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Tag: Indiana University

  • Indiana and Miami students reflect on season lead-up to football championship

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    The No. 1-ranked Indiana Hoosiers will take on the No. 10 seed Miami Hurricanes in the championship game on Monday night. Indiana student Francisco Cáceres and Miami student Shea McDonald join “The Takeout” to discuss what the season has been like for both schools.

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  • How a Sixtysomething Coach from a So-So School Turned Indiana into World-Beaters

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    There was little reason to think that Indiana would turn into the new Alabama—or that Indiana would humiliate the old Alabama in the Rose Bowl, 38–3. Cignetti had been an assistant to Nick Saban at Alabama, but that was nearly two decades ago. He’d left Tuscaloosa for a low-paying job as head coach at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, a Division II school, and then moved on to Elon University; from Elon, he went to J.M.U. When he came to Indiana, he brought many of his assistants and the core of the team from J.M.U. with him.

    He’s toned down the boasts since then. Cignetti has said that he leaned into a more arrogant persona in part to give Indiana fans—which is to say, basketball fans—a reason to talk about the football team. Now he can let his team’s results speak for him. This is the first college-football season to feature a twelve-team playoff. On its way to the title game, Indiana has beaten Ohio State, Alabama, Penn State, and Oregon (twice). It has won the Big Ten, the Rose Bowl, and the Peach Bowl, and is heavily favored to win the championship. It could become the first team to go 16–0 since 1894.

    How? Everyone is trying to figure out the blueprint. Maybe it has to do with Cignetti’s attention to detail, his emphasis on execution and not making mistakes; he obsesses over things like hand placement and how many inches a player should step. Or maybe it’s the culture of the team: Indiana’s coaches tuck in their shirts, and players are expected to have solid handshakes. Or the recruiting: Cignetti used the transfer portal to build a team largely out of overlooked players by focussing on past productivity instead of raw athletic traits—except for those traits that he believes really matter, such as joint mobility. Or maybe it’s his coaching staff: Cignetti has hired coördinators and coaches who are especially good at developing players. Or it could be continuity and experience: Indiana’s starters have, on average, played more than four years of college football, and much of the coaching staff has been with Cignetti for a long time. Or is it accountability? Cignetti is known to have high expectations. Others point to faith: the quarterback, Mendoza, seems to begin every sentence by praising God. Or maybe it’s the doubt from outsiders: the players call themselves a “bunch of misfits” who are proving everyone wrong. Or possibly it’s simply common sense: practices are brief and hyperefficient, because Cignetti has the radical idea that healthy, rested players are better than exhausted, injured ones. (He could be on to something!) Maybe Indiana made a deal with the devil. (Bobby Knight?)

    I like to think that it has something to do with Cignetti’s infamous expression on the sideline. It’s the same half scowl whether his team has just scored or been stuffed at the line of scrimmage. Every once in a while, he’ll pop his left eyebrow.

    It serves a purpose, that face. Cignetti is not unfeeling; he is capable of enjoying a moment. After Indiana beat Oregon, an on-field interviewer took it for granted that Cignetti was already concentrated on beating Miami, until Cignetti told her, “I’m really not thinking about the next game, I’m thinking about cracking open a beer.” His game face, though, serves as a reminder to focus and move on. Cignetti has said that he asks his players to approach every play, from the first one in the first game to the hundred-and-fiftieth of the season, the same way. “I can’t be seen on the sideline high-fiving people and celebrating, or what’s going to happen, right? What’s the effect going to be?”

    It’s possible, of course, that high-fiving people would have a galvanizing effect: players sometimes respond to joy, or to anger, better than they do to stoicism. Just look at Mendoza, Indiana’s quarterback, who is so ebullient that his smile seems to strain with happiness. But part of Cignetti’s power seems to stem from predictability and routine—the same expressions, the same gameday conversations, the same Chipotle order every day (rice, beans, and chicken, no toppings, side of guacamole).

    “Repetition is the mother of learning,” he likes to say. Repetition makes skills automatic. It helps players improve. And the awareness that you have been there, that you have done it before—even if, really, you haven’t—is the best, perhaps the only, way to deal with the uncertainty inherent in football. “I don’t have any idea what they’re going to do,” Cignetti said before playing Oregon in the semifinal, at that press conference with Lanning. “They don’t know what we’re going to do. As I sit here right now, I know everything we’ve practiced, but I have no idea what that tape is going to look like the day after. And that’s every game,” he went on. “That’s football. There are a lot of variables.”

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    Louisa Thomas

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  • Bob Knight was hard to love, but impossible to forget

    Bob Knight was hard to love, but impossible to forget

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    There was so much bad that happened and that he did over the second and even third acts of his basketball life with Bob Knight that they made you forget all that he did at Indiana University when he was young, and was as great a coach of college basketball as there ever was. John Wooden won more and Mike Krzyzewski would win more after Wooden. Both were loved a lot more. But at his best, when he was winning three national titles at Indiana and then an Olympic gold medal, when one of his championship teams was undefeated, no one ever coached a more beautiful game of basketball than Bob Knight did.

    Knight is gone now, at 83. And in death, there is no attempt, certainly not here, to clean up his record, scrub brush away his temper, or chairs being thrown across a court or the worst moment of all for him, the worst of a lot of bad public moments, when he lost his temper in the gym one day and put his hand on the throat of one of his players. He was a big and loud and complicated and controversial figure in his sport, in all of American sports, really.

    But if you only remember the times when his face became a clenched fist, when he himself became a clenched fist, if you only remember all the times when he sabotaged himself even before he got older, you are missing a lot today about a big life in sports and, again, not just in his sport.

    “There really was so much more good to him than bad,” Mike Woodson was saying last night after we all got the news of Knight’s passing. “I know some people don’t want to hear that. But it’s true.”

    Woody paused and said, “All I can do is explain what he meant to me. And he meant a lot from the time I played for him. I saw him at his highest points and his lowest points. I saw him laugh and I saw him cry and whether people want to believe this or want to listen to me about this, I know he was a good man.”

    I knew Knight a long time, and well. I did see him at his best in Indiana, and then all the times later when his excesses, and his inability to control his temper and his own mouth, kept obscuring his record as a coach, in a career that never should have left Bloomington, Ind. I often sat in his office at Indiana, and ate pizza with him at his favorite hangouts there. I sat and watched his team practice and saw all the coaches, high school and college, from across the country who would just show up in his gym to watch him to do that, just coach a single practice.

    And I was at home one night having dinner with my wife and he called and started yelling at me because I had criticized him for telling Connie Chung in a television interview that if a women was being raped, well, let him tell it the way he told Connie Chung:

    “I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it…That’s just an old term that you’re going to use. The plane’s going down, so you have no control over it. I’m not talking about the act of rape. Don’t misinterpret me. But what I’m talking about is something happens to you, so you have to handle it — now.”

    He said I had misinterpreted what he said. I told him that I had understood him perfectly. Finally he hung up, and we went years without speaking, until he started working for ESPN after his retirement from coach and he was paired on television with my dear, late friend John Saunders.

    He was a 24-year-old head coach at Army when Bill Parcells was an assistant coach on the football team there, and that began a good and deep and lasting friendship between the two men that lasted until Knight died on Wednesday. I remember a day at the old Daily News building on 42nd St. when I was sitting in the sports department and the phone rang and it was Knight. At the time Parcells was in his rookie season coaching the Giants, and all I really knew about him was that I thought he was going to get fired when the season was over, if not sooner.

    “Have you gotten to know this guy?” Knight said.

    I told him that all I really knew was in Parcell’s press conferences, during the week and after practice.

    “Well, you ought to go over there to Jersey and get to know him, because you’re going to be making a big mistake if you don’t,” Knight said.

    I said, “Why is that?”

    And Knight said, “Because he’s great, that’s why.”

    There was nothing for Knight in that phone call other than friendship. He was that kind of friend. But not unconditionally. He was a longtime friend of my friend Dick Schaap. But then, much later, he was tremendously rude when Dick’s son Jeremy, conducted an interview with Knight on ESPN after he had been fired at Indiana. Knight told Jeremy that night that he had a long way to go to be as good as his dad. But Jeremy stayed right with him, refused to be bullied when Knight had once again turned into a bully.

    As far as I know, Dick Schaap, who died the next year, never spoke to Knight again. Knight and I did stop talking after the Chung interview. But there came a night four or five years ago, near Christmas, when the phone rang and it was Knight. He told me that he had been sitting with his second wife, Karen, and going over some old clips, and some were things I’d written about him when he was young.

    “My wife asked me why we’d stopped talking, and I didn’t have a good reason for that,” Knight said. “And she said, ‘Why don’t you call him?’ So I did.”

    We talked for a long time that night. And suddenly it was like all those late nights in Bloomington out of the past, before he couldn’t get out of his way, or refused to even try. Again: I’m not trying to defend the bad parts today. Just remembering there was more to the story with Bob Knight, a story as complicated as he was, but one that won’t be forgotten, the way he won’t be.

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    Mike Lupica

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  • Specific gut bacteria increase risk of severe malaria

    Specific gut bacteria increase risk of severe malaria

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    BYLINE: Jackie Maupin

    Newswise — INDIANAPOLIS—Indiana University School of Medicine researchers have identified multiple species of bacteria that, when present in the gut, are linked to an increased risk of developing severe malaria in humans and mice. Their findings, recently published in Nature Communications, could lead to the development of new approaches targeting gut bacteria to prevent severe malaria and associated deaths.

    Malaria is a life-threatening infectious disease caused by parasites transmitted through the bite of infected mosquitoes. According to the World Health Organization’s latest World Malaria Report, an estimated 619,000 people died from malaria globally in 2021, with 76% of those deaths occurring in children age 5 or younger. 

    IU School of Medicine’s Nathan Schmidt, PhD, an associate professor of pediatrics with the Ryan White Center for Pediatric Infectious Disease and Global Health and the Herman B Wells Center for Pediatric Research, said previous efforts to combat the disease have led to several advancements in malaria treatment and prevention, including new vaccines and antimalarial drugs, insecticides to manage mosquito populations and improved health care processes. However, he said new developments are desperately needed because the gains made in decreasing malaria-related deaths between the early 2000s and late 2010s have plateaued over the last five years.

    “This plateau highlights the need for novel approaches to prevent malaria-related fatalities,” said Schmidt, whose research lab is focused on investigating this global health crisis and its critical impact on children. “Presently, there are no approaches that target gut microbiota. Therefore, we believe that our approach represents an exciting opportunity.”

    In a pivotal 2016 article published in PNAS, Schmidt and his colleagues made a groundbreaking discovery in their experimental models: the gut microbiota has the capability to influence the severity of malaria. This revelation ignited their determination to pinpoint the precise microorganisms, called “Bacteroides,” within the intestinal tract that orchestrate this effect. 

    In their latest study, the researchers found mice harboring particular species of Bacteroides were notably associated with an elevated risk of severe malaria. A similar correlation was also observed in the intestinal tracts of children afflicted with severe malaria.

    Most of the Schmidt lab’s research has been conducted using mouse models of malaria. Thanks to collaboration with several colleagues in the field, the research team was able to extend its observations by studying approximately 50 children with malaria in Uganda. They plan to continue their clinical observations by working with a cohort of over 500 children with malaria. 

    This collaboration was made possible by the joint efforts of Chandy John, MD, MS, of IU School of Medicine; Ruth Namazzi, MB ChB, MMEd, of Makerere University; and Robert Opoka, MD, MPH,  of Global Health Uganda. Together, they are evaluating how severe malaria may affect child neurodevelopment by studying children from households with a history of severe malaria. While these children may not display any symptoms of illness, some carry the malaria parasite in their blood, allowing researchers to explore risk factors associated with the development of severe malaria, including variations observed in the microbiome.

    “Dr. Namazzi, Dr. Opoka and I aren’t experts in the microbiome, so we collaborated with Nathan [Schmidt] on this part of the study since he is an expert,” said John, who is the Ryan White Professor of Pediatrics at IU School of Medicine. “I believe Nathan’s findings are important because they point to the possibility that certain bacteria or combinations of bacteria in the gut may predispose a child to severe malaria. This opens the way to thinking about how we might alter those combinations in the gut to try to protect children from severe malaria.”

    In addition to studying the expanded cohort in Uganda, Schmidt and his team will also collaborate with researchers in Malawi and Mali to get a broader sense of trends present between gut microbiota and malaria across Africa. 

    “Beyond our efforts to assess the contribution of gut bacteria towards severe malaria in diverse African populations, we have initiated pre-clinical efforts to target gut bacteria that cause susceptibility to severe malaria,” Schmidt said. “Our long-term aspiration is to move a treatment into the clinic.”

    About Indiana University School of Medicine

    IU School of Medicine is the largest medical school in the U.S. and is annually ranked among the top medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. The school offers high-quality medical education, access to leading medical research and rich campus life in nine Indiana cities, including rural and urban locations consistently recognized for livability.

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  • New study shows which neighborhoods police spend most time patrolling

    New study shows which neighborhoods police spend most time patrolling

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    Newswise — BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Using anonymized smartphone data from nearly 10,000 police officers in 21 large U.S. cities, research from Indiana University finds officers on patrol spend more time in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

    “Research on policing has focused on documented actions such as stops and arrests – less is known about patrols and presence,” said Kate Christensen, assistant professor of marketing at the IU Kelley School of Business.

    “Police have discretion in deciding where law enforcement is provided within America’s cities,” she said. “Where police officers are located matters, because it affects where crimes are deterred and what the public knows about crimes as they happen. Police presence can influence when and where crime is officially recorded.”

    Christensen and her colleagues at University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, Irvine; and American University are the first to use anonymized smartphone location data to identify and study the movements of police officers while on patrol in America’s cities.

    Their article, “Smartphone Data Reveal Neighborhood-Level Racial Disparities in Police Presence,” appears in The Review of Economics and Statistics, which is edited at the Harvard Kennedy School.

    Few police departments collect detailed officer location data, and even fewer release it publicly. This analysis of smartphone GPS data allowed researchers to study where officers chose to spend their time, including when they were patrolling outside their cars.

    GPS data revealed a strong correlation between racial and ethnic composition of a neighborhood and police presence.

    “Our findings suggest that disparities in exposure to police are associated with both structural socioeconomic disparities and discretionary decision making by police commanders and officers,” researchers wrote.

    On average, the research indicated that police spent:

    • 6% more time in areas of a city where the fraction of Black residents was 10% higher.
    • 2% more time in places with 10% higher share of Hispanic residents.
    • 7% more time in places with 10% as many Asian residents.

    Variation in socioeconomic status, social disorganization and violent crime can explain:

    • 35% of the additional officer time spent in Black neighborhoods.
    • 33% of additional time spent in Hispanic neighborhoods.
    • All additional officer time spent in Asian neighborhoods.

    When they combined police presence data with geocoded arrest data available for six cities – New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Austin and Washington, D.C. – Christensen and her colleagues found that higher arrest rates of Black residents were connected to more officer time spent in Black neighborhoods.

    “This neighborhood-level disparity persists after controlling for density, socioeconomic and crime-driven demand for policing, and may be lower in cities with more Black police supervisors – but not officers,” she said. “Patterns of police presence statistically explain 57% of the higher arrest rate in more Black neighborhoods.”

    The researchers used data provided by Safegraph, which recorded “pings” indicating where smartphones are at a certain time. That information was linked to police station location data published by the Department of Homeland Security and geofence data provided by Microsoft. To identify patrol officers, the sample included phones used at 316 police stations in 21 cities between February and November 2017.

    Other authors of the study are M. Keith Chen, professor of behavioral economics and strategy and the Bing and Alice Liu Yang Chair in Management and Innovation at UCLA; Elicia John, assistant professor of marketing at American University and adjunct researcher at the RAND Corporation; Emily Owens, chair of the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine; and Yilin Zhuo, a Ph.D. student at UCLA.

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  • Internationally recognized computational researcher Spyridon Bakas, PhD, to serve as inaugural director of Division of Computational Pathology

    Internationally recognized computational researcher Spyridon Bakas, PhD, to serve as inaugural director of Division of Computational Pathology

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    Newswise — INDIANAPOLIS—Indiana University School of Medicine Department of Pathology is launching a new Division of Computational Pathology and a Research Center for Federated Learning in Precision Medicine. Both will be led by Spyridon Bakas, PhD, an internationally recognized computational researcher who brings ten years of experience and NIH grant funding to this growing field that combines artificial intelligence and medicine.

    “Computational pathology is a growing area of medicine around the world,” Bakas said. “The idea is to leverage information that exists within tissue slides that cannot be perceived by the naked eye. After being digitized, the clinical pathologist can identify cues that are visually interpretable, whereas computational methods can unlock sub-visual cues revealing patterns of diagnostic, prognostic, and predictive value. Recent technological advancements have generated an amplitude of data that burden the current pathologists and technicians, so we need these computational tools to assess all this information more efficiently and effectively.”

    Bakas joined IU on September 1 as the Joshua Edwards Associate Professor of Pathology and brings with him a team of six researchers that span across various ranks. He and the Department of Pathology are actively recruiting for several more positions, from assistant professors to data analysts and postdoctoral researchers, to serve as leaders in the promising field of computational pathology and federated learning.

    The goals of the new division and research center include:

    • Devise solutions to clinically relevant questions while contributing to the optimized use of health care professional skillsets while decreasing cognitive and clerical burden
    • Expedite digital service, device, and drug discovery across the school
    • Yield new biological and clinical insights into pathological processes
    • Facilitate multi-institutional collaborations without sharing patient data, thereby overcoming legal, privacy and data ownership challenges.

    Bakas will hold secondary appointments, indicating the vision of the new division and research center to work collaboratively and closely with other areas of the school, including the Department of Biostatistics and Health Data Science, Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences and the Department of Neurological Surgery. They will also work with other schools within Indiana University, such as the Department of Computer Science in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering.

    “We bring expertise in machine learning for health care data, while other collaborators will bring complimentary domain knowledge and expertise in privacy and security,” Bakas said.

    “The arrival of Dr. Bakas is a tremendous opportunity for the department and for IU School of Medicine to launch into the sphere of computational pathology, which unlocks new ways of examining cells, tissues and organs in health and disease,” said Michael Feldman, MD, PhD, chair of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine. “We will be able to leverage the significant resources that already exist at the school and the university to build long-term partnerships with other departments, such as radiology.”

    Bakas and his team have published several major research studies, including the largest real-world federated learning study ever conducted, which focused on health care for brain tumor patients. Federated Machine Learning provides an alternative paradigm for accurate and generalizable machine learning by only sharing numerical model updates across multiple data sets.

    “We look forward to extending that further, not only in more research studies, but with collaborators within IU and outside of the university with other industry collaborators and research institutions,” Bakas said.

    About Indiana University School of Medicine

    IU School of Medicine is the largest medical school in the U.S. and is annually ranked among the top medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. The school offers high-quality medical education, access to leading medical research and rich campus life in nine Indiana cities, including rural and urban locations consistently recognized for livability.

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    Indiana University

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  • Study: health equity an important aspect of improving quality of care provided to children in emergency departments

    Study: health equity an important aspect of improving quality of care provided to children in emergency departments

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    Newswise — INDIANAPOLIS—A new multi-site study led by Indiana University School of Medicine found increasing pediatric readiness in emergency departments reduces, but does not eliminate, racial and ethnic disparities in children and adolescents with acute medical emergencies.

    The study also involved researchers from Oregon Health and Science University and UC Davis Health. They recently published their findings in JAMA Network Open.

    “Ours is a national study group focused on pediatric emergency department readiness,” said Peter Jenkins, MD, associate professor surgery at IU School of Medicine and first author of the study. “We have been very productive in demonstrating that the more prepared an ED is to take care of kids, the better their chances of survival, and that includes children with traumatic injuries and medical emergencies.”

    “Readiness” can include a variety of factors for an ED, including staffing, materials, training and protocols. Jenkins said the more prepared the hospital, and the more protocols in place, then the more likely a child is to survive a traumatic injury or acute medical emergency. But until now, it was unclear whether children of all races and ethnicities benefit the same from increased levels of readiness.

    “We believe that treatment protocols help to overcome biases and racism because if a child meets criteria, then we do one thing or another,” Jenkins said. “We saw that for kids with traumatic injuries, whose care is largely determined by such protocols, there weren’t significant differences in survival based on race and ethnicity. But for children with medical emergencies, where treatment protocols are often lacking, we found significant disparities in mortality between Black and White kids. Importantly, the higher the level of readiness of the ED, the lower the level of disparity between racial and ethnic groups.”

    Researchers looked at 633,536 pediatric patients at hospitals in 11 states from 2012-2017, making this one of the largest studies of racial and ethnic disparities among children to date.

    “A lot of times when we talk about health equity, people are concerned that improving the condition of one group may result in another group losing out,” Jenkins said. “This study shows the opposite to be true. All groups benefit from improved readiness, and we also have this extra layer of social justice woven into the narrative of improved health care quality. These findings only strengthens the case to provide resources to hospitals so they’re prepared to take care of all sick kids.”

    In the future, the group plans to look at updated surveys of hospitals to determine if there have been changes in pediatric readiness over time. Jenkins said they also plan to promote the importance of health equity into the national platform for pediatric readiness.

    Other lead collaborators include Nathan Kuppermann, MD, MPH from UC Davis and Craig Newgard, MD, MPH from OHSU. Read the full publication in JAMA Network Open.

    About Indiana University School of Medicine

    IU School of Medicine is the largest medical school in the U.S. and is annually ranked among the top medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. The school offers high-quality medical education, access to leading medical research and rich campus life in nine Indiana cities, including rural and urban locations consistently recognized for livability.

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  • Kelley, WNBPA partner to empower WNBA players in pursuit of graduate education, entrepreneurship

    Kelley, WNBPA partner to empower WNBA players in pursuit of graduate education, entrepreneurship

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    Newswise — BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — The Indiana University Kelley School of Business has teamed up with the Women’s National Basketball Players Association, which represents the current WNBA players, to offer players the chance to pursue a graduate education. This partnership will equip them with the knowledge and skills necessary for successful careers beyond basketball.

    Drawing from previous successful collaborations for the National Football League and Major League Soccer, this partnership will offer current and former WNBA players the opportunity to attain a master’s degree or professional certificate.

    “Through our degree programs and many other initiatives, the Kelley School has long been committed to empowering women to accelerate their careers and become influential business leaders,” said Ash Soni, dean of the Kelley School and the Sungkyunkwan Professor. “Through this partnership, we are providing another highly competitive group of women with the resources they will need for lasting success — in this instance, off the court.”

    “Each season, over 95% of the W draft class graduates with their undergraduate degree, and some have even started graduate programs,” said Terri Jackson, executive director of the WNBPA. “Our members know all too well that the career span of a professional athlete is not very long and view an academic partnership with Kelley as a significant pathway to further their education and achieve economic empowerment.”

    Later this year, members of the WNBPA will be able to apply for an MBA degree, being delivered online by the Kelley School’s Executive Degree Programs, as well as certificates and a Master of Science degree. WNBPA members will be part of a general group of students and have an opportunity to learn with those enrolled in similar specialized MBA degree programs, offering them a broader perspective of strategic management and economic issues.

    Key features of the WNBPA-Kelley MBA program will include the Kelley Capstone Experience, which puts teams of students to work on real-world strategic projects. This provides them with an opportunity to apply skills and knowledge acquired in the MBA program to actual business problems that directly relate to each person’s goals and objectives.

    Courses, such as those in business planning, economics, management strategy and quantitative analysis, are taught by the same high-ranked faculty who teach in Kelley’s full-time programs. Many of these classes will be taught using the school’s $10 million Brian D. Jellison Studios. The immersive, state-of-the-art studios enhance the delivery of course content and provide an even more dynamic experience, with faculty and students being together virtually as if they were in an in-person classroom.

    A unique component of the developing partnership is an in-person program at Kelley. This program will provide players with insights into entrepreneurship and foster an entrepreneurial mindset within larger organizations.

    The WNBPA-Kelley partnership is one example of customized education at the school. For more information about Executive Degree Programs, email [email protected].

    Established in 1998, the WNBPA is the first of its kind and longest-running union for women athletes. The purpose of the WNBPA is to protect the rights of players and assist them in achieving their full potential on and off the court. The members of the WNBPA are phenomenal and accomplished athletes. The union members play around the world and are, without a doubt, the global ambassadors for the sport.

    The Kelley School is committed to helping women discover their own pathway to success. Clubs and organizations provide support, professional development and career opportunities for women in all its degree programs. It was one of the first participants in the Forté Foundation, which supports the advancement of women in business. Kelley also offers opportunities for young women in high school.

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  • Kelley School research explains why a bad first impression cost Google $100 billion — or more

    Kelley School research explains why a bad first impression cost Google $100 billion — or more

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    Newswise — BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Google’s launch of Bard, it’s search-integrated, AI-powered chatbot, went wrong when the bot’s first advertisement accidentally showed it was unable to find and present accurate information to users.

    Research by professors at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business and the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management explains why it may be harder for the creator of the world’s largest search engine to write off the situation as a temporary issue.

    Although it isn’t uncommon for software vendors to release incomplete products and subsequently fix bugs and provide additional features, the research shows this may not be the best strategy for AI.

    As seen through a one-day $100 billion decrease in market value for Alphabet, Google’s parent company, a botched demo can cause significant damage. Findings in an article accepted by the journal ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction indicates that errors that occur early in users’ interactions with an algorithm can have a lasting negative impact on trust and reliance.

    Antino Kim and Jingjing Zhang, associate professors of operations and decision technologies at Kelley, are co-authors of the paper, “When Algorithms Err: Differential Impact of Early vs. Late Errors on Users’ Reliance on Algorithms,” with Mochen Yang, assistant professor of information and decision sciences at Carlson. Zhang also is co-director of the Institute for Business Analytics at Kelley. Yang taught at Kelley in 2018-19.

    Known as “algorithm aversion,” users tend to avoid using algorithms, particularly after encountering an error. The researchers found that giving users more control over AI results can alleviate some of the negative impacts of early errors.

    Kim, Yang and Zhang examined the situation through the lens of their research and present their analysis below:

    “Not long ago, search engines simply fetched existing content from the internet based on the keywords users provided. Then, in late 2022, ChatGPT, a conversational AI developed by OpenAI, took the internet by storm. Within just a couple of months, Microsoft announced its multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI and integrated ChatGPT capabilities into Bing.

    “Understandably, Google, the defending champion of search engines, was feeling the pressure, and it was quick to react. On Feb. 6, Google ran an advertisement showcasing its own conversational AI service, Bard. Unfortunately, in its first demo, Bard produced a factual error, and the market was not forgiving of Bard’s bad first impression. This error led to a $100 billion decrease in market value for Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

    “In the aftermath, Google employees criticized the CEO for the ‘rushed, botched’ announcement of Bard, and Google is now asking staff to help fix the AI’s ‘bad responses’ manually.

    “Predictive algorithms and generative AI — broadly referred to as “algorithms” in this article — operate using probabilistic processes instead of deterministic ones, meaning that even the best algorithms can sometimes make mistakes.

    “However, users may not tolerate such mistakes, and the term ‘algorithm aversion’ refers to users’ tendency to avoid using algorithms, particularly after encountering an error.

    “Not all errors have the same effect on users and, in Google’s case, the market. Our research suggests that errors occurring early on in users’ interactions with an algorithm, before they have had a chance to build trust through successful interactions, have a long-lasting negative impact on users’ trust and reliance.

    “Essentially, early errors can create a bad first impression that persists for a long time. In fact, during our experiment, where participants repeatedly interacted with an algorithm, their trust levels following an early error never fully recovered to the level of no error.

    “The situation was different, however, for errors that occurred after participants had already had enough successful interactions with the algorithm and built trust. In such cases, participants were more forgiving when algorithms made a mistake, treating it as a one-time fluke. As a result, the level of trust and reliance did not suffer significantly.

    “To be fair to Google, it is not uncommon for traditional software vendors to release incomplete products and subsequently fix bugs and provide additional features. However, for AI, this may not be a wise strategy, as the damage from a botched demo can be significant. Our research suggests that Google’s road to recovery from the negative impact of the error may be long.

    “So, what steps can AI systems take to mitigate the effects of errors like the one made by Google’s Bard? Our findings suggest that giving users control over how to use the algorithm’s results can alleviate some of the negative impacts of early errors.

    “It is possible that Bard’s error had such a significant adverse effect because of the confidence with which the incorrect result was presented. When asked, ‘What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?,’ the chatbot responded with bullet points that the telescope took the very first pictures of exoplanets — a factually incorrect claim that Google could have verified by Googling it.

    “For algorithms that involve probabilistic processes, there is typically a score marking the confidence level for the result. When the score is below a certain threshold, it may be wise to give users more control. One example could be reverting to the search engine mode, where several credible and relevant sources are presented for users to navigate.

    “After all, that is what Google does best, and it may be a better approach than hastily releasing another AI that may confidently return an incorrect answer.”

    Editor’s note:

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  • Indiana University Student Stabbed On Bus For Being Asian, School Says

    Indiana University Student Stabbed On Bus For Being Asian, School Says

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    BLOOMINGTON, Indiana (AP) — A 56-year-old woman has been charged after an 18-year-old Indiana University student repeatedly was stabbed in the head on a public bus in an attack the school says was because the victim is Asian.

    The victim told investigators she was standing and waiting for the exit doors to open on a Bloomington Transit bus Wednesday afternoon when another passenger began striking her in the head, Bloomington police said in a release.

    Bus surveillance footage showed no interaction between the two women prior to the attack.

    A witness who also was riding the bus followed the woman’s attacker and contacted police, who later arrested Billie R. Davis of Bloomington. Davis has been charged with attempted murder and aggravated battery, according to court records.

    The victim was treated at a hospital for multiple stab wounds. Her name was not released.

    Court documents show Davis said the victim was targeted because of her race, according to WNDU-TV.

    Citing court records, WRTV-TV reports that Davis told police she stabbed the woman multiple times in the head with a folding knife, because it “would be one less person to blow up our country.”

    Records did not list an attorney representing Davis.

    “This week, Bloomington was sadly reminded that anti-Asian hate is real and can have painful impacts on individuals and our community,” Indiana University Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Multicultural Affairs James Wimbush said in a statement. “No one should face harassment or violence due to their background, ethnicity or heritage. Instead, the Bloomington and IU communities are stronger because of the vast diversity of identities and perspectives that make up our campus and community culture.”

    Bloomington is in southern Indiana. Mayor John Hamilton called behavior like the bus attack “not acceptable” and said it will be “dealt with accordingly.”

    “We know when a racially motivated incident like this resonates throughout the community, it can leave us feeling less safe,” Hamilton said in a statement Saturday. “We stand with the Asian community and all who feel threatened by this event.”

    In recent years, Asian Americans have increasingly been the target of racially motivated harassment and assaults, especially after the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

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  • Study reveals average age at conception for men versus women over past 250,000 years

    Study reveals average age at conception for men versus women over past 250,000 years

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    Newswise — BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — The length of a specific generation can tell us a lot about the biology and social organization of humans. Now, researchers at Indiana University can determine the average age that women and men had children throughout human evolutionary history with a new method they developed using DNA mutations.

    The researchers said this work can help us understand the environmental challenges experienced by our ancestors and may also help us in predicting the effects of future environmental change on human societies.

    “Through our research on modern humans, we noticed that we could predict the age at which people had children from the types of DNA mutations they left to their children,” said study co-author Matthew Hahn, Distinguished Professor of biology in the College of Arts and Sciences and of computer science in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering at IU Bloomington. “We then applied this model to our human ancestors to determine what age our ancestors procreated.”

    According to the study, published today in Science Advances and co-authored by IU post-doctoral researcher Richard Wang, the average age that humans had children throughout the past 250,000 years is 26.9. Furthermore, fathers were consistently older, at 30.7 years on average, than mothers, at 23.2 years on average, but the age gap has shrunk in the past 5,000 years, with the study’s most recent estimates of maternal age averaging 26.4 years. The shrinking gap seems to largely be due to mothers having children at older ages.

    Other than the recent uptick in maternal age at childbirth, the researchers found that parental age has not increased steadily from the past and may have dipped around 10,000 years ago because of population growth coinciding with the rise of civilization.

    “These mutations from the past accumulate with every generation and exist in humans today,” Wang said. “We can now identify these mutations, see how they differ between male and female parents, and how they change as a function of parental age.”

    Children’s DNA inherited from their parents contains roughly 25 to 75 new mutations, which allows scientists to compare the parents and offspring, and then to classify the kind of mutation that occurred. When looking at mutations in thousands of children, IU researchers noticed a pattern: The kinds of mutations that children get depend on the ages of the mother and the father.

    Previous genetic approaches to determining historical generation times relied on the compounding effects of either recombination or mutation of modern human DNA sequence divergence from ancient samples. But the results were averaged across both males and females and across the past 40,000 to 45,000 years.

    Hahn, Wang and their co-authors built a model that uses de novo mutations — a genetic alteration that is present for the first time in one family member as a result of a variant or mutation in a germ cell of one of the parents or that arises in the fertilized egg during early embryogenesis — to separately estimate the male and female generation times at many different points throughout the past 250,000 years.

    The researchers were not originally seeking to understand the relationship of gender and age at conception over time; they were conducting a broader investigation about the number of mutations passed from parents to children. They only noticed the age-based mutation patterns while seeking to understand differences and similarities between these pattens in humans versus other mammals, such as cats, bears and macaques.

    “The story of human history is pieced together from a diverse set of sources: written records, archaeological findings, fossils, etc.,” Wang said. “Our genomes, the DNA found in every one of our cells, offer a kind of manuscript of human evolutionary history. The findings from our genetic analysis confirm some things we knew from other sources (such as the recent rise in parental age), but also offer a richer understanding of the demography of ancient humans. These findings contribute to a better understanding of our shared history.”

    Additional contributors to this research were Samer I. Al-Saffar, a graduate student at IU at the time of the study, and Jeffrey Rogers of the Baylor College of Medicine.

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  • Indiana University student-athlete pays off sister’s student loans for Christmas

    Indiana University student-athlete pays off sister’s student loans for Christmas

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    Student-athlete pays off sister’s student loans


    Student-athlete pays off sister’s student loans

    01:42

    A junior business major who plays basketball for Indiana University gave his sister the ultimate Christmas present. 

    It has been less than three years since the choice to allow student-athletes to make money from their name, image, and likeness. The decision, made by Congress and the NCAA, allows them to sign endorsement deals, apply for jobs, and start their own businesses. An estimated 460,000 student-athletes across the U.S. have benefited from the new rule change and the money is pouring in.

    Anthony Leal is a 21-year-old junior at Indiana University, where he plays point guard for the men’s basketball team. The business major does work throughout the Bloomington community, has endorsement deals, and just started his own real estate company.

    “We’re just trying to make the most of the opportunity we have,” Anthony Leal told CBS News in his first TV interview.

    This Christmas, with money saved to date, he paid over $50,000 to pay off his sister Lauren’s student loan debt. It’s something he had been plotting to do for his role model since his freshman year. 

    “I don’t expect anything in return,” Anthony Leal said. “I know she’ll pay it forward, what goes around comes around.”

    For Lauren Leal, a 23-year-old aspiring physician assistant, the gift means a fresh start as she enters the real world. The one word to describe just how she feels about no longer having to worry about student loan debt.

    “Freedom would be the best word for that. And like I can go full steam ahead in my future and what I want to accomplish, what I want to do, without having that just weighing me down and holding me back. So it’s just, it’s surreal. it’s incredible,” Lauren Leal told CBS News.

    Jericka Duncan


    jericka-duncan-promo-aug2019.jpg

    Jericka Duncan is a national correspondent based in New York City and the anchor for Sunday’s edition of the “CBS Weekend News.”

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