—may explain altruistic behavior. You’re more likely to help someone whom you feel is connected to or just like you.

After determining that there is a correlation between video games and behavior and that altruism in the form of social support could be encouraged in humans, the final step was to consider the video game itself. Research shows that young teens are still undergoing moral development, and therefore are still impressionable—making them an ideal audience for the game. While sitting kids in front of a video game to learn morals may veer a little into “brainwashing” territory, research has shown that social support lowers cortisol and increases oxytocin, which provides for a better immune system and elongated life span. With such a good outline for the rationale and benefits of an empathy-inducing video game, Monroe’s team should find it easy to motivate further work on the game’s details. Perhaps the project will have the luck to benefit from a third summer with a helpful SURF-IT undergrad researcher!

As a third-year BioSci major, Marissa, for her part, will continue her research with Dr. Wallace’s lab on mitochondrial molecular genetics. She hopes to go to grad school to pursue her interest in the intersection of biology and psychology—in the neurobiology behind psychology, for example (an interest bolstered in part by a Psychology class she took last quarter and that manifests in her SURF-IT work this summer). The SURF-IT program provided a nice contrast with her work in Wallace’s lab, and has helped further prepare her for grad school. “I just wanted to explore different interests, to see what I wanted to go into,” she concludes.

Most advances in science come when a person for one reason or another is forced to change fields. - Peter Borden

Roger at work

Roger Shih’s SURF-IT project this summer involves using “dielectrophoresis” to separate different kinds of cells from each other, particularly neural stem cells from already differing stem cells. (Having purer samples of stem cells would, of course, ultimately benefit research for brain damage and spinal cord injuries, among other projects.)

Dielectrophoresis, or “DEP” for short, is the polarization of cell particles that are not charged. Different types of cells get attracted or repelled to electrodes at different frequencies, such that changing the electric field to a higher frequency may cause the cells to get attracted, while lowering the frequency may case them to be repelled. By figuring out where the crossover frequency is—the frequency point where cells go from being attracted to repelled—we can better separate cells with polarized cell membranes.

One way of changing the electric field is to manipulate the configuration or spacing of electrodes. Ideally, Roger needs to produce a non-uniform electric field, since DEP needs a non-uniform field to occur. A “non-uniform” field is a field in which the electric strength is asymmetric, having an uneven strength from one end to the other—and polarizing the cell membrane.

Roger has been running computer simulations to determine the optimal conditions for his lab’s DEP work. He chooses the number of electrodes and their width, spacing, and frequency, and then the simulation calculates the strength of the resulting electric field. While electrons are particles with negative charges, electrodes are strips of metal usually connected to two wires of differing voltage. Because electrons flow down a voltage gradient, the differing voltages form an electric current in a closed circuit. This is the same electric current that produces the electric power in our power outlets.

The computer simulation program is called CFD; he uses CFD-GEOM to construct the model, CFD-ACE-GUE to enter the initial conditions (e.g. voltage, flow rate) and to run the simulation; and CFD-VIEW to display and analyze the results.

The combination of biotech and computer programming suits the BME (biomedical engineering) premed major and ICS (information and computer science) minor. Roger has taken to his summer research with enthusiasm, noting that he has been working with an informative graduate student and that the articles he was assigned to read in preparation for his work are “more than interesting.” He’s been working with graduate student Lisen Wang in Dr. Lee’s lab; he had no prior experience working with either of them, but Lisen is responsible for bringing over the neural stem cells and embryonic liver cells to run through the micro-channel to see how the DEP works. I suppose he’d one day like to be in Lisen’s shoes, as Roger hopes on going to graduate school for BME after his upcoming senior year.

CFD-VIEW

The Politics and Aesthetics of Media in East Asia
Faculty Mentor: Professor Jonathan M. Hall, Comparative Literature
Undergraduate Researcher: Tyler Moore 

Tyler elaborates

Watch the video 

“Information arts and new media experimentalism occupy special places in the recent history of East Asia. Artists, groups, and movements as globally important and diverse as Nam Jun Paik, Experiments in Art and Technology, Fluxus, Yoko Ono, Feng Mengbo, and recent “noise” activists have pioneered innovative uses of information technology that question information’s relation to state and multinational politics, to gender, to sexuality, and to conventions in visual and acoustic aesthetics. In some cases, these uses have questioned the national and corporate interests that inhere in state advocacy of an “information society” while in other instances, state telecommunications monopolies have been major champions of information-technology-based aesthetics. This project offers a broad survey of the emergence of information arts and new media in a regional East Asian context and within an international and global purview. It locates media experimentation within specific local histories and within the emergent space of globally accessible information art.

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SuperSize Me: Visualizing Parallel Workspace Activities on a Next-Generation, Massively-Tiled Display System
Faculty Mentor: Professor Andre van der Hoek, Informatics
Undergraduate Researcher: Gabriela Marcu

“Large-scale visualizations have been effectively used in many disciplines, but they have never been used to advance the activity of software development itself. The goal of SuperSize Me is to develop an experimental prototype that uses a massive display system to show which project files are modified by whom, where, and by how much. The result will be the first system to display, in a manner scalable to include hundreds of developers worldwide, what is going in a software development project. SuperSize Me brings together the Workspace Activity Viewer software, which shows the activities in a software development project with 3D graphics, and Calit2’s HIPerWall, a display system consisting of 50 tiled screens, which is the world’s largest in terms of available pixels (200 megpixels). The implementation of SuperSize Me requires leveraging existing code in both the Workspace Activity Viewer and HIPerWall. We will examine several software development archives that we have obtained, to understand how projects evolve and, in a way, ‘live.’”

Chris has a polymer! 

Polymers are all around you; the word “polymer” simply identifies a chain of monomers, or individual molecules. “Polymerization” is thus the act of chemically creating polymers out of monomers by causing them to link together, a process for which organic chemistry student and SURF-IT fellow Chris Levins has been busy synthesizing catalysts.

A catalyst has a metal center—say Palladium (Pd) or Nickel (Ni)—which encourages the individual molecules (monomers) to bind together by creating a situation of “downhill thermodynamics.” In other words, the introduction of the catalyst creates an unstable situation, causing the monomers to bond together in a relatively stable chain.

Chris has been experimenting with the catalysts themselves, altering their properties by changing their environment such that the catalyst’s functional group “donates” or “withdraws” an electron. By altering the catalyst, he can change the properties of the polymers produced by the catalysts through polymerization: he can change the molecular weight of the polymer (the aggregate molecular weight of the monomers); rate of polymerization (the rate at which the monomers bind into a polymer); and topology of the polymer (polymers can be shaped into spheres, straight chains, hyperbranched chains, etc.)

Noting that “you probably know more thank you think” about polymers, Chris points out that many new polymers have been produced by new ways of making polymers, including polypropylene (in plastic bottles), low-density polyethylene (Saran Wrap), and the novel polymers that go by brand names like Kevlar and Teflon.

In Chris’s research into polymer architecture design through catalysis, he’s worked with “cyclophanes,” a neologism for new catalysts that are free to rotate or spin around because their carbons are atypically not bonded at the top and bottom. The great advantage to cyclophanes, Chris explains, is that at higher temperatures, they are more susceptible to degradation and decomposition—meaning that chemical reactions (e.g. polymerizations) involving these catalysts occur more quickly. Accelerating the speed of chemistry is a huge advantage for industry, as time spent sitting waiting for a reaction to complete is “lost time.”

Chris is no stranger himself to long hours in the lab. In the multi-step work to make a catalyst, a short step can take three to eight hours, while a long step could take two days (!). A late night at the lab can find him checking the results of that day’s reactions around midnight. The results then may have to be checked in the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) lab, where chemical samples are placed in a tube with a solvent in a magnetic field. It’s the most accurate way to determine what compound has been produced, but it could take ten to 40 minutes at the end of the day.

The long hours aren’t just a summer gig for Chris, who has been working in Prof. Zhibin’s lab since half-way through winter quarter. Chris had been doing well in Zhibin’s class, prompting the noted chemist to invite him to work in his lab. The fact that Zhibin paid and continues to pay Chris and his work attention “inspires me to do better,” Chris says. Ultimately, he’d like to attend graduate school for organic chemistry, and hopes to have a published paper with his name on it before leaving UCI. He credits the Honors organic chemistry track with getting him into research early, and is enjoying the SURF-IT faculty presentations, despite their distance from his own work.

Chris energetically illustrates his work

Again, read it while you can!

Read it while you can at the nytimes (for all of you interested in hard-core math or 3-D graphics…)

“Molecular Communication: System Design, Modeling, and Simulations”
Prof. Tatsuya Suda, Computer Science
Undergraduate Researcher: Christina Wong

 
Christina presents!

Watch the video

“Molecular communication is a new and interdisciplinary research area that spans nanotechnology, biotechnology, and communication technology. Molecular communication is inspired by the observation that communication in biological systems such as inter/intra cell signaling is done through molecules; it could also allow nanomachines to communicate using molecules or chemical signals. The long-term goal of this research is the design and control of new molecular-scale communication systems. The undergraduate student will design potential molecular communication systems and investigate the characteristics of the designed systems through modeling and simulations.”

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“Information Integration in Medical Databases”
Prof. Chen Li, Computer Science
Undergraduate Researcher: Chris Trezzo

Watch the video

“We are starting an interdisciplinary project in which faculty from ICS, the Department of Neurosurgery, and other UC hospitals are involved. The goal of the project is to integrate clinical trial data from different hospitals. Clinical trials are extremely expensive, and currently researchers at each hospital can only use their own limited amount of local data to do analysis. A federated system that can integrate data from various heretogeneous, autonomous databases could provide tremendous statistical power for clinical research at all the hospitals. As the first step, we want to integrate data of neuroscience clinical trials from the UCI Medical Center and the UCLA medical school. This pilot project requires techniques and tools to migrate data between databases. The student will develop tools to facilitate the process of converting data from one database (e.g., the UCI Hospital database or a UCLA database) to another database (e.g., the federated database).”