Questões de Concursos Inglês

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Educating future technology engineers

While much of the world's wireless communications technologies, such as cell phones, run on 5G mobile networks, engineers already have their eyes on developing future-generation networks. One of these engineers is Yanchao Zhang, a professor of electrical engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University.

Zhang runs the DOD Center of Excellence in Future Generation Wireless Technology, or FutureG Center of Excellence. Led by ASU and funded by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the center includes collaborators from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory, the U.S. DOD and The Ohio State University.

The FutureG Center of Excellence aims to advance mobile network technology for wireless communications that are more secure, faster and more reliable. Artificial intelligence, or AI, and machine learning are also up for potential inclusion.

The center also has outreach and workforce development initiatives to increase the number of workers in the wireless communications engineering field. As part of this initiative, the center hosted a five-day FutureG Summer Research Camp on ASU's Tempe campus in May that is planned yearly.

The inaugural camp hosted 25 undergraduate students from the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering and the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, both part of the Fulton Schools. The participants learned about a variety of engineering disciplines related to electronics, including cybersecurity, signal processing, augmented and virtual reality, or AR and VR.

To choose the 25 students, Zhang and his colleagues in the FutureG Center of Excellence — Antonia Papandreou-Suppappola and Chaitali Chakrabarti, both Fulton Schools professors of electrical engineering — selected from 78 applicants.

"I was thrilled to see so many motivated, highly qualified young minds interested in cutting-edge research topics," he says. "Notably, half of the participants were women and underrepresented minority students, who were selected based on the same criteria as all applicants."

In line with the Fulton Schools value of building a foundation for all to be successful, students participated in sessions each day featuring lectures and demonstrations from experts in the topic areas. The presenters beyond Zhang included a variety of Fulton Schools electrical and computer engineering andcomputer science faculty members and external FutureG Center of Excellence collaborators.

"The goal of this summer camp is to expose highly qualified Fulton Schools undergraduate students to the latest topics and opportunities in the future generation wireless technology field and within the FutureG Center of Excellence," Zhang says. "We aim to motivate their academic and research interests in the future wireless technology area, ultimately contributing to the U.S. workforce in this field."

Among the student participants inspired to further research future wireless communications technology is Diego Quintero, a Fulton Schools undergraduate student majoring in electrical engineering who just completed his sophomore year.

Before the program, Quintero was only considering studying electrical engineering through the Fulton Schools accelerated master's degree program, which enables students to complete graduate coursework while completing their bachelor's degree, saving them time. Now he's planning to apply to the program in the 2024− 25 academic year.

Quintero says the FutureG summer camp helped him understand how the engineering skills he learned in the classroom are applied to technology development.

"Learning about such fascinating advancements in the thriving tech industry has strengthened my ideologies and passion for pursuing a career in this field," he says. "There are so many interesting careers and research opportunities. I believe it's a great way to learn more about specific roles in engineering."

For Mounia Bazzi, an undergraduate electrical engineering student who just completed the first year of her program, the FutureG summer camp helped her build on principles she learned while exploring engineering specializations. While Bazzi initially learned about using the MATLAB programming software in her FSE 100: Introduction to Engineering class, she explored MATLAB's signal processing tools in a session led by Papandreou-Suppappola.

Bazzi found that hearing from graduate students who are working with session presenters was especially helpful in learning about research conducted at ASU. The presentations inspired her interest to pursue her own research, and she contacted Guoliang Xue, a Fulton Schools professor of computer science and engineering involved in the camp, to ask if she could work under him in fall 2024.

Bazzi says her favorite part of the experience was the final day of the camp, which took place at ASU's Media and Immersive eXperience Center, or MIX Center.

"The most fun part of the camp was experiencing AR and VR systems with Dr. Robert LiKamWa," Bazzi says. "After going through different VR immersive narratives, we formed groups and used Dreamscape to build our own VR world that we then got to experience."

The session led by LiKamWa, a Fulton Schools associate

professor of electrical engineering with a joint appointment in ASU's School of Arts, Media and Engineering, was also Shannen Aganon's favorite part of the camp.

"Exploring and developing VR experiences was both exciting and educational," says Aganon, a rising senior majoring in computer science. "It is definitely interesting to see how immersive technology can transform so much."

During the camp, Aganon aimed to learn more about different engineering fields within electrical engineering.

"Attending this camp session broadened my appreciation of how different engineering disciplines interconnect and definitely allowed me to reach my goal," she says.

Aganon says the camp confirmed her passion for engineering through the variety offered within the field and the hands-on collaborative activities. She also enjoyed the networking, new friendships and skills the camp taught her

"If you would like a unique way to gain hands-on experience, this camp offers invaluable opportunities," Aganon says.

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Text II

10 Shorts Not to Miss at 2020's

Annecy "Carne" (Camila Kater, Abano Produciónes, Doctela, Brazil, Spain)

Camila Kater's debut short is _______ fresh, unprejudiced reflection on femininity through successive stages of life. A resourceful documentary, "Carne" mixes diverse techniques such as paint, watercolor, stop motion, 35mm film and virtual imagery decomposition to obtain a harmonious, vindicating ensemble narrated by five women from childhood to old age, from around the world. Produced by Spain's Abano and Brazil's Doctela, it premiered last year at Locamo, earning a special mention. Multiple further awards fo!lowed.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/variety.com/2020/filmlfestivals/10-shortsnoMo-miss-2020-annecy-1234641312/amp/

T E X T

Can you learn in your sleep?

Sleep is known to be crucial for learning and memory formation. What's more, scientists have even managed to pick out specific memories and consolidate them during sleep. However, the exact mechanisms behind this were unknown — until now.

Those among us who grew up with the popular cartoon "Dexter's Laboratory" might remember the famous episode wherein Dexter's trying to learn French overnight. He creates a device that helps him to learn in his sleep by playing French phrases to him. Of course, since the show is a comedy, Dexter's record gets stuck on the phrase "Omelette du fromage" and the next day he's incapable of saying anything else. This is, of course, a problem that puts him through a series of hilarious situations.

The idea that we can learn in our sleep has captivated the minds of artists and scientists alike; the possibility that one day we could all drastically improve our productivity by learning in our sleep is very appealing. But could such a scenario ever become a reality?

New research seems to suggest so, and scientists in general are moving closer to understanding precisely what goes on in the brain when we sleep and how the restful state affects learning and memory formation.

For instance, previous studies have shown that non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep — or dreamless sleep — is crucial for consolidating memories. It has also been shown that sleep spindles, or sudden spikes in oscillatory brain activity that canbe seen on an electroencephalogram (EEG) during the second stage of non-REM sleep, are key for this memory consolidation. Scientists were also able to specifically target certain memories and reactivate, or strengthen, them by using auditory cues.

However, the mechanism behind such achievements remained mysterious until now. Researchers were also unaware if such mechanisms would help with memorizing new information.

Therefore, a team of researchers set out to investigate. Scott Cairney, from the University of York in the United Kingdom, co-led the research with Bernhard Staresina, who works at the University of Birmingham, also in the U.K. Their findings were published in the journal Current Biology.

Cairney explains the motivation for the research, saying, "We are quite certain that memories are reactivated in the brain during sleep, but we don't know the neural processes that underpin this phenomenon." "Sleep spindles," he continues, "have been linked to the benefits of sleep for memory in previous research, so we wanted to investigate whether these brain waves mediate reactivation. If they support memory reactivation, we further reasoned that it could be possible to decipher memory signals at the time that these spindles took place."

To test their hypotheses, Cairney and his colleagues asked 46 participants "to learn associations between words and pictures of objects or scenes before a nap." Afterward, some of the participants took a 90-minute nap, whereas others stayed awake. To those who napped, "Half of the words were [...] replayed during the nap to trigger the reactivation of the newly learned picture memories," explains Cairney.

"When the participants woke after a good period of sleep," he says, "we presented them again with the words and asked them to recall the object and scene pictures. We found that their memory was better for the pictures that were connected to the words that were presented in sleep, compared to those words that weren't," Cairney reports.

Using an EEG machine, the researchers were also able to see that playing the associated words to reactivate memories triggered sleep spindles in the participants' brains. More specifically, the EEG sleep spindle patterns "told" the researchers whether the participants were processing memories related to objects or memories related to scenes.

"Our data suggest that spindles facilitate processing of relevant memory features during sleep and that this process boosts memory consolidation," says Staresina. "While it has been shown previously," he continues, "that targeted memory reactivation can boost memory consolidation during sleep, we now show that sleep spindles might represent the key underlying mechanism."

Cairney adds, "When you are awake you learn new things, but when you are asleep you refine them, making it easier to retrieve them and apply them correctly when you need them the most. This is important for how we learn but also for how we might help retain healthy brain functions."

Staresina suggests that this newly gained knowledge could lead to effective strategies for boosting memory while sleeping.

So, though learning things from scratch à la "Dexter's Lab" may take a while to become a reality, we can safely say that our brains continue to learn while we sleep, and that researchers just got a lot closer to understanding why this happens.

From: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/Mar/2018

T E X T

Can you learn in your sleep?

Sleep is known to be crucial for learning and memory formation. What's more, scientists have even managed to pick out specific memories and consolidate them during sleep. However, the exact mechanisms behind this were unknown — until now.

Those among us who grew up with the popular cartoon "Dexter's Laboratory" might remember the famous episode wherein Dexter's trying to learn French overnight. He creates a device that helps him to learn in his sleep by playing French phrases to him. Of course, since the show is a comedy, Dexter's record gets stuck on the phrase "Omelette du fromage" and the next day he's incapable of saying anything else. This is, of course, a problem that puts him through a series of hilarious situations.

The idea that we can learn in our sleep has captivated the minds of artists and scientists alike; the possibility that one day we could all drastically improve our productivity by learning in our sleep is very appealing. But could such a scenario ever become a reality?

New research seems to suggest so, and scientists in general are moving closer to understanding precisely what goes on in the brain when we sleep and how the restful state affects learning and memory formation.

For instance, previous studies have shown that non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep — or dreamless sleep — is crucial for consolidating memories. It has also been shown that sleep spindles, or sudden spikes in oscillatory brain activity that canbe seen on an electroencephalogram (EEG) during the second stage of non-REM sleep, are key for this memory consolidation. Scientists were also able to specifically target certain memories and reactivate, or strengthen, them by using auditory cues.

However, the mechanism behind such achievements remained mysterious until now. Researchers were also unaware if such mechanisms would help with memorizing new information.

Therefore, a team of researchers set out to investigate. Scott Cairney, from the University of York in the United Kingdom, co-led the research with Bernhard Staresina, who works at the University of Birmingham, also in the U.K. Their findings were published in the journal Current Biology.

Cairney explains the motivation for the research, saying, "We are quite certain that memories are reactivated in the brain during sleep, but we don't know the neural processes that underpin this phenomenon." "Sleep spindles," he continues, "have been linked to the benefits of sleep for memory in previous research, so we wanted to investigate whether these brain waves mediate reactivation. If they support memory reactivation, we further reasoned that it could be possible to decipher memory signals at the time that these spindles took place."

To test their hypotheses, Cairney and his colleagues asked 46 participants "to learn associations between words and pictures of objects or scenes before a nap." Afterward, some of the participants took a 90-minute nap, whereas others stayed awake. To those who napped, "Half of the words were [...] replayed during the nap to trigger the reactivation of the newly learned picture memories," explains Cairney.

"When the participants woke after a good period of sleep," he says, "we presented them again with the words and asked them to recall the object and scene pictures. We found that their memory was better for the pictures that were connected to the words that were presented in sleep, compared to those words that weren't," Cairney reports.

Using an EEG machine, the researchers were also able to see that playing the associated words to reactivate memories triggered sleep spindles in the participants' brains. More specifically, the EEG sleep spindle patterns "told" the researchers whether the participants were processing memories related to objects or memories related to scenes.

"Our data suggest that spindles facilitate processing of relevant memory features during sleep and that this process boosts memory consolidation," says Staresina. "While it has been shown previously," he continues, "that targeted memory reactivation can boost memory consolidation during sleep, we now show that sleep spindles might represent the key underlying mechanism."

Cairney adds, "When you are awake you learn new things, but when you are asleep you refine them, making it easier to retrieve them and apply them correctly when you need them the most. This is important for how we learn but also for how we might help retain healthy brain functions."

Staresina suggests that this newly gained knowledge could lead to effective strategies for boosting memory while sleeping.

So, though learning things from scratch à la "Dexter's Lab" may take a while to become a reality, we can safely say that our brains continue to learn while we sleep, and that researchers just got a lot closer to understanding why this happens.

From: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/Mar/2018