2017 PRIMES Conference

Seventh Annual PRIMES Conference, May 20-21, 2017

Saturday, May 20

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

• Franklyn Wang, Monodromy groups of indecomposable rational functions (mentor Prof. Michael Zieve, University of Michigan) ( slides )
• Michael Ren, On quasi-invariant polynomials (mentor Xiaomeng Xu) ( slides )
• Swapnil Garg, Hilbert series of the representation of Cherednik algebras (mentor Alexey Pakharev, Northeastern University) ( slides )
• Megan Joshi, Maximal self-intersection number of curves on surfaces (mentor Prof. Moira Chas, SUNY at Stony Brook) ( slides )

10:10 am Session 2

• Anlin Zhang, Modelling epidemics on networks with cliques (mentor Prof. Laura Schaposnik, University of Illinois at Chicago) ( slides )
• Kyle Gatesman, An algorithmic and computational approach to optimizing gerrymandering (mentor Prof. James Unwin, University of Illinois at Chicago) ( slides )
• Richard Xu, Graph theory and tessellations (mentor Prof. Sergiy Merenkov, CCNY – CUNY) ( slides )
• Kaiying Hou and Byung Yeon Rhee, Continuum modelling of traffic system with autonomous vehicles (mentor Andrew Rzeznik) ( slides )

11:25 am Session 3

• Zoe Levitt (PRIMES Circle), An introduction to group theory and braids (mentor Lara Booth) ( slides )
• Joshua Lee, Coin games and 5-way scales (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova) ( slides )
• Hyunjun Ahn, Benjamin Chen, Richard Chen, Ezra Erives, Jeremy Fleming, Michael Gerovitch, Tejas Gopalakrishna, Neil Malur, Nastia Polina, and Poonam Sahoo (PRIMES STEP students) We are the CHOMPians (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova) ( slides )
• Pratik Alladi, Neel Bhalla, Nathan Sheffield, Tiancheng Song, Will Sun, Andrew The, Alan Wang, Naor Wiesel, Kevin Zhang, Kevin Zhao (PRIMES STEP students) Impartial combinatorial games (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova) ( slides )

1:30 pm Session 4

• Ayush Agarwal, Maps between critical groups of group representations (mentor Christian Gaetz) ( slides )
• Michael Gintz, Classifying graph Lie algebras (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova) ( slides )
• Aaron Kaufer, Low-dimensional d-Algebras (mentor Lucas Mason-Brown) ( slides )
• Daniel Liu and Nathan Ramesh, Verma modules of the Virasoro algebra (mentor Siddharth Venkatesh) ( slides )

2:45 pm Session 5

• Richard Zhou, Pattern avoidance classes invariant under the modified Foata-Strehl action (mentor Yan Zhuang, Brandeis University) ( slides )
• Dylan Pentland, Coefficients of q-binomial coefficients modulo N (mentor Younhun Kim) ( slides )
• Jason Chen, Arithmetic properties of weighted Catalan numbers (mentor Dmitry Kubrak) ( slides )
• Mihir Singhal, Generalizations of Hall-Littlewood polynomials (mentor Christopher Ryba) ( slides )

4:00 pm Session 6

• William Zhang, Pattern avoidance on binary matrices (mentor Jesse Geneson) ( slides )
• Louis Golowich, Set-sequential trees (mentor Chiheon Kim) ( slides )
• Michael Ma, A generalization of Erdös-Szekeres to permutation pattern replacement (mentor William Kuszmaul, Stanford University) ( slides )
• Wendy Wu and Andy Xu, Second gonality of Erdös-Rényi random graphs (mentor Guangyi Yue) ( slides )

5:15 pm Session 7

• Sam Cohen and Aaditya Singh, Generalization of some properties of discrete curve shortening flow (mentor Ao Sun) ( slides )
• Grace Tian, Multi-crossing numbers for knots (mentor Jesse Freeman) ( slides )
• Gopal Goel, Limits of interlacing eigenvalues in the tridiagonal β-Hermite matrix model (mentor Andrew Ahn) ( slides )
• August Chen, Folding, jamming, and random walks (mentor Prof. Jayadev Athreya, University of Washington) ( slides )

6:30 pm Session 8

• Jeffery Yu, Jacobian groups of biconnected graphs (mentor Dr. Dhruv Ranganathan) ( slides )
• Kaan Dokmeci, On denesting radicals (mentor Yongyi Chen) ( slides )
• David Darrow, A near-optimal spectral method for simulating fluids in a cylinder (mentors Prof. Alex Townsend, Cornell University, and Prof. Grady Wright, Boise State University) ( slides )
• Peter Rowley, Random walks on a grid with a periodic boundary condition (mentor Boya Song) ( slides )

Sunday, May 22

Computer Science and Computational Biology

9:00 am Welcoming Remarks

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

9:15 am Session 9

• Vivek Bhupatiraju, Towards append-only authenticated dictionaries (mentor Alin Tomescu) ( slides )
• Robert Chen, John Kuszmaul, and Yiming Zheng, Keychat: Secure messaging via Bitcoin (mentor Alin Tomescu) ( slides )
• Sanjit Bhat and David Lu, Analyzing Tor’s anonymity with machine learning (mentor Albert Kwon) ( slides )
• Theodor Lukin Yelin, AnonReddit: A strongly anonymous public forum (mentor Albert Kwon) ( slides )

10:45 am Session 10

• Anjali Saini, Investigating the consensus algorithm (mentor Ling Ren) ( slides )
• Nihar Sheth, Investigating the scalability of Go’s garbage collector in multicore environments (mentor Cody Cutler) ( slides )
• Robert Cunningham, An analysis of a directory entry cache in a high level language (mentor Cody Cutler) ( slides )

11:40 am Session 11

• Zachary Steinberg, Development of a new method for multicolor image segmentation of neuronal tissue in 20x expanded hydrogels (mentor Daniel Goodwin) ( slides )
• Chao Cheng, 1.00 for life: Real-time analysis of computational thinking (mentor Prof. John Williams) ( slides )
• Mayank Mali, Caleb Trotz, and Justin Yu, Automated calibration and a real-time web-based control interface for fiber lasers (mentor Michael Plotkin, IPG Photonics) ( slides )

1:35 pm Session 12

• Harshal Sheth and Andrew Sun, Tarpan: A router that supports evolvability (mentor Dr. Raja Sambasivan, Boston University) ( slides )
• Henry Heffan and Shashvat Srivastava, Mo-nero, Mo-problems: Defending Monero against temporal analysis (mentors Ethan Hellman, Dr. Jason Hennessey, Kyle Hogan, and Dr. Mayank Varia, Boston University) ( slides )
• Vinjai Vale, Vision as inverse graphics: Machine learning techniques towards a program-based model for scene understanding (mentor Kevin Ellis) ( slides )

2:50 pm Session 13

• Dr. Gil Alterovitz, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Introductory remarks
• Adithya Vellal, Enrichment and analysis of sequence motifs in genomic variant calls (mentor Dr. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )
• Andrew Gritsevskiy, Structural gene expression (mentor Dr. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )
• Eric You, Analyzing compression: Using gene sets to find patterns in genomic compression (mentor Dr. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )

3:55 pm Session 14

• Makiah Bennett and Jack Flahive, Precision cancer medicine web application (mentor Dr. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )
• James Jusuf, A versatile algorithm for finding patterns in large cancer cell line data sets (mentor Dr. Mahmoud Ghandi, Broad Institute) ( slides )
• Kevin Hu, An analysis of MDM4 alternative splicing and effects across cancer cell lines (mentor Dr. Mahmoud Ghandi, Broad Institute) ( slides )
• Kalyan Palepu and Andrew Zhang, Compression of genomic variants using convolutional autoencoders (mentor Dr. Gil Alterovitz) ( slides )

Mathematics Reading Groups

Friday, December 15

5:30 pm

• Ashley Chen and Allen Wang, Hyperplane arrangements: Intersection posets, characteristic polynomials, and regions (mentor Zhulin Li) ( slides )
• Nathaniel Liberman and Nhat Pham, Topics in enumerative combinatorics (mentor Svetlana Makarova) ( slides )
• Nithin Kavi and Anmol Sakarda, Topics in knot theory (mentor Zhenkun Li) ( slides )
• Aurash Vatan and Andrew Yao, Elliptic curves and Mordell's theorem (mentor Andrew Senger) ( slides )
• Jeremy Chen and Yuxuan (Tom) Zhang, Algebraic number theory and representation theory (mentor Robin Elliott) ( slides )

Contact

With questions, contact PRIMES Program Director Slava Gerovitch at