Daily Bruin – Page 106

UCLA researchers invent new technology to improve prostate cancer diagnoses

UCLA researchers developed a machine learning algorithm to aid radiologists in diagnosing prostate cancer.

Ruiming Cao, a graduate student in computer science, was the main developer of FocalNet, an artificial intelligence system which uses data from magnetic resonance imaging to detect and assess prostate cancer.

Steven Raman, a radiologist and a senior author of the study, said prostate cancer diagnoses and assessments usually do not use imaging technology like MRI and instead use blood tests and biopsies.

Raman, along with UCLA urologists and pathologists, had previously developed a method of using MRI to collect data on prostate cancer. This allows doctors to bypass the risk of infection associated with biopsies. The data the MRI collected in that study was used to develop the algorithms for FocalNet.

Raman said most men develop prostate cancer at some point in their lives, but most do not require intervention. However, the high frequency of incorrect diagnoses causes many patients to undergo unnecessary operations.

Raman added there is a 30-40% chance of misdiagnosing the severity of prostate cancers. Improving diagnostic procedures could lead to fewer unnecessary interventions such as surgeries.

Kyunghyun Sung, an assistant professor of radiology and senior author of the study, said the technology could potentially reduce how long radiologists take to study the cancer with MRI machines and make accurate diagnostics using MRI scans. This could make the diagnosis procedure cheaper for patients, he said.

Machine learning algorithms have the potential to make the imaging process two or three times faster, said Dieter Enzmann, chair of radiology at UCLA and a senior author of the study.

Raman said one of the main goals of FocalNet is to help radiologists with less experience make more accurate diagnoses.

“It may take thousands of scans for them to achieve a level of expertise that is required, and they may never see those thousands of scans,” Raman said. “(FocalNet) takes someone at an entry level and makes them achieve at a level that is much higher than a level they may be capable of alone based on their inability to access the experiences.”

Sung said the study focused on comparing FocalNet’s accuracy to that of radiologists and found that the two were comparable. However, FocalNet still needs to receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration before it is ready to be used on patients, he said.

Enzmann said he thinks this new technology should be incorporated into radiologist training in the future.

“It can only help us if we understand the tools,” said Enzmann. “Radiologists need to understand in what situations it is appropriate to use (the machine learning technology) because as powerful as they are, they are only as good as the training sets.”

Emily A. Carter appointed as new executive vice chancellor and provost

UCLA announced the appointment of the new executive vice chancellor and provost Monday.

Emily Carter, currently dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University, will take on the role beginning Sept 1. She will replace current Executive Vice Chancellor Scott Waugh, who is returning to the faculty to pursue his study of medieval history.

Carter received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from UC Berkeley and earned a doctorate in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology.

She served in the faculty for chemistry and material science and engineering at UCLA between 1988 and 2004, where she helped establish the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics and the California NanoSystems Institute.

At Princeton, Carter was the founding director of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. Her research focuses on quantum mechanics-based computer simulations in the study of sustainable energy. She has authored nearly 400 publications and delivered more than 500 lectures.

Carter has won several honors in her career, including election to the National Academy of Sciences, the 2017 Irving Langmuir Prize in Chemical Physics from the American Physical Society and the 2018 Award in Theoretical Chemistry from the American Chemical Society.

Annual celebration of Iranian cinema analyzes socio-cultural issues through film

A number of new films will show Westwood audiences the latest in Persian cinematic trends.

The UCLA Film & Television Archive began its annual Celebration of Iranian Cinema on Saturday with a screening of “Tehran: City of Love,” followed by a Q&A with writer and director Ali Jaberansari. This year’s selection features a number of comedies, satires and traditionally Persian dramas along with two newly restored editions of classic prerevolution films from before 1979. All films will screen at the Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum through May 11.

The film series is sponsored by the Farhang Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that promotes Iranian culture and art in the greater Los Angeles area. Alireza Ardekani, the executive director of the foundation, said it aims

to bring more eyes to Iranian cinema, and the Archive has selected films with a wide range of themes, showcasing the quality that Iranian filmmakers are capable of producing.

“Despite some heavy restrictions on films produced in Iran, art and cinema continues to flourish,” Ardekani said.

One reality that all filmmakers in Iran have to deal with is the overwhelming censorship that has pervaded filmmaking since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. This political upheaval ousted Iran’s monarchy in favor of a theocratic system. Every film must go through a rigorous permit process; from script to production to screening, each level requires government approval, Jaberansari said. But he feels that the restrictions create something akin to a level playing field for Iranian filmmakers. Regardless of the intended audience, he said directors are all at the mercy of government censors.

Due to these restrictions, Jaberansari said most filmmakers heavily utilize visual metaphors in order to communicate their message to the audience. Whether it’s a man and woman almost touching or a dialogue exchange that mimics sexual foreplay, Iranian audiences actively discuss these artistic efforts to bypass censorship, he said. There is a demand for films that push the red lines of censorship in Iran, he said, but filmmakers have to be creative in order to not offend censors.

“Films that are a bit bold, whether it’s politics, personal freedom or sexual references, this is what makes the Iranian audience go see a film these days,” Jaberansari said.

Iranian films are often heavy, dramatic stories, but Jaberansari said he had a different idea for his latest project. Though Iran tends to produce fewer comedies than other countries, Jaberansari said he didn’t want “Tehran: A City of Love” to be the same kind of socio-realistic, gritty film that has pervaded the Iranian market for the last several years. Instead, he said he took inspiration from the deadpan humor of Scandinavian films to highlight some of the latest in cultural trends of Tehran, including plastic surgery, gym culture and religious singing. Jaberansari does not live in Iran full time, but splits his time between Iran and San Francisco. He said that not being subject to the same societal pressures of conforming to government standards every day allows him to use the creative lens of comedy, rather than drama, to highlight social issues.

“The majority of films in Iran are about harsh realities,” Jaberansari said. “Because I have this distance I can look at things and be able to (laugh) at the numerous absurdities that are part of the fabric of life in Iran.”

Latifeh Hagigi, a senior lecturer in the Iranian Studies program in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, said she has required her students to attend at least one screening since the first Celebration of Iranian Cinema 31 years ago. But some of her students don’t want to see the films, Hagigi said, because they’re heavy dramas with depressing endings, but Hagigi always insists that the cultural issues underlying those films – equality, women’s rights – are a reality of modern life in Iran. She said students in Iranian studies need to experience these issues, and seeing them portrayed on screen is the easiest way.

“If you cannot travel (to Iran), at least through these films you can project yourselves into these situations,” Hagigi said.

Because the audience won’t be strictly Iranian, Jaberansari said he is worried that non-Iranian audiences will misinterpret the fictional narratives of these films as documentary: that the characters and situations in his film are wholly accurate to how real-life citizens of Tehran live their lives. It is important for audiences to understand that even though they can learn a lot about a culture through their fictional media, they can’t take it as factual storytelling, he said. But the filmmaker said he also understands that fiction is the common thread that binds people and helps one culture understand another.

“If anything … Iranian film can (show) and prove that after all we’re all pretty much the same, no matter where you come from,” Jaberansari said.

Student uses microscopes to get closer look at potential for music creation

Ivana Dama is innovating what can constitute a musical instrument, using a microscope and human brain tissue in her latest performance.

The third-year design media arts student gave a presentation of her audiovisual project in an improvisational performance at Studio 106 L.A. on April 21. The ongoing project consists of a microscope and slides that Dama uses as a musical instrument. By manipulating parameters of the microscope’s camera, such as focus and movement, Dama triggers specific sound effects – like altered frequencies of different piano samples – to create music. The microscopic image Dama uses to stimulate sounds is projected behind her, and is visually filtered based on the frequency of the audio it creates. Despite her lack of a background in music, Dama said she was inspired to use sound as an artistic medium.

“I was interested in exploring the different ways that we can play the instruments,” Dama said. “Not just by knowing really well certain instruments but kind of applying new rules into the musical instruments and the music world.”

At the Sound + Science Symposium 2.0 at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA on Friday, Dama will give another presentation of her project. Dillon Bastan, a third-year design media arts students who collaborated with Dama on her project, is also set to perform at the event, and the two will be leading hands-on workshops for the technology they use.

Dama said her work aims to explore space at different scales – such as the microscopic, architectural and cosmic levels. For example, one of Dama’s recent projects featured metal-engraved satellite images of Serbia, where Dama grew up, from the first day of the 1999 NATO bombings to the last. Dama said her goal was not to show her perspective of the events, but to highlight the viewpoint of the pilots flying over the country. Another of Dama’s projects presented enlarged, 10-foot-tall scans of an ant farm to compare a human’s interpretation of time with that of insects’, demonstrating her interest in working with dimensions of space to present new perspectives.

“I always liked the microscopes as an instrument and I was also intrigued by seeing something in the microscope that … was hard to see in reality,” Dama said. “But this was the first time that I tried to actually hear how (it sounds) like something that we can hear.”

Bastan collaborated with Dama to create the project by helping identify features of the microscopic camera, such as blurring or brightness, that would create noticeable effects on the images. He then aided in creating the algorithms that process these changes to the images to create sound effects. For example, when the microscope’s light is turned on to illuminate the slides, a base organlike sound is produced, Dama said. Bastan, who curates for Studio 106, invited Dama to present her project at the gallery because of her experience working with mixed media, such as light and sound, and his desire to create a community for multidisciplinary artists to share their work.

“For me and for the other people curating there, we lean toward avant-garde, experimental, amateur, (do-it-yourself), really expressive kind of artists and pieces,” Bastan said.

Amy Fang, a second-year design media arts student, attended Dama’s performance at Studio 106 and said she was impressed by Dama’s ability to repurpose an object associated with STEM traditions into an artistic instrument. She added that the merging of science and art does not happen often, so an interdisciplinary project like Dama’s is fascinating.

Marcos Otero García, a postdoctoral researcher studying Alzheimer’s disease in UCLA’s Center for Health Sciences, also collaborated with Dama on the project. Otero García provided her with brain cell slides to be used in conjunction with the microscope to create sound. The slides were projected on a screen behind Dama, who explained the process as circular – the image of the slides influences the sound and the sound, in turn, influences the projection of the slides.

“It was just kind of like you’re seeing this whole … multidimensional visualization of the … brain,” Fang said.

Dama is currently working on another project that also experiments with sound and challenges traditional ideas of how to play an instrument. The project incorporates a piano that people can play by walking around, with notes and frequencies triggered by the geographical location of the walker. Similar to her microscope project, Dama was inspired to create an instrument that anyone can be in control of playing.

“My idea was that my instrument can be played by anyone,” Dama said. “Anyone can be in control of playing it. You don’t have to be (a professional) in knowing … violin or the piano.”

Middle Eastern instruments vocalize underlying themes in UCLA Hillel play

This post was updated May 14 at 4:45 p.m.

The saz – a Middle Eastern instrument with a long, ornamented neck – gives voice to a lizard in a one-woman play.

The Dortort Center for Creativity in the Arts at UCLA Hillel will present “The DIG” on Tuesday in collaboration with the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel studies. The play acts as writer Stacie Chaiken’s response to her year-and-a-half residency in Israel starting in 2003. Interacting with Israel’s history, the play follows genetic archaeologist Sally Jenkins, played by Chaiken, as she travels to Jaffa to solve the mystery behind a 4,000-year-old tomb. Having originally premiered in 2016, this rendition features the debut of Yuval Ron’s original music composition, which he will perform live alongside Chaiken’s performance. The music serves as a subconscious voice, emphasizing emotions, history and the multicontinental locations in the play, Chaiken said.

“(The music) gives a voice to the land, and it gives a voice to things that are buried in that land or buried in time around that land,” Chaiken said.

Chaiken imagined the second voice of the play – one that changes according to a scene’s content – to feature an oud’s big-bellied and resonant sound. As a result, the music is primarily played on this Middle Eastern nylon-stringed instrument. But to signify the presence of Sally’s best friend, Mo the lizard, Ron plays a saz, which has metal strings. Since the lizard is the only animal character, the instrument conveys a brighter, metallic sound, differentiating the lizard’s theme from that of the human characters.

The composition is organized in musical themes; each creates a specific sound for different topics. For instance, the Middle Eastern land theme is composed in maqam hijaz – an ancient Middle Eastern musical mode. This mode utilizes midrange notes and a grounding pedal bass to express yearning and tragedy, reflecting on Israel’s violent history, Ron said.

Director Pamela Berlin, who has been working with Chaiken on the play for 10 years, said Ron’s use of the musical motifs supports the thematic ideas in the play without overwhelming Sally’s story. Ron varies the volume as well as implements simple compositions at certain moments to enhance the text instead of overwhelming it, Berlin said.

“His treatment of (the themes) is wonderfully subtle – it doesn’t jump out at you, it doesn’t scream at you, it makes its way down into your … subconscious,” Berlin said.

Ron said the composition is meant to emphasize the underlying emotions in each scene. When there is tension between Sally and her mother, for example, the music conveys that strain through an intense buildup, complete with rapid strumming and increased usage of dissonance, Ron said. Additionally, he uses a deepening set of sounds to create a sense of impending trouble as Sally descends into the tomb. Because Sally is a very guarded character, the music is able to convey an intimacy unapparent in Sally’s relations with other people, Berlin said.

“Having the music play under her I think has really helped to reveal who she is deep down, which is in fact a very vulnerable person,” Berlin said.

The music also indicates the attitudes of other characters without them being physically present. Ron constructed his responses through musical devices like melodic motifs and slides. When Sally talks to a skeleton, believed to be the remains of the biblical Sarah, the music answers the lines to allude to a dialogue between a living human and a dead human, Ron said.

Ron converses with Chaiken through the music from his place on stage, but never actually looks at the actress. This ensures he does not become an audience member and allows him to treat her voice and breath as music, instead of responding to visual cues. The music and the monologues contrast each other in the music’s emotions and Sally’s cold demeanor, even when discussing painful events, Ron said.

“The music doesn’t really support Sally most of the time; rather, the music supports the world around Sally – the world that she gets trapped in,” Ron said. “The music has its own wisdom.”

Updating traditional Western canon could support a more holistic view of humanities

“Stand on the shoulders of giants,” they say.

If only those shoulders weren’t always attached to dead white men.

The Western canon – which is the basis for a range of humanities courses – refers to a collection of vital works throughout history. It includes landmark pieces by people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Shakespeare, Thomas Hobbes, Aristotle, Plato, John Stuart Mill and John Locke.

That list also happens to be notoriously exclusive, hegemonic and Eurocentric.

The few recognized women in the canon are often taught in the context of feminist courses, and the non-European authors often suffer a similar fate, separated from the central canon based on their geography or race. The prevalence of white male authors speaks to a long historical trend of purposeful exclusion based on race and gender.

Yet it’s the material universities across the nation continue to teach – and UCLA is no exception.

Humanities courses, especially those that rely heavily on a canon, must reinvent themselves in order to create a thoughtful dialogue built on a diversity of narratives. After all, the literature provided has the ability to shape students’ future understanding of these fields. And UCLA has a responsibility to take progressive measures to refurbish traditional canons so they include new voices.

The widespread acceptance of the Western canon permeates multiple campus departments. Take Philosophy 7: “Introduction to Philosophy of Mind” – a lower-division offering for philosophy majors – which includes nine male authors in the first month of its syllabus. Meanwhile, only three women are taught throughout the quarter.

And in the grand scheme of things, a course like Philosophy 7 probably isn’t the worst offender. But this narrow approach to the humanities limits the perspectives of students entering the field, and pigeonholes students’ conception of who can contribute to the field and what ideas are acceptable.

This only continues the cycle of hegemony and exclusivity in the humanities.

“I think that these voices need to be incorporated as if they’ve always been there because they have – we’re just now paying attention to them,” said Saraliza Anzaldua, a doctoral student in philosophy.

The issue isn’t just one of adding new work to an old canon – there is a long line of women and non-European thinkers who have been purposefully scratched from the literature.

UCLA’s failure to elevate a variety of narratives is not just narrow-minded but represents a conscious choice to exclude certain voices per tradition – something that shapes the perspective of the next generation.

Emily Emard, a first-year history student, said her consistent exposure to American and European history has made her hesitant to branch out into other classes, such as Asian studies.

“It’s not because I’m not interested in it, but I’m unfamiliar with it, so I don’t know if that’s where I would place myself if I knew I could better succeed in other classes,” Emard said.

The narrow nature of the canon has facilitated a culture where students are more likely to study what they are prepared to succeed in, even if it means failing to diversify their perspective.

But if UCLA begins the push toward diversification at the introductory level, it has the potential to shift the very nature of what is now considered traditional.

In order to create a truly inclusive canon, we must incorporate centuries of valuable work that was invalidated by our predecessors. Actively including a wider range of voices in the canon can increase the diversity of future philosophers. If students can empathize with the authors they read, they are more likely to see their own voice as something of value.

On top of that, it is vital to contextualize the work of traditional authors. When humanities courses ignore the sexism and racism prevalent in so much of the canon’s literature, they do a disservice not only to students but to a more holistic understanding of our own histories.

“Oftentimes the things that are most in contrast with our values actually have the most potential to teach us about where we’ve come from and what persists,” said John Branstetter, a political science lecturer.

Diversification of the canon and traditional Western literature are by no means mutually exclusive. In fact, it’s an unwillingness to bridge the gap between the two that may be most harmful.

Branstetter added that the traditional canon and modern literature complement one another when they are interconnected.

“I think that recognizing that gives us new opportunities not to throw out the old, but to integrate the new and productive ways that drive the conversation forward,” Branstetter said.

This is not to imply an overhaul of the canon would be easy. Changing it would affect the knowledge that long has been considered the basis of the humanities. Including nontraditional canon, literature will involve cutting some of the traditional work in introductory courses. But those courses should be geared toward a basic, holistic understanding of the field – and the canon, as it now exists, is not representative of that.

A canon is not set in stone. Instead, it should pay tribute to the ever-evolving nature of the human experience.

Someone has to make the first step away from generations of bearded white men and Socratic seminars.

Perhaps that someone should be the No. 1 public university in the nation.

Poor correlation between course load and unit count causes confusion among students

UCLA is a place where numbers don’t work outside of a math class. It’s a place where four equals seven and five equals three.

When it comes to course units, that is.

The number of units for each class is determined by its attendance, classwork and additional weekly assignments outside of class. This number is based on the instructor who drafts the course proposal and how much time and effort they believe a student must put into a course, said Eric Wells, a committee analyst for the Academic Senate.

But the units often don’t accurately represent the amount of work and time students spend on a course. Course instructors change from one quarter to the next, and the assignments with them. There aren’t any set limits or standards for classes – it all depends on what a professor perceives to be the necessary time and effort.

This inconsistency allows some professors to require a lot from students who earn fewer units than they should.

UCLA’s unit designations aren’t accurate reflections of a student’s time and effort. These inaccurate numbers can give students a false expectation of the coursework they sign up for during enrollment, leading them to experience undue stress and distaste for their quality of education.

Each unit represents three hours of work per course each week. A student who enrolls in a four-unit course theoretically should expect to spend about 12 hours per week either in class or doing work for it.

Wells said classes often range from four to five units, but that it’s difficult to put a number on student engagement and overall time spent per course.

“I believe it is extremely challenging to gauge student time investment,” Wells said. “(For example), reading more technical subjects or dense material would likely take more time to read and digest than other subjects.”

These varying factors make it hard to prescribe a consistent value to course units.

But giving professors the power to determine freely the amount of coursework assigned can be an issue itself. There is too much variability in how unit counts are assigned to courses. The same course can be taught by different professors in the same year, leaving some students putting significantly more time into one class than their other classes.

But more time doesn’t necessarily mean more units.

Teresa Dueñas, a third-year biology student, said she remembers taking three- and four-unit classes that assigned a lot more work than five-unit courses.

“Sometimes it was more (work) than five-unit classes,” she said. “Honestly, for those classes, I was doing a lot. I’d spend a whole day just doing work for that class.”

Students taking classes with fewer units but large course loads might have to sacrifice extracurricular activities or a job midway through the quarter because they can’t keep up. This can be detrimental to students as they might be steering away from a requirement or take more than the recommended courses per quarter.

Elena Stevens-Flores, a fourth-year psychology student, said she took a three-unit lab course over a summer, which was a psychology degree requirement at the time.

“I felt like (the work we did) was a lot, but I also was taking three other classes,” she said. “If the unit count was higher, I feel like I would’ve taken only three.”

This kind of situation can steer students away from lower-unit courses, and thus hurt their educational experience.

“I feel like I’ve had a bad experience with (four-unit classes),” Dueñas said. “So if I’m going to do so much, then I’m going to go ahead and do it for more credit in a five-unit class.”

There’s a lot of difference one unit can make. Students’ graduation statuses rely significantly on whether they’ve met a certain unit count. Taking a four-unit course that leaves them with too much on their plate compared to a five-unit one that requires little of them can change their course schedules dramatically.

“It kind of seems like, ‘What’s the point if it’s one less?’ What if you need that one unit to graduate?” said Sarah Demma, a third-year English student.

Of course, it is difficult to hold instructors accountable for giving students only the amount of work they signed up to do for the course. Yet, as Wells said, all academic programs are reviewed every eight years by the Academic Senate. Making this review a process that happens more frequently would be the first step in making sure units aren’t arbitrary.

It’s about time UCLA makes unit counts speak for the coursework students are signing up for. Let’s make the numbers make sense.