The MC2 Lab would like to give a huge congratulations to our RA Amber for successfully presenting her honors research poster at the showcase this week. Amber has been with the lab for three semesters and has been working hard on this project for the last year. Amber was also recently accepted to a doctoral program in Occupational Therapy here at Rutgers.
Her honors project is looking at the effect of pre-encoding stress on LTM in students. Amber has implemented a Cold Pressor Task (CPT) to induce stress prior to learning in order to examine the effects on their memory for the studied material during a recognition task a day later. While her poster presents predicted results, she is still hard at work collecting data for the finished paper. Stay tuned!
In addition, two former members of the MC2 Lab were presenting at the showcase. Noor El-Hawwat, was there to present her honors research project on the development of the OctoLink app, an application to help combat rising rates of loneliness and smartphone addiction in a post-COVID-19 world. The purpose of the app is to promote healthier perceptions of online interactions and reward the user for socialization. Noor will be graduating this semester and has been accepted to her dream school and will be pursuing a Masters in Computer Science at Cornell Tech University in the fall. Congratulations Noor!
Former lab member, Bassim Ibrahim, also presented his honors research project examining the ethics of Artificial Intelligence. AI is rapidly developing and discussions around ethical use and development of AI have already begun to surface. Bassim targets the ethics of AI rights in the not so distant future. Should artificially intelligent beings and programs be granted rights under the law, similarly to large corporations? And does or can AI develop consciousness? Congratulations Basssim, very interesting work!
