Primes Logo 2014 PRIMES Conference

Fourth Annual PRIMES Conference, May 17-18, 2014

Room 4-163 , MIT

Open to the public

Conference abstracts booklet

Download conference poster (24x36) or flyer (8x11)

See also the materials of 2011 , 2012 , and 2013 PRIMES conferences

PRIMES conference flyfer

Saturday, May 17

Mathematics

8:30 am Welcoming Remarks

  • Prof. Michael Sipser, Acting Dean of the MIT School of Science, Head of the MIT Mathematics Department
  • Prof. Pavel Etingof, PRIMES Chief Research Advisor
  • Dr. Slava Gerovitch, PRIMES Program Director
PRIMES-USA student Jessica Li
PRIMES-USA student Jessica Li

9:00 am Session 1

  • Kavish Gandhi, Geodesics in the hypercube (mentor Yufei Zhao) ( slides )
  • >Noah Golowich, Removing cycles from dense digraphs (mentor Laszlo Lovasz) ( slides )
  • Eric Nie and Alok Puranik, Cellular automata on a hexagonal grid (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova) ( slides )
PRIMES-USA student Yilun Du
PRIMES-USA student Yilun Du

10:20 am Session 2

  • Arjun Khandelwal, Compact dot representations in permutation avoidance (mentor Rik Sengupta) ( slides )
  • Joseph Zurier, Generalizations of the joints problem (mentor Ben Yang) ( slides )
PRIMES-USA student Eric Neyman
PRIMES-USA student Eric Neyman

11:05 pm Session 3: PRIMES-IGL

  • Jessica Li, On the geometry and mathematical modelling of snowflakes and viruses (mentor Prof. Laura Schaposnik, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) ( slides )
  • Yilun Du, Tiling harmonic functions (mentor Prof. Sergiy Merenkov, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) ( slides )
PRIMES-USA students Andrew He, Suzy Lou, and Max Murin
PRIMES-USA students Andrew He, Suzy Lou, and Max Murin

12:00 pm Session 4: PRIMES-USA

  • Eric Neyman, Cylindric Young tableaux and their properties (mentor Darij Grinberg) ( slides )
  • Sara Kim, Connected matchings in graphs of independence number 2 (mentor Dr. Peter Csikvari)
  • Andrew He, Suzy Lou, and Max Murin, On the existence of srg(99, 14, 1, 2) (mentor Dr. Peter Csikvari) ( slides )
PRIMES-USA student Peter Tian
PRIMES-USA student Peter Tian

2:15 pm Session 5: PRIMES-USA

  • Shyam Narayanan, Improving the accuracy of primality tests by enhancing the Miller-Rabin theorem (mentor David Corwin) ( slides )
  • Kyle Gettig, Linear extensions of directed acyclic graphs (mentor Benjamin Iriarte) ( slides )
  • Brice Huang, G-parking functions and monotone monomial ideals (mentor Wuttisak Trongsiriwat) ( slides )
PRIMES reading group students Cameron Derwin and Margalit 
            Glasgow
PRIMES reading group students Cameron Derwin and Margalit Glasgow

3:30 pm Session 6: PRIMES-USA

  • Alexandria Yu, Classification of unital 7-dimensional commutative algebras (mentor Sherry Gong) ( slides )
  • Peter Tian, On the extremal functions of multi-dimensional forbidden matrices (mentor Jesse Geneson) ( slides )
  • Shashwat Kishore, Decomposition of tensor products of Verma modules (mentor Gus Lonergan) ( slides )
PRIMES reading group students Rohil 
            Prasad, Isaac Xia, and William Kuszmaul. Kuszmaul is 
            explaining the concept of trefoil, using his shoelaces.
PRIMES reading group students Rohil Prasad, Isaac Xia, and William Kuszmaul. Kuszmaul is explaining the concept of trefoil, using his shoelaces.

4:45 pm Session 7: Reading groups

  • Cameron Derwin and Margalit Glasgow, The probabilistic method (mentor Chiheon Kim) ( slides )
  • Rohil Prasad, William Kuszmaul, and Isaac Xia, Proving the trefoil is knotted (mentor Umut Varolgunes) ( slides )
  • Ravi Jagadeesan and Luke Sciarappa, Simplicial homology (mentor Akhil Mathew) ( slides )
PRIMES reading group students Ravi Jagadeesan and Luke Sciarappa
PRIMES reading group students Ravi Jagadeesan and Luke Sciarappa

Sunday, May 18

Computer Science

Physical and Computational Biology

8:45 am Welcoming Remarks

  • Prof. Srini Devadas, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
  • Dr. Slava Gerovitch, PRIMES Program Director
PRIMES students Nicolaas Kaashoek and 
            William Wu
PRIMES students Nicolaas Kaashoek and William Wu

9:00 am Session 8

  • Nicolaas Kaashoek and William Wu, How to teach a class to grade itself (mentors Christos Tzamos and Matt Weinberg) ( slides )
  • Amy Chou and Justin Kaashoek, Automatically generating puzzle problems of different complexity levels (mentor Rishabh Singh) ( slides )
  • Istvan Chung and Oron Propp, Inferring the structure of probabilistic graphical models for efficient natural language understanding (mentor Dr. Tom Howard) ( slides )
Prof. Srini Devadas and PRIMES students Amy Chou and Justin Kaashoek
Prof. Srini Devadas and PRIMES students Amy Chou and Justin Kaashoek

10:40 am Session 9

  • Nathan Wolfe and Ethan Zou, Protecting private data in the cloud: A path oblivious RAM protocol (mentors Ling Ren and Xiangyao Yu) ( slides )
  • Lalita Devadas, Modelling changes in gene expression in neurodegeneration in mice (mentor Angela Yen) ( slides )
  • Michael Colavita, Network motifs of pathogenic genes in human regulatory network (mentor Soheil Feizi) ( slides )
Dr. Stephen Wolfram is 
            investigation the distribution of color in cats
Dr. Stephen Wolfram is investigation the distribution of color in cats

12:00 pm Invited Lecture

  • Stephen Wolfram, Making discoveries using computation
PRIMES students Michael Colavita, 
            Ethan Zou, Dr. Stephen Wolfram, William Wu, John Zhang, and Arul 
            Prasad
Left to right: PRIMES students Michael Colavita, Ethan Zou, Dr. Stephen Wolfram, William Wu, John Zhang, and Arul Prasad

2:15 pm Session 10: Medical Informatics

  • Dr. Gil Alterovitz, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Introductory remarks ( slides )
  • Yishen (Tom) Chen, SMART Genomics API (mentor Dr. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )
  • Xi (Steve) Chen, Genomics development library for Android (mentor Dr. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )
  • John Zhang, Integrating genomic, clinical, and patient questionnaire information for breast cancer diagnosis and treatment (mentor Dr. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )
  • Andrew Li and Arul Prasad, Exploration of disordered proteins related to drug resistance in Hepatitis B virus and lung cancer (mentor Dr. Gil Alterovitz)
PRIMES student Yishen (Tom) Chen
PRIMES student Yishen (Tom) Chen

4:00 pm Session 11: Physical and Computational Biology

  • Prof. Leonid Mirny, Program in Health Sciences and Technology and Physics Department, Introductory remarks
  • Andrew Luo, The impact of protein aggregates on the sub-diffusion of a DNA locus (mentors Geoffrey Fudenberg and Maxim Imakaev) ( slides )
  • Carolyn Lu, Loop extruding enzymes in interphase: Dynamic folding of chromatin domains (mentors Geoffrey Fudenberg and Maxim Imakaev) ( slides )
PRIMES student Carolyn Lu
PRIMES student Carolyn Lu

5:00 pm Session 12: Mathematics

  • Yonah Borns-Weil and Junho Won, Discrete and continuous dynamical systems: Applications and examples (mentor Dr. Aaron Welters) ( slides )
  • Joshua Xiong, On the winning positions in generalizations of Nim (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova) ( slides )
  • Niket Gowravaram and Uma Roy, A diagrammatic approach to the K(π, 1) conjecture (mentor Alisa Knizel) ( slides )
PRIMES students and mentors Junho Won, mentor Alisa Knizel, Niket Gowravaram, Joshua Xiong, Prof. Pavel Etingof, head mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova, Yonah Borns-Weil, and Uma Roy
PRIMES students and mentors (left to right): Junho Won, mentor Alisa Knizel, Niket Gowravaram, Joshua Xiong, Prof. Pavel Etingof, head mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova, Yonah Borns-Weil, and Uma Roy

Contact

With questions, contact PRIMES Program Director Slava Gerovitch at