Boise State University has been selected as the lead regional institution for the Pacific Intermountain Network for Education in Semiconductors, part of the National Network for Microelectronics Education (NNME). 

Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (NSF TIP) in partnership with the U.S. Department of Commerce, the NNME initiative addresses the urgent national need for skilled workers in the semiconductor industry, which is experiencing unprecedented growth driven by federal investments through the CHIPS and Science Act, increasing demand for microelectronics across all sectors of the economy. As the lead regional institution, Boise State will coordinate educational programs, industry partnerships, and workforce development initiatives across the Pacific Intermountain region.

 

There is a substantial potential to use LLMs as a supplementary grading tools, particularly in high-resource languages, but they do not yet match the consistency or interpretative depth of human expert evaluators.

This study proposes PEG-Prompt, a Paul-Elder critical thinking-guided prompt framework for LLM-based automated course project report (CPR) assessment. It evaluates CPRs across six dimensions. Experiments on the PEG-CPR dataset show PEG-Prompt significantly improves score alignment with human raters, especially when combined with key content extraction and few-shot examples.

Today, the SETI Institute announced the second round of grants it will fund with its Support Technology, Research, Innovation, Development, and Education (STRIDE) program. The SETI Institute established the STRIDE fund to support SETI Institute researchers and EOC (Education, Outreach, and Communications) professionals in developing innovative research and education proposals. After funding the first round with $500K, this year’s program will award $1M to fund 10 projects. Advance understanding of the impact of stellar winds and magnetic fields on atmospheric loss in exoplanets and their implications for planetary habitability.

"This year’s STRIDE selections showcase ambitious, cutting-edge work across astrobiology, intelligence, planetary science, AI, and public engagement,” said Nathalie Cabrol, Director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute. “These projects push the boundaries of how we explore life, intelligence, habitability, and our place in the universe while fostering innovation that can shape future scientific breakthroughs."

A new study shows that researcher independence is not a simple PhD milestone but rather an ongoing, uneven process. Using a “river of experience” method with six researchers, it reveals independence as a lifelong journey shaped by personal agency, relationships and structural conditions, highlighting the need for more sustained and contextualized approaches to researcher development.

Researchers from the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NIE NTU, Singapore) and Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) - Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) research enterprise in Singapore - in collaboration with clinicians from the National University Hospital (NUH) and Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine), have developed a novel fluorescent nanosensor capable of rapidly detecting indole-3-propionic acid (IPA), an emerging biomarker linked to gut health and disease.