cs.OH

Research computing centers around the world struggle with onboarding new users. Subject matter experts, researchers, and principal investigators are often overwhelmed by the complex infrastructure and software offerings designed to support diverse research domains at large academic and national institutions. As a result, users frequently fall into confusion and complexity to access these resources, despite the availability of documentation, tutorials, interactive trainings and other similar resources. Through this work, we present a framework designed to improve new-user onboarding experience. We also present an empirical validation through its application within the Research Infrastructure Services at Washington University in St. Louis.

Gait speed is a widely used indicator of functional health and mobility decline, yet in clinical practice it is commonly measured manually using a stopwatch, which limits scalability and measurement frequency. Privacy-preserving and maintenance-free sensing approaches can enable more routine and less burdensome assessments in real-world care settings. This paper presents the design, implementation, and real-world deployment of a fully passive, battery-free gait-speed monitoring system based on ultra-high-frequency (UHF) RFID. Compared with camera- and wearable-based approaches, the proposed system preserves patient privacy by avoiding video capture and biometric data, while eliminating battery maintenance. The system employs a dual-antenna configuration and an edge-based peak-detection algorithm to estimate gait speed in real time from received signal strength indicator (RSSI) streams. By leveraging antenna-beam symmetry and asymmetric signal processing, the method improves robustness to noise, plateau regions, and multiple local maxima. We evaluate the system during routine outpatient care across three clinical sites using 966 trials, achieving an 87.7% measurement success rate. Compared with concurrent stopwatch timing, the system attains a mean absolute error of 0.064 $m/s$, demonstrating reliable operation with accuracy suitable for clinical gait-speed assessment.

Representations play a central role in the study of both biological and artificial intelligence, as well as philosophy of mind. Across neuroscience, computer science, and philosophy, a recurring theme is that representations not only carry information but should be ``useful'' for or ``usable'' by an agent in some sense. Here, we review how the ``usefulness'' of representations has been conceptualized and how it figures into different conceptions of representation. We identify and explore four aspects of use and usability: representations generally carry \textit{information}; that information may or may not be \textit{useful} and it may or may not be encoded in a usable \textit{format}; and the representations may or may not be \textit{used downstream}. Building on these four aspects of information and use, we then organize existing perspectives on neural representations into three levels: Representations as Information (Level 1); Representations as Usable (Level 2); and Representations as Used (Level 3). Our account is meant to give readers an appreciation for the diversity of notions of ``neural representation,'' help them navigate the vast and multi-disciplinary literature on the topic, and help them clarify the appropriate notion of representation for their own investigations.