Fourteenth Annual Fall-Term PRIMES Conference, October 12-13, 2024

Saturday, October 12

Mathematics

9:00 am: Welcoming Remarks

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

9:15-10:20 am: Session 1

• Jerry Zhang, Quantum-Sound Property Tests for Linear and Affine Linear Functions (mentor David Cui) (slides)
• Rohan Dhillon, Patterns in the Stable SL(N) Homologies of Torus Knots (mentor Dr. Joshua Wang, Princeton/IAS) (slides)
• Qiao (Tiger) Zhang, On Variants of Graph Neural Networks with Stronger Expressive Power (mentor Dr. Ziang Chen) (slides)
• Lexing (Alex) Huang, Agniv Sarkar, and Kartik Ramachandrula, Neural Network Pipeline for Systems Biology: Solving the Notch Signaling Pathway (mentor Prof. Lu Lu, Yale) (slides)

10:40-11:40 am: Session 2

• Eric Wang, Conformal Type Problem via Discrete Analysis (mentor Prof. Sergiy Merenkov, CCNY) (slides)
• Henry Jiang, Electric Potential of a Torus Knot Along the Axis (mentor Dr. Max Lipton) (slides)
• Skyler Mao, Investigating the Collapse and Convergence of Particle-Wave Statistics in Pilot-Wave Hydrodynamics (mentor David Darrow) (slides)
• Michael Lu, Special Bounds for Theta Sums (mentor Dr. Tariq Osman, Brandeis University) (slides)

12:00-1:00 pm: Session 3

• Owen Zhang, Tetrahedron-Intersecting Families of 3-Uniform Hypergraphs (mentor Nitya Mani) (slides)
• Katelyn Gan, The Ungar Games Played on Various Lattices (mentor Yunseo Choi, Harvard University) (slides)
• Aarush Vailaya, Chromatic Symmetric Function of Cycle Chains (mentor Dr. Foster Tom) (slides)
• Andrew Brahms, Alan Duan, and Jacob Greene, Saturation of 0-1 Matrices (mentor Dr. Jesse Geneson, SJSU) (slides)

2:00-3:05 pm: Session 4 (in parallel with Computer Science sessions in the afternoon)

• Jason Mao, Differentiating Point Cloud Distributions Using Persistence Homology (mentor Jonathan Rodriguez Figueroa) (slides)
• Hannah Fox, Monochromatic Components with Many Edges in Random Graphs (mentor Dr. Sammy Luo) (slides)
• Neil Krishnan, On the Connectivity of Friends-and-Strangers Graphs (mentor Rupert Li) (slides)
• Christopher Bao, Joshua Wang and William Zhao, Minimum and Approximate Minimum k-Cuts in Hypergraphs (mentor Yuchong Pan) (slides)

3:25-4:25 pm: Session 5

• Anay Aggarwal, Ekan Kaur, and Susie Lu, Bringing Reproducibility to Cancer Research: A Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Models for Thyroid Cancer Recurrence Prediction (mentor Dr. Marly Gotti, Apple) (slides)
• Arjun Agarwal, Rachel Chen, and Rohan Garg, Automorphically Equivalent Elements in Finite Abelian Groups (mentors Prof. Jim Coykendall and Jared Kettinger, Clemson University) (slides)
• Eddy Li, Advaith Mopuri, and Charles Zhang, A Goldbach Theorem for Group Semidomains (mentor Dr. Harold Polo, University of California, Irvine) (slides)

4:45-5:45 pm: Session 6

• Jonathan Du, Bryan Li, and Nick Zhang, On the Internal Sum of Positive Monoids (mentor Dr. Felix Gotti) (slides)
• Evin Liang, Alexander Wang, and Lerchen Zhong, Maximal Common Divisors of Puiseux Monoids (mentor Dr. Felix Gotti) (slides)
• Jiya Dani, Leo Hong, and Shimon Schlessinger, Finitary Power Monoids: Atomicity, Divisibility, and Beyond (mentors Dr. Felix Gotti and Benjamin Li) (slides)

Computer Science and Computational Biology (in parallel with Math sessions in the afternoon)

1:30 pm: Welcoming Remarks

• Dr. Slava Gerovitch, PRIMES Program Director
• Prof. Srini Devadas, PRIMES Computer Science Section Coordinator

1:35-2:45 pm: Session 7

• Eric Chen and Rohith Raghavan, Comparing Methods of Opportunistic Risk-Limiting Audits (mentor Mayuri Sridhar) (slides)
• Adam Ge and Aadya Goel, Unlearning Mechanisms in Graph Models for Document Classification (mentor Mayuri Sridhar) (slides)
• Coleman DuPlessie, Sparse Autoencoders for Interpretability in Reinforcement Learning Models (mentor Andrew Gritsevskiy, University of Wisconsin–Madison) (slides)
• Sophia Yan, A Multi-Omic Approach to Uncover Enhancer-Gene Interactions in the Human Brain (mentor Dr. Nicole Rockweiler, Broad Institute) (slides)

3:05-4:05 pm: Session 8

• Michael Han and Ashley Yu, Introducing Multi-Stage Multiplicative-Weights Update and An Empirical Evaluation of Convergence to Correlated Equilibria (mentor Noah Golowich) (slides)
• Eric Archerman and Celine Zhang, Using Ideas from Hardware to Accelerate Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machines (mentor Simon Langowski) (slides)
• Adrita Samanta and Govind Velamoor, Adaptive Timeout Strategies for Microservice Applications (mentors Prof. Raja Sambasivan, Max Liu, and Zhaoqi Zhang, Tufts University) (slides)

4:25-5:15 pm: Session 9

• Shreyas Ekanathan, Adaptive Order Radau Methods (mentor Dr. Christopher Rackauckas) (slides)
• Albert Lu, Alcatraz: Secure Remote Computation via Sequestered Encryption in Hardware Security Module (mentors Jules Drean and Sacha Servan-Schreiber) (slides)
• Maya Kalai and Ella Kim, Inner-Product Predicate Encryption from Weaker Assumptions (mentor Sacha Servan-Schreiber) (slides)

5:35-6:35 pm: Session 10

• Raj Saha, Figurative Language as a Mobilizer to Act: A Multi-method Approach (mentors Prof. Ann Kronrod, UMass Lowell, and Prof. Ivan Gordeliy, EDHEC Business School) (slides)
• Stephanie Wan, Transparent Authorship Verification with Machine Learning Models (mentor Dr. Gil Alterovitz, Harvard Medical School) (slides)
• Siddharth Nirgudkar, Contextualized Transfer Learning: Transforming Heterogeneity into Predictive Power with Generative Latent Structures in Resource-Limited Settings (mentor Dr. Ben Lengerich) (slides)
• Rajarshi Mandal, Epigenetic Clocks and Aging Biomarkers: A Multi-Omics Exploration of DNA Methylation, SURF1 Mutation, and Regenerative Therapies (mentor Dr. Gil Alterovitz, Harvard Medical School)

Sunday, October 13

Mathematics

Room 4-370 , MIT

9:00-9:45 am: Session 11

• Marina Lin, CAACS: A Carbon-Aware Ant Colony System (mentor Prof. Laura Schaposnik, University of Illinois at Chicago) (slides)
• Weian (Andrew) Xie, Worst-Case Error Bounds on Online Learning of Smooth Functions (mentor Dr. Jesse Geneson, SJSU) (slides)
• Aidan Gao, Spatial Clustering and Classification with Graph Neural Networks (mentor Junhong Lin) (slides)

10:05-11:05 am: Session 12

• Rohan Das, New Multiplicative Structures on Frobenius Algebras (mentors Prof. Julia Plavnik, Indiana University Bloomington, and Dr. Pablo Ocal, UCLA) (slides)
• Enmei (Emma) Yang, Examples of the Reflective Algebra for Various Hopf Algebras (mentors Prof. Julia Plavnik and Dr. Héctor Peña Pollastri, Indiana University Bloomington) (slides)
• Sargam Mondal, Exact Factorizations of G-crossed Braided Fusion Categories (mentors Prof. Julia Plavnik, Indiana University Bloomington, and Prof. Monique Müller, Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei, Brazil) (slides)
• Jiwu Jang, Vertex Functions of Type D Nakajima Quiver Varieties (mentor Dr. Hunter Dinkins) (slides)

11:25 am - 12:30 pm: Session 13

• Hwisoo (Harry) Kim, Subregular Affine Kazhdan-Lusztig Polynomials in Type D (mentor Kenta Suzuki) (slides)
• Sophia Liao, Transitivity of Bender–Knuth Moves on Standard and Semistandard Young Tableaux (Prof. Leonid Rybnikov, Université de Montréal) (slides)
• Eric Yee, Hilbert Series of Quasi-Invariant Polynomials in Characteristics p ≤ n (mentor Frank Wang) (slides)
• Sidarth Erat and Shihan Kanungo, Mixed Tensor Products for Lie Superalgebras (mentor Arun Kannan) (slides)

Fourteenth Annual Spring-Term PRIMES Conference, May 19, 2024

Sunday, May 19

Room 2-190, MIT

May conference abstracts booklet

9:15 am: Welcoming Remarks

• Dr. Slava Gerovitch, PRIMES Program Director

9:20-10:10 am: Session 1. Mathematics, Computational Biology, and Computer Science

• Sophia Hou, Henrick Rabinovitz, and Derek Zhao, “Gabriel’s Theorem and the Subspaces Problem” (mentor Serina Hu) (slides)
• Elizaveta Rybnikova, “Loop Extrusion Dynamics at Chromatin Fountains” (mentor Dr. Aleksandra Galitsyna) (slides)
• Alan Song, “Characterizing Retry Policies for Microservice Applications” (mentor Yueying (Lisa) Li) (slides)

10:20-11:05 am: Session 2. Computer Science

• Sophia Lichterfeld, “An Analysis of the 2024 Web Monetization Landscape” (mentor Kyle Hogan) (slides)
• Boyan Litchev, “Improved Performance for Private Information Retrieval” (mentor Simon Langowski) (slides)
• Dongchen Zou, “Intersection Attack in a Non-uniform Setting” (mentor Simon Langowski) (slides)

11:20 am - 12:00 pm: Session 3. PRIMES STEP

• Aria Chen, Tyler Cummins, Rishi De Francesco, Jate Greene, Alexander Meng, Tanish Parida, Anirudh Pulugurtha, Anand Swaroop, and Samuel Tsui (PRIMES STEP Junior group), “Card Tricks and Information” (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova) (slides)
• Nikhil Byrapuram, Adam Ge, Selena Ge, Sylvia Lee, Rajarshi Mandal, Gordon Redwine, Soham Samanta, Daniel Wu, Danyang Xu, and Ray Zhao (PRIMES STEP Senior group), “Fibonacci Party Tricks” (mentor Dr. Tanya Khovanova) (slides)

12:30-1:40 pm: Session 4. PRIMES Circle

• Marisa Gaetz & Mary Stelow, PRIMES Circle coordinators, Welcoming remarks
• Ronni Chang & Paige Zhu, “Introduction to Computation Theory” (mentor Zoe Xi) (slides)
• Mohamed Fofana Jr. & Tanesha Nixel, “Game Theory” (mentor Sam Packman) (slides)
• Joshua Pité & Yiying Zhong, “Overview of the RSA Cryptosystem” (mentor Honglin Zhu) (slides)
• Ayla Lin, Kelsey Liu, & Vedika Soneji, “Intersecting Parallel Lines: Projective Geometry and its Applications” (mentor Luis Modes) (slides)

1:55-2:55 pm: Session 5. PRIMES Circle

• Nina Lee & Yurie Lee, “Introduction to Probability” (mentor Maggie Lin) (slides)
• Youdi (Ivy) Yao & Julia Zhou, “A Special Case of Zykov’s Theorem and the Shifting Method” (mentor Tomasz Slusarczyk) (slides)
• Nairi Davidian & Winnie Gong, “Knots, Genus, and Surfaces” (mentor Yuyuan Luo) (slides)
• Hwiseo (Irene) Choi, Bang Tam Ngo, & Larine Ouyang, “Classification of Cyclic Subgroups with the Fundamental Theorem of Cyclic Groups” (mentor Zhao Yu Ma) (slides)

3:10-4:25 pm: Session 6. PRIMES Circle

• Neel Chattopadhyay & Nahum Linhart, “Diophantine Equations” (mentor George Shaker) (slides)
• Ladia Khaing & Ada Kilian, “The Szemeredi-Trotter Theorem” (mentor Paige Dote) (slides)
• Aleah He, Bhavika Kalia, & Laurelyn Newsome, “Exploring Knot Theory: Surfaces and Summation” (mentor Carlos Á. Alvarado) (slides)
• Quinten Jin & Emre Kocaman, “Combinatorics: An Exploration of Counting Principles and Their Applications” (mentor Sean Li) (slides)
• Olivia Chen & Natalie Han, “The Math Behind ‘Spot It!’” (mentor Katherine Tung) (slides)

Contact

With questions, contact PRIMES Program Director Slava Gerovitch at