2014 PRIMES Conference

Fourth Annual PRIMES Conference, May 17-18, 2014

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

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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

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 )

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 )

12:00 pm Invited Lecture

• Stephen Wolfram, Making discoveries using computation

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)

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 )

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 )

Contact

With questions, contact PRIMES Program Director Slava Gerovitch at