2016 PRIMES Conference

Sixth Annual PRIMES Conference, May 21-22, 2016

Saturday, May 21

Mathematics

8:20 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

8:50 am Session 1

• Nicholas Guo, Rational hyperplane arrangements and counting independent sets of symmetric graphs (mentor Guangyi Yue) ( slides )
• Valerie Zhang, Computer-based representations and manipulations of paths in the plane (mentor Umut Varolgunes) ( slides )
• Aaron Yeiser, A robust spectral PDE solver on skinny triangles (mentor Dr. Alex Townsend) ( slides )

10:00 am Session 2

• Kai-Siang Ang, On the geometry of icosahedral viruses (mentor Prof. Laura Schaposnik, University of Illinois at Chicago) ( slides )
• Nikhil Marda, On point separation by arrangements of lines (mentor Borys Kadets) ( slides )
• Zachary Chroman, Rational embeddings of convex polyhedra (mentor Sheela Devadas, Stanford University) ( slides )

11:10 am Session 3

• Ria Das, Investigations of mixed reinforcement-memory models for random walks (mentor Andrew Rzeznik) ( slides )
• Benjamin Chen, Ezra Erives, Leon Fan, Michael Gerovitch, Jonathan Hsu, Neil Malur, Ashwin Padaki, Nastia Polina, Will Sun, Jacob Tan, and Andrew The (PRIMES STEP students), Who is guilty? (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova) ( slides )
• Benjamin Chen, Ezra Erives, Leon Fan, Michael Gerovitch, Jonathan Hsu, Neil Malur, Ashwin Padaki, Nastia Polina, Will Sun, Jacob Tan, and Andrew The (PRIMES STEP students), Alternator coins (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova) ( slides )

1:10 pm Session 4

• Felix Wang, Ramification of solutions of functional equations (mentor Prof. Michael Zieve, University of Michigan) ( slides )
• Nathan Smith, Square-primitive gaps (mentor Xiaoyu He, Harvard University) ( slides )
• Meena Jagadeesan and Karthik Karnik, The Outer Automorphism of S ₆ (mentor Akhil Mathew) ( slides )

2:25 pm Session 5

• Nina Anikeeva, Applications of ergodic theory to continued fractions on the Heisenberg group (mentor Prof. Jayadev Athreya, University of Washington)
• Rafael Saavedra, Discreet coin weighings and the Frobenius problem (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova) ( slides )
• Harish Vemuri, Tiling-harmonic conjugate functions (mentor Prof. Sergiy Merenkov, CCNY – CUNY) ( slides )

3:30 pm Session 6

• Nelson (Shuheng) Niu, Extensions of classic combinatorial games (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova) ( slides )
• Kevin Chang, Ordered Ramsey numbers of small graphs (mentor William Kuszmaul, Stanford University) ( slides )
• Louis Golowich and Richard Zhou, Maximum number of pairwise G-different permutations (mentor Chiheon Kim) ( slides )

4:40 pm Session 7

• Eric Nie and Alok Puranik, Invariants of knots (mentor Zhenkun Li) ( slides )
• Albert Yue, Knot diagram invariants and bounds for the number of Reidemeister moves needed for unknotting (mentor Piotr Suwara) ( slides )
• Alec Leng, Independence of the Miller-Rabin and Lucas probable prime tests (mentor David Corwin) ( slides )

6:15 pm Session 8

• Maya Sankar, The dimensions of partially directed nil-Temperley-Lieb algebras (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova) ( slides )
• Laura Pierson, Signatures of stable multiplicity spaces in symmetric group restrictions (mentor Siddharth Venkatesh) ( slides )
• Dhruv Rohatgi, A connection between vector bundles over smooth projective curves and representations of quivers (mentor Vishal Arul) ( slides )

7:20 pm Session 9

• Alec Sun, Wall crossing bijections and representations of rational Cherednik algebras (mentor Seth Shelley-Abrahamson) ( slides )
• Matt Lipman, Representations of Cherednik algebras (mentor Gus Lonergan) ( slides )
• Matthew Hase-Liu, Counting points on curves of the form $y^{m_{1}}=c_{1}x^{n_{1}}+c_{2}x^{n_{2}}y^{m_{2}}$ (mentor Nicholas Triantafillou) ( slides )

Sunday, May 22

Computer Science and Computational Biology

8:45 am Welcoming Remarks

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

9:00 am Session 10: Computer Science

• Harshal Sheth, Aashish Welling, and Nihar Sheth, Read-copy update in a garbage collected environment (mentor Cody Cutler) ( slides )
• Vivek Bhupatiraju, John Kuszmaul, and Vinjai Vale, Exploring proof of space with hard-to-pebble graphs (mentors Ling Ren and Albert Kwon) ( slides )
• Leo Alcock, Private publishing using Bitcoin (mentor Ling Ren) ( slides )

10:30 am Session 11: Computer Science

• Cristian Gutu, SeifPass: A secure password manager (mentor Albert Kwon) ( slides )
• Henry Liu, Justin Kaashoek, and Siye Zhu, Scalable logging algorithm for in-memory database systems (mentor Xiangyao Yu) ( slides )
• Yatharth Agarwal and Vishnu Murale, Moving in next door: network flooding as a side channel in cloud environments (mentors Dr. Jason Hennessey, Kyle Hogan, and Dr. Mayank Varia, Boston University) ( slides )

11:55 am Session 12: Computational and Physical Biology

• Prof. Leonid Mirny, Introductory remarks
• Laura Braverman, Protein determinants of chromosome domains (mentor Nezar Abdennur) ( slides )
• Betsy Pu, Chromatin states at boundary elements (mentor Nezar Abdennur) ( slides )
• Krishna Suraj, Emergent chromosome organization in interphase from loop extrusion (mentor Dr. Geoffrey Fudenberg) ( slides )

2:00 pm Session 13: Computational Neuroscience

• Prof. Ed Boyden, Introductory remarks
• Albert Gerovitch, Metrics for comparing 3D neuron segmentations in expansion microscopy connectomics (mentor Dr. Adam Marblestone) ( slides )
• Zachary Steinberg, Automatic segmentation of punctate 3D super-resolution microscopy data (mentor Daniel Goodwin) ( slides and video )

3:00 pm Session 14: Medical Informatics

• Prof. Gil Alterovitz, Introductory remarks
  Daniel Lu, Study of various synergistic drug mechanisms in disordered protein-related diseases (mentor Prof. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )
• Kara Luo, Computational modeling identifies biosynthetic modifications to improve drug inhibition against Klebsiella pneumoniae (mentor Prof. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )
• Arul Prasad, Targeting viral envelope proteins: an application to the Zika virus (mentor Prof. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )

4:15 pm Session 15: Medical Informatics

• Andrew Gritsevskiy and Adithya Vellal, Compression and integration of human genomic variants into smart EHR systems (mentor Prof. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )
• John Flahive, Providing clinical decision support to medical providers through interpretation of gene-drug interactions (mentor Prof. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )
• James Jusuf, Exploring the effects of CTCF binding site mutations on transcriptional regulation (mentor Dr. Mahmoud Ghandi, Broad Institute) ( slides )

Mathematics Reading Groups

Tuesday, December 6

6:00 pm, Room 2-146

• Jeffrey Chang and Evan Fang, Defining the Jones Polynomial in Terms of the Tutte Polynomial (mentor Hood Chatham) ( slides )
• Sam Cohen and Peter Rowley, Dynamic Systems and Discrete Curve Shortening Flow (mentor Ao Sun) ( slides )
• Aaron Kaufer, The Domino Tiling Problem (mentor Lucas Mason-Brown) ( slides )

Friday, December 9

5:30 pm, Room 2-146

• Sathwik Karnik, Irreducibility Tests in Fp[x] (mentor Hyun Jong Kim) ( slides )
• Dylan Pentland and Albert Zhang, Posets and Their Incidence Algebras (mentor Atticus Christensen) ( slides )

Contact

With questions, contact PRIMES Program Director Slava Gerovitch at