“The increasing capability and availability of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools have brought new challenges in our classrooms, especially for computing courses,” says astrophysicist Yao-Yuan Mao. “New pedagogical approaches are clearly needed, and while general guidance does exist, specific implementation depends on our understanding of how Gen Z students use AI tools in class.”

Mao, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Utah, was recently selected as a Martha Bradly Evans Teaching Fellow. The fellowship will allow them to develop these new approaches in two phases, the first involving a "field study" in the Computational Laboratory for Classical Mechanics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

In the lab, explains Mao, their team will observe how students utilize AI tools for computational tasks. “An undergraduate researcher will document these interactions as a bystander, without participating in student evaluation at all.”

In the second phase, Mao further explains, their team will develop pedagogical guidelines, recommendations and materials based on the field study results, specifically tailoring them for physics computing instructors. “The final product will be a well-structured document containing the field study findings, the detailed pedagogical guidelines and recommendations and a collection of adaptable example course materials.”

Using AI 'responsibly and productively'

Mao’s colleague Jordan Gerton sees the work Mao is proposing as developing a deeper understanding of how AI is being used by students and instructors, “to help students learn to use AI responsibly and productively."

Another colleague Kyle Dawson agrees: "This award recognizes the foresight that Professor Mao has beyond the material for those classes and into how advances in computation such as AI impact our overall educational mission."

Outside of the classroom, Mao’s research work advances the discovery and understanding of low-mass galaxies, Mao’s use of the powerful Rubin Observatory allows them to search for these faint objects, likely increasing the number of known low-mass galaxies by a hundred-fold over in the coming years.

Ben Bromley, also a professor in the department of Physics and Astronomy, explains how these galaxies are “cosmic gems” as they are composed of considerably more dark matter per star than other galaxies more familiar to us like our own, much larger, Milky Way. “That makes each elusive low-mass galaxy that Yao discovers a great laboratory for exploring dark matter’s properties,” says Bromley.

'No-risk, high-reward effort'

Bromley further explains his colleague’s intriguing finds that they serve as key building blocks of bigger galaxies. “Yao's low-mass galaxies together will help transform our understanding of galaxy formation and the emergence of the cosmic web of structure that extends across the universe.” Despite their small size, he says, “Yao’s galaxies can track where mass is, where it’s going and how it is organizing into larger and larger structures. In this way they are like weather balloons, giving key bits of information that help us paint the big picture.”

That Mao is equally adept as a researcher as they are as an instructor and mentor in the classroom, for which they are being recognized by the Bradley Fellowship, perhaps provides the perfect combination for exceptional undergraduate education and learning. This project also fits in nicely with the ongoing discussion of AI in Education hosted by the College’s Center for Science and Mathematics Education.

Concludes Bromley, “The project envisioned by Yao for the [Martha Bradley Evans Center for] Teaching Excellence award, is an inspired no-risk, high-reward effort that will help guide both students and us faculty through uncertain straits ahead.”

By David Pace

For a full list of this year’s 2024-25 Fellows awarded by the Martha Bradley Evans Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Utah, click here.

Vivian O’Dell, Upgrade Project Director at the IceCube

“It’s all about the upgrade,” said Vivian O’Dell, Upgrade Project Director at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. O’Dell was one of the featured speakers in the opening salvo of the IceCube Neutrino Collaboration’s semi-annual meeting, October 6-10, this year convened at the University of Utah.

The Collaboration is an international group of scientists using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a one-cubic-kilometer detector located in Antarctica. The site is designed to detect high-energy neutrinos from cosmic sources and to study dark matter, cosmic rays and neutrino properties.

Since its construction, which started in 2004, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has revolutionized the field of astroparticle physics, by enabling us to observe the Universe in fundamentally new ways, using high-energy neutrinos as cosmic messengers. Most recently, in 2023,  the IceCube Neutrino Observatory produced the first view of our home galaxy using high-energy neutrinos and measured neutrino properties through a phenomenon known as neutrino oscillations.

Made up of 450 people from 58 institutions in 14 countries, the Collaboration is also positioned to explore fundamental physics, and the upgrade O’Dell—based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison—was referring to is an on-going, multi-year improvement of the massive observatory. Beginning this week, Dennis Soldin from the U will take on the role of the IceCube Analysis Coordinator, coordinating the scientific data analysis efforts across all member institutions.

Adding Strings

Most recently the upgrade includes adding seven additional vertical “strings” or cables to the already existing 86. Light sensors called digital optical modules frozen into the Antarctic ice form the giant detector that uses the ice as its natural medium to detect the ghostly, electrically neutral, subatomic particle with a mass close to zero.

Once deployed, the strings are connected to the main computing facility via a surface junction box. The box is the point where the buried strings, once commissioned, link with the detector’s central data acquisition system. From there data will be analyzed by IceCube scientists and high-level data from neutrino bursts will be shared with researchers across the globe in real or close-to-real time.

Pearl Sandick, Interim Dean, College of Science

At the meeting’s opening session Monday morning at the new L. S. Skaggs Applied Science Building, O’Dell and the Detector Operations Manager Matt Kauer walked the assembled group of scientists through enhancements at the site largely focused on upgrade support and integration, including surface array improvements. IceCube Spokesperson Erin O’Sullivan reviewed the scientific program of the observatory.

Collected data on neutrinos and interactions of cosmic rays with the Earth’s atmosphere are critical to the work of particle physicists around the world including at the U where Carsten Rott, Jack W. Keuffel Memorial Chair professor and chair of the Department of Physics & Astronomy, correlates observations of high-energy neutrinos with other cosmic messengers. “To establish any correlation, it’s essential that we can accurately point back to where neutrinos originated on the sky,” said Rott in a 2023 profile about the potential of the ongoing upgrade. 

“We hope that the IceCube upgrade will be just the first step towards a much larger facility for multi-messenger science at the South Pole that combines optical and radio neutrino detection with a cosmic ray air shower array.”

Utah’s Particle Detection Legacy

Rott was on hand Monday to welcome the Collaboration to the U, as was Senior Dean and Vice Provost of the Colleges of Liberal Arts & Sciences Peter Trapa who reviewed the history of astroparticle physics at the U. It began in 1959 with the arrival of Jack Koeffel whose “early detection experiments over 60 years ago,” said Trapa, “were designed to isolate the neutrino event from the other events” using what we now consider to be primitive detection systems.

In other opening remarks, particle physicist and Interim Dean of the College of Science Pearl Sandick detailed the work of the Utah Neutrino Detector with origins in a nearby 600-meter-deep Park City mine. The mine's depth provided the necessary shielding from cosmic rays, allowing scientists to focus on the rare, highly penetrating neutrino particles. 

Carsten Rott, Chair, Dept. of Physics & Astronomy

Dennis Soldin, IceCube Analysis Coordinator

Known as the Spiro Tunnel, the site was intended to be a laboratory, reported the Park Record newspaper at the time, to "help probe the mysteries of outer space" by detecting neutrinos from the far reaches of the universe and Earth's atmosphere. The researchers published a paper in 1969 describing the observation of two "neutrino events" in their detector. 

Despite erroneous conclusions in the paper, the experiment was considered a pioneering effort in the field of particle physics, and the U’s Cosmic Ray group, founded by Keuffel, was established. The group would ultimately include George Cassiday, Eugene Loh and Haven Bergeson. Their research in high-energy physics continued, and later projects, such as the Fly's Eye experiment in the 1980s, were built upon this early work. 

More recently, Sandick reminded the group, the highest energy cosmic ray ever was detected in Utah’s Telescope Array in 1991 with the second highest energy cosmic ray detected in 2021 at the same site in the high desert of Millard County, Utah, near the town of Delta.

Public Event

With the Beehive State’s illustrious history of investigating astroparticle physics, the University of Utah is a fitting location for the IceCube Neutrino Collaboration’s meeting. And while most of the proceedings are closed to members, the U.S. premiere of “Messengers” a documentary film featuring two "winter overs" who spent an entire year in isolation at the geographic South Pole running the IceCube Neutrino Telescope experiment is open to the public on Wednesday, October 8 at the Utah Museum of Fine Art on the U campus. 

The free public screening is part of the IceCube Neutrino Telescope Collaboration Meeting hosted by the Department of Physics & Astronomy and co-organized, with Rott and Soldin, 

Meanwhile, the fascinating and complex upgrades to the Observatory reported on by Vivian O’Dell and others continue in Antarctica. Annually, an estimated 100,000 neutrinos will now be detected and their properties measured with what’s being called “unprecedented precision.” 

by David Pace

Read the full story by Lisa Potter in @ TheU