Projects

We are globally interested in how organisms adapt to different environments.

What powers machine learning? The AMISTAD Lab opens the black-box to understand how machine learning works as a form of search, governed by information theoretic and statistical constraints.

Project Overview: Bacteria respond to stressful changes in their environment by changin

We are globally interested in how organisms adapt to different environments.

Evolution is responsible for the immense biological diversity of our planet; however, despite its central role as the most fundamental property of life, the process of evolution remains poorly unde

Project overview: Honey bees are social insects with tens of thousands of bees per colony that have evolved amazing strategies to collectively solve problems.

Probabilistic topic models are widely used outside of computer science to find patterns of meaning in large text collections.

Horizontal gene transfer, or HGT, is a process by which organisms acquire new genes from their environment and incorporate them into their own genomes.

Large-scale systems of linear equations arise in many areas of data science, including in machine learning and as subroutines of several optimization methods.  When the systems are very large and c

Our lab investigates how electrons behave in solids — such as crystals, glasses, metals, superconductors, van-der-Waals (2D) materials, spin-liquid magnets, char

Online social media networks have become extremely influential sources of news and information.

Elastic biological materials like tendon play a vital role in animal locomotion, yet their complexity makes their mechanical characterization challenging.

When robots team up with humans, we want to give human teammates as many possibilities as we can for completing their activities.  However, robustly reacting to

I have four potential subprojects in the area of program analysis and one in proof analysis (though programs and proofs are extremely similar and are amenable to similar analysis techniques). Not a

The game of backgammon ultimately becomes a race, and over the years there have been various methods proposed for estimating one's chances when the game reaches that situation. For the last 15 year

Many organisms can acquire genetic information outside the normal process of parent-offspring inheritance.

At this time the Chemistry Department is managing applications for summer research outside the URO interface.

Photovoltaic panels are a crucial part of the world's effort to provide renewable energy and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

We will build and optimize a portable source of quantum mechanically entangled photons. We will measure their polarization with a polarizer whose angle is set by incoming star light.

Imagine learning to play a new video game.