2015 PRIMES Conference

Fifth Annual PRIMES Conference, May 16-17, 2015

Saturday, May 16

Mathematics

8:30 am Welcoming Remarks

• Prof. Tomasz Mrowka, Head of the MIT Mathematics Department
• Prof. Pavel Etingof, PRIMES Chief Research Advisor
• Dr. Slava Gerovitch, PRIMES Program Director

9:00 am Session 1

• Varun Jain, Circular planar graphs and electrical networks (mentor Carl Lian) ( slides )
• Alok Puranik, Limitations of semidefinite programming for certifying RIP (mentor Adrian Vladu) ( slides )
• Kavish Gandhi and Noah Golowich, Analysis of Boolean functions (mentor Yufei Zhao) ( slides )

10:25 am Session 2

• Dhruv Medarametla, Bounds on the norms of locally random matrices (mentor Aaron Potechin) ( slides )
• Karan Sarkar, On modular extensions to Nim (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova) ( slides )
• Caleb Ji, Robin Park, and Angela Song, Combinatorial games of no strategy (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova) ( slides )

11:45 am Session 3

• Mehtaab Sawhney, A study of bar and arc k-visibility graphs (mentor Jonathan Weed) ( slides )
• Richard Yi, Continuous model for two-lane traffic flow (mentor Prof. Gabriele LaNave, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) ( slides )
• Daniel Guo, An infection spreading model on trees (mentor Prof. Partha Dey, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) ( slides )

1:45 pm Session 4

• Girishvar Venkat, Signatures of the contravariant form on Specht modules for cyclotomic Hecke algebras (mentor Siddharth Venkatesh) ( slides )
• Samuel Rush, Signatures in representations of rational Cherednik algebras (mentor Gus Lonergan) ( slides )
• Luke Sciarappa, Algebras in representations of the symmetric group S _t , when t is transcendental (mentor Nate Harman) ( slides )

3:00 pm Session 5

• Brandon Epstein, The defect angle and the relation to the Laplacian matrix (mentor Prof. Martin Rocek, SUNY at Stony Brook) ( slides )
• Rachel Zhang, Statistics of intersections of curves on surfaces (mentor Prof. Moira Chas, SUNY at Stony Brook) ( slides )
• Arthur Azvolinsky, Explicit computations of the frozen boundaries of rhombus tilings (mentor Alisa Knizel) ( slides )

4:15 pm Session 6

• Meena Jagadeesan, The exchange graphs of maximal weakly separated collections (mentor Miriam Farber) ( slides )
• Meghal Gupta, Extremal functions of forbidden matrices (mentor Jesse Geneson) ( slides )
• David Amirault, Better bounds on the rate of non-witnesses of Lucas pseudoprimes (mentor David Corwin) ( slides )

5:25 pm Session 7

• Jacob Klegar, Tiling-harmonic functions (mentor Prof. Sergiy Merenkov, CCNY-CUNY) ( slides )
• Ahaan Rungta, Mathematically modeling the motion of cells in porous media (mentor Andrew Rzeznik) ( slides )
• Nick Diaco, A new coin weighing problem and concealing information (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova) ( slides )

Sunday, May 17

Computer Science and Computational Biology

8:30 am Welcoming Remarks

• Prof. Srini Devadas, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
• Dr. Slava Gerovitch, PRIMES Program Director

8:45 am Session 8: Medical Informatics

• Mingjie Chen, Medical informatics group: An introduction ( slides )
• Ashay Athalye, Machine learning characterization and prediction of intrinsically disordered protein interactions: A focus on BRCA 1 (mentor Dr. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )
• Arul Prasad, The significance of disordered residues in bacterial drug resistance and SNP interactions in relation to disease associations (mentor Dr. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )
• Kara Luo, Computer simulation of biosynthetic drug modifications to improve binding activity (mentor Dr. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )

10:00 am Session 9: Medical Informatics and Computational Biology

• Andrew Li, Exploring multi-conformational modeling and flexibility of molecular recognition features in improving drug docking (mentor Dr. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )
• Daniel Lu, Investigating drug synergy mechanisms of disordered protein-related diseases (mentor Dr. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )
• Laura Braverman and Betsy Pu, Genomic and epigenomic signatures of chromosomal domains (mentors Maxim Imakaev and Boryana Doyle) ( slides )

11:15 am Session 10: Computer Science

• Amy Chou and Justin Kaashoek, Automating generation of programming problems (mentor Rohit Singh) ( slides )
• Harshal Sheth and Aashish Welling, A garbage collected network stack with CSP threads (mentor Cody Cutler) ( slides )
• Gregory Barboy, Albert Gerovitch, and Andrew Gritsevskiy, Mobile health surveillance: The development of software tools for monitoring the spread of disease (mentor Dr. Natasha Markuzon, Draper Lab) ( slides )

1:30 pm Session 11: Computational Biology

• Michael Colavita, Clustering of pathogenic genes in human coregulatory network (mentor Soheil Feizi) ( slides )
• Allison Paul, The inference of directed acyclic graphs using spectral clustering (mentor Soheil Feizi) ( slides )
• Lalita Devadas, Modelling changes in gene expression using five histone modifications (mentor Angela Yen) ( slides )

2:45 pm Session 12: Computer Science

• Diana Ding and Cristian Gutu, SecretRoom: An anonymous chat client (mentor Albert Kwon) ( slides )
• Akiva Gordon and Krishna Suraj, Improving oblivious RAM protocol through novel eviction and access strategies (mentor Ling Ren) ( slides )
• Henry Liu and Ethan Zou, Time traveling in multicore processors (mentor Xiangyao Yu) ( slides )

4:15 pm Session 13: Mathematics

• Uma Roy, Infinity crystals for certain generalized quantum groups (mentor Seth Shelley-Abrahamson) ( slides )
• Niket Gowravaram, XYX Algebras (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova) ( slides )
• Eric Nie, Dual Schubert polynomials (mentor Pavel Galashin) ( slides )

5:25 pm Session 14: Mathematics

• Kenz Kallal, Matt Lipman, and Felix Wang, Equal compositions of rational functions (mentors Thao Thi Thu Do and Prof. Michael Zieve (University of Michigan)) ( slides )
• Arjun Khandelwal and Joshua Xiong, Linear algebra methods in combinatorics (mentor Chiheon Kim) ( slides )

Contact

With questions, contact PRIMES Program Director Slava Gerovitch at