The University Research Council and Office of Research presented the Outstanding Externally Funded Research Awards (OEFRA) to recognize the high quality and impact of the honorees’ sponsored research within the last three years and how their work has enhanced Fordham’s reputation—both nationally and globally.

Faculty were honored in five separate categories, and were presented awards by University Provost Stephen Freedman, Ph.D.:

Humanities: Nina Rowe, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Art History and Music in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

Rowe, an expert in the art of northern Europe in the high and late Middle Ages, recently received a $4,000 grant from the American Philosophical Society and fellowships totaling $95,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. She used the awards to fund research for her current book project, From Adam to Achilles to Alexander: World Chronicles and the Anecdotal Past in the Late Medieval City.

Interdisciplinary Research: Chun Zhang, Ph.D., Professor of Curriculum and Teaching at the Graduate School of Education 

Zhang has worked with colleagues at Columbia University and New York University to investigate workforce development in universal preschool programs in New York City. At Fordham, she has collaborated with Yi Ding, Ph.D., associate professor of school psychology, and Tiedan Huang, Ed.D., assistant professor of educational leadership, administration, and policy, to secure research funding. Her efforts have netted awards and grants totaling more than $2.8 million for studies that will impact the lives of children with special needs and their families.

Junior Faculty Research: Jordan DeVylder, Ph.D., Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Social Service

DeVylder, who joined the Fordham faculty in 2017, has a keen interest in preventive mental health, with an emphasis on psychosis and suicide. He is currently conducting a randomized trial to test an intervention to improve detection of untreated psychosis by community social workers. The trial is being funded by a $680,000 National Institute of Mental Health grant. DeVylder also recently won an $85,000 grant from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Sciences: Jason Munshi-South, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biological Sciences

An expert in the burgeoning field of urban ecology, Munshi-South was awarded a $600,000 research grant from the National Science Foundation in 2015 to study the evolutionary biology of wild rats. Since then, the NSF has granted multiple sub-awards , some of which have involved bringing undergraduates from other campuses to work with him during the summer. The NSF has continued to increase this award annually; its total is expected to reach over $672,000 this year. In total, Munshi-South has received more than $1 million in grants from the NSF, the National Institute of Health, and other foundations and organizations.

Social Sciences: Yilu Zhou, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Information Systems at the Gabelli School of Business

Zhou is the first faculty member from the Gabelli School of Business to be awarded a National Science Foundation grant, for her research project, “Can You Trust Apps Age Recommendations? Inconsistent and Unreliable Maturity Ratings on Mobile Platforms.” An expert on human-computer interactions and social media mining, she received two awards totaling $245,000 from the NSF for the project.

George Hong, Ph.D., chief research officer and associate vice president for academic affairs, touted the fact that from July 1, 2017, to March 31, 2018, Fordham faculty submitted 116 new grant proposals—an increase of 142 percent over the same period last year—and that faculty has received 82 awards in the past nine months.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, commended the winners for the example they set for their students.

“I wanted to congratulate all of you for renewing the heart of the University, in a really significant way, and giving all of our students inspiration, hope, and great pride,” he said.

Organized by the Office of Research and the University Research Council and sponsored by the University Research Compliance Council and the Office of Sponsored Programs, the daylong event included a workshop devoted to compliance awareness, a forum of humanities researchers, and a keynote speech by Jennifer Saak, Ph.D., managing director of Traliance. 

Within 24 hours of the announcement, however, customers took to social media to criticize the new plan. Some of them even switched vendors.

“Because the analysis tools the company was using couldn’t pick up on a small group of customers complaining, the social media team didn’t find out there was an issue with the plan for three days,” says Zhou, Ph.D., associate professor of information systems. “The technique they were using was too simple.”

Zhou recently co-authored the paper, Text Analytics to Support Sense-Making in Social Media: A Language–Action Perspective with Ahmed Abbasi, director of the Center for Business Analytics at the University of Virginia; Shasha Deng, assistant professor at Shanghai International Studies University; and Pengzhu Zhang, director of the Center for Management Information Systems at Shanghai Jiaotong University.

 The researchers propose an algorithm that helps to identify the order of conversations on social media, as well as the context of the messages. The algorithm also identifies influential users who generate the most discussions.

“Very often when you’re on any social media platform, users are constantly replying to a main post, but not every single reply is a direct reply to that main post,” says Zhou. “Sometimes a user may reply to a message that was posted five days ago, and very often these dialogues are intertwined and hard to untangle.”

Zhou says these sense-making challenges can cause companies to miss out on the early signs of dissatisfaction among consumers.

Making Sense of Complex Online Discussions

Zhou and researchers from the University of Virginia conducted three types of experiments in the telecommunications, healthcare, security, and manufacturing sectors. They also explored the pragmatics and the syntax of people’s conversations on traditional social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, in addition to niche social networking sites like PatientsLikeMe.

In the first experiment, language experts categorized conversations on social media based on the “speech act.” A speech act is a message that is assertive, commissive, expressive, declarative, or directive. The language experts then created a gold standard for evaluation that Zhou used to compare the effectiveness of her team’s algorithm.

The second experiment asked non-experts a series of questions to answer based on reconstructed messages. A simple question might be: “Identify all of the ideas in an entire discussion about a company product or service.” A more difficult question might be “Identify the discussant who seems the most frustrated about an issue.”

“To answer the question, the user must understand [both]the context of the conversation and the tone of the user,” says Zhou. “Knowing which issues caused the greatest confusion might be useful to companies when they introduce a new policy or service.”

In stage three, the researchers conducted a four-month field study of a telecommunications company. The company has a team of 23 members doing social media monitoring of the reactions to company products and services. One group used the algorithm created by Zhou’s team and the second group used the company’s methodology. Whenever there was a problem or user complaint, a ticket was issued with a dollar amount.

Based on the volume of tickets received and how fast the issues were resolved, Zhou’s team’s algorithm was able to save the company $13.5 million, besting the existing methodology’s $9.1 million in savings.

“With our algorithm, they became more efficient and accurate,” she says.

The algorithm also helped the company retain 7.2 million contracts, to the existing methodology’s 4.5 million contracts.

Zhou says the findings can help businesses to make sense of complex online discourse.

“Social media is changing business,” says Zhou. “It’s changing the entire market research area and customer support.”

WHO GAVE IT: The New York State Department of Health
WHO GOT IT: Edward Dubrovsky, PhD, professor of biology
HOW MUCH: $77,005
WHAT FOR: A grant to explore the role of mutations in a gene called ELAC2 in prostate cancer

Orthodox Christian Studies

WHO GAVE IT: The Carpenter Foundation combined with a Fordham Faculty Fellowship
WHO GOT IT: George Demacopoulos, PhD, the Fr. John Meyendorff & Patterson Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies
HOW MUCH: $30,000
WHAT FOR: A yearlong sabbatical for his project, “Colonizing Christianity: Prejudice and Sex in the Crusader East”

Art History

WHO GAVE IT: National Endowment for the Humanities
WHO GOT IT: Nina Rowe, PhD, associate professor of art history
HOW MUCH: $50,400
WHAT FOR: To complete a book on late medieval illuminated World Chronicle manuscripts

Arts and Sciences

WHO GAVE IT: Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities
WHO GOT IT: Eva Badowska, PhD, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and doctoral candidate in philosophy Joseph Vukov
HOW MUCH: $2,000
WHAT FOR: A grant to study how Fordham graduate students perceive their education in the context of the University’s mission

Graduate School of Education

WHO GAVE IT:  Marie Noelle Chynn, GSS ’60 and Kuo York Chynn, M.D
WHO GOT IT: Graduate School of Education
HOW MUCH: $104,000
WHAT FOR: Dr. J.T. Vincent Lou Memorial Endowed Fellowship

Irish Studies

WHO GAVE IT:  Mary Brautigam, TMC ’74, and Richard Brautigam, FCRH ’73
WHO GOT IT: Irish Studies
HOW MUCH: $6,000
WHAT FOR: Four Irish Cultural Events in the Spring of 2016

Engineers Without Borders

WHO GAVE IT:  Mary Jane McCartney, TMC’ 68 and George McCartney, FCRH ’68, LAW ’72
WHO GOT IT: Engineers Without Borders
HOW MUCH: $13,000 challenge grant
WHAT FOR: A challenge grant that raised $27,000 to support EWB’s trip to Uganda to build fish farms

Physics

WHO GAVE IT:  Christa and John Reddy, FCRH ’77
WHO GOT IT: Department of Physics and Engineering Physics
HOW MUCH: $10,000
WHAT FOR: Supplies for Experiments

Other major grant-winners last year included:

• Yilu Zhou, PhD, professor of information sciences, who received a National Science Foundation grant to research age recommendations on mobile apps;
• Winnie Kung, PhD, associate professor of social work, who received a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study the impact among Asian survivors and rescuers exposed to the World Trade Center attack; and
• Lise Schreier, PhD, associate professor of French, who won a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for her research on the 18th-century practice of “child-gifting.”

That’s just one example from Yilu Zhou’s research into the murky world of maturity ratings for applications and ads that run on mobile devices. A professor of information systems in the Gabelli School of Business, Zhou, PhD, is conducting research that could eventually help prevent youngsters from seeing unseemly or shocking things when they pick up a smartphone or tablet.

“Most researchers, when they look at mobile applications, are concerned with privacy issues. They look at what information the apps are collecting—your location information, your contacts, your photos,” she said. “Not many people look at maturity ratings yet. With more than 2 million apps on iTunes and Google Play alone, you can’t simply assume that maturity ratings provided by app platforms are all accurate. So we believe this is an understudied area that we really need to look at.”

Her research is supported by a $237,042 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace initiative. It’s the first Gabelli School research project funded by the NSF.

Like movies and video games designed for game systems, mobile device applications have ratings criteria for maturity. But unlike movies and video games, which are rated by independent agencies, apps have no standard, official ratings guidelines, Zhou said. They can vary from platform to platform, and it’s usually up to the developer to assess the maturity level of an app by referring to simple, vaguely worded guidelines that leave a lot of room for interpretation.

“It’s very hard for the developers themselves to judge” what constitutes graphic violence or other sensitive content, she said. (Apple’s ratings are considered closer to the mark because the company double-checks them, although the ratings can still be questionable, she said.)

The Entertainment Software Rating Board, a nonprofit regulatory body, only checks the maturity ratings of the most popular apps, Zhou said. Meanwhile, the advertisements that accompany the apps are distributed by ad networks that may not take the user’s age into account.

Focusing on a sample of 100,000 to 200,000 apps, Zhou is trying to zero in on those that are most likely to have wrong ratings for violence, sexual content, and language, and find out why.

With help from student workers, she’ll analyze user reviews, app descriptions, developer profiles, and other information, using various techniques—text mining, web crawling, machine learning—for digesting huge amounts of online data and spotting patterns.

Social scientists and legal scholars will be invited to join the project later, she said, since the role of policies and regulations in the selection of maturity ratings will also be analyzed.

The research will be anchored in data that’s considered more of a “gold standard,” like ratings for iOS apps (since they’re reviewed by Apple) and application reviews collected through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform, she said.

Also as part of the project, she and the students will create a simulation that demonstrates the types of advertisements that show up in applications that are rated as safe for young children.

Her work could eventually lead to models or other tools for identifying apps that are more likely to be mislabeled, or even a new online store for apps that are reliably rated as safe for kids, she said.

But for now, she said, “our major goal is to study this phenomenon [and]alert the general public” about it, she said.