Profiles of Faculty Scholarship HIGHLIGHTS OF RESEARCH, PUBLICATIONS AND CREATIVE ACTIVITY September, 2015 – September, 2016 FOREWORD We are pleased to present the annual edition of this publication to honor the creative, community and scholarly work of Fitchburg State University faculty and librarians. This booklet offers an opportunity to recognize and celebrate the intellectual and creative achievements of our faculty and librarians. These activities both spring from and feed our central teaching mission. Reflected in these pages is the dedicated work of a community of scholars. Augmenting Reality Jon Amakawa has merged his interest in history with his game design skills to bring the past to life. “I’m interested in history and bringing real world approaches to the game program,” said Amakawa, who joined the Fitchburg State faculty in 2013 as part of the first wave of the university’s game design major. That interdisciplinary fusion is manifested in the “augmented reality” mobile app he created for the National Park Service. The “Jenkins Lot AR Tour” For these faculty highligh pages, use the following was created for visitors to the Lincoln Home National Jonathan Amakawa paragraph styles: Historic Site in Springfield, Ill., where Abraham ASSISTANT PROFESSOR Lincoln lived before taking office as the nation’s COMMUNICATIONS MEDIA *faculty name 1 16th president. *FACULTY DEPARTMENT 1 Jameson Jenkins, James Blanks and their families were neighbors of Lincoln’s, and early activists *text faculty bio 1 in the fight for civil rights. Amakawa’s app allows That approach is embedded in the game design visitors to view virtual recreations of the buildings major, Amakawa added, with a curriculum that’s *faculty pull quote 1 and people overlaid on the lot at different points in rooted in the liberal arts as well as computer science time over the course of 150 years. Amakawa built technology. That background helps provide students three-dimensional architecture with the skills to dig deep into and characters to populate the “... it’s getting game design the content they’re looking to site in virtual space. Visitors use students to think about represent in the digital space. their mobile devices to recognize Those skills were applied special AR target signs, and the how that technology can this academic year in a project scenery being viewed through be used outside of games.” Amakawa’s students developed their device comes alive. He at the Museum of Russian Icons presented his work at the National Park Service’s in Clinton, which features historic images of holy 2016 National Underground Railroad Conference in persons and events. In conjunction with Assistant Hilton Head, S.C. Professor Joseph Wachtel’s history students, Amakawa is continuing his work with the Amakawa’s students designed augmented reality park service this year on other augmented reality applications that will reveal additional context and projects that fuse game technology with historical appreciation for the artifacts on display. Students are interpretation. The experience has informed his own currently working with the museum to deploy one of teaching at Fitchburg State. the apps for public use. “We’re using the same technology, and it’s To download the Jenkins Lot AR app, visit Apple’s getting game design students to think about how App Store or Google Play for Android. that technology can be used outside of games,” he said. “There’s only a finite amount of game studios out there, but there are a lot more opportunities for them to apply their skills.” Dr. Ricky Sethi ASSISTANT PROFESSOR COMPUTER SCIENCE Dr. Catherine Buell ASSISTANT PROFESSOR With support from a National Endowment for the MATHEMATICS Humanities Digital Start-up Grant, Buell and Sethi are working with teams of undergraduate and graduate students on the development of a tool called Making WAIVS WAIVS (workflows for analysis of images and visual A cross-disciplinary effort to build a user-friendly tool stylometry). WAIVS is designed to be powerful enough for digital image analysis of paintings is unfolding to support advanced research in computer science, on the Fitchburg State campus. Catherine Buell, cognitive science, art history, and the philosophy of who joined the Mathematics Department in 2014, art while providing an accessible interface that can began the research in her previous post at Bates be used by researchers or students with little or no College. Her research question concerned how computer science background. Buell and Sethi see humans perceptually categorize the project as a means to promote and recognize painting and other “This is a nascent area that computational literacy and data wise experience and engage with piques everyone’s interest analytic skills among humanities works of art. students, while also introducing Bringing that topic to Fitchburg ... everyone we speak to science students to research in State, Buell found an ally in Ricky gets very excited about it.” the art and humanities. Sethi, who had just joined the The professors have also faculty of the Computer Science Department. been working with the Fitchburg Art Museum on “I learned about Ricky’s work with machine the development of WAIVS, analyzing elements of its learning and computer vision, and I realized that was collections. A WAIVS station is being installed in the the missing piece,” Buell said. “learning lounge” adjacent to one of the museum’s “‘Visual stylometry’ was a term I didn’t hear until main galleries for its spring exhibition, and a daylong I met Catherine,” said Sethi. It applies techniques and workshop at the museum in May will include another procedures from digital image analysis to questions set of artists and researchers to explore WAIVS’ about the nature of artistic style and how expert potential and how the scientific workflow will apply knowledge of artistic style drives our interactions to the humanities. with, and understanding of, works in a variety of “Everyone we speak to gets very excited about it,” different media. “This is a nascent area that piques Sethi said. everyone’s interest.” WAIVS can be viewed online at waivs.org. Dr. Ricky Sethi ASSISTANT PROFESSOR COMPUTER SCIENCE For these faculty highligh pages, use the following paragraph styles: *faculty name 1 *FACULTY DEPARTMENT 1 *text faculty bio 1 *faculty pull quote 1 Getting into the Groove Throbbing bass pulsed from the Subaru Outback parked outside Percival Hall, and for Assistant Professor Michael Hove, research was in progress. A member of the Psychological Science Department since 2015, Hove is fascinated with how For these faculty highligh pages, use the following the human body responds to groove, the musical paragraph styles: quality that induces movement. Listen to the main riff of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” for a particularly Dr. Michael Hove *faculty name 1 powerful example of groove, Hove suggests. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR *FACULTY DEPARTMENT 1 In the Subaru experiment he conducted last year, PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Hove’s test subjects sat in the front seat of the car wearing noise-isolating headphones and hearing *text faculty bio 1 protection. Their movements to music were recorded *faculty pull quote 1 on video, both in response to the headphones alone, Sciences suggests groove-heavy rhythms can help and again with the headphones augmented by a patients improve their gait and stability in walking. powered subwoofer in the back seat of the car. The That’s because bass-frequency tones in music provide greater bass frequencies from the subwoofer inspired strong timing cues, and can be especially effective more movement in the listener. harnessing the close connection “The bass is really important “The bass is really between auditory and motor for movement and ratings of important for movement networks. groove,” Hove said. “We’re trying Other applications of musical to figure out why that is.” and ratings of groove. rhythm that Hove studies include Hove published a recent We’re trying to figure the use of rhythmic drumming in article in the Proceedings of the out why that is.” rituals. “Shamans from all over the National Academy of Sciences that world listen to rhythmic drums to showed that the brain is more attuned to bass tones get into a trance-like state,” he said. “Some people for rhythm—possibly due to how those sounds are say it’s more powerful than hallucinogenic drugs.” encoded in the inner ear. The Subaru experiment Hove gave presentations last year on the link examines another hypothesis for the bass-movement between bass and movement and on the use of connection: The bass provides an increased feeling in rhythm to induce altered states at conferences in the body. Boston, San Francisco and Amherst, and also had Hove—himself a musician, playing bass, drums articles published in journals focused on brain imaging and piano—is also looking at the application of this and music perception. He will be doing additional phenomenon to people with movement disorders, brain imaging research this summer in Germany. such as those with Parkinson’s disease. A piece by Hove in the Annals of the New York Academy of poverty from a wider perspective. “For example, is it considered poverty if a family can afford housing, clothing and food but is economically devastated when the family car needs extensive repairs or is unable to buy holiday gifts for the children,” the chapter asks. The self-sufficiency standard was devised to identify the income necessary for a working adult Dr. Lynne Kellner to achieve economic independence for one’s family, PROFESSOR taking expenses like childcare and food into account BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES relative to the age of the children in the home. Keeping that in mind will help caseworkers develop a broader context to characterize the true needs of the families with whom they work. Reframing Poverty Such work would have to be undertaken in Lynne Kellner calls the impact of poverty on the concert with larger policy discussions.