Alex Bäcker's Research Group & Collaborators
      
The Center for Bits, Brains and Genes

 

                                                                   

Alex Bäcker, Ph. D. In addition to the projects listed below, Alex is working on genetic code evolution, the function of neuronal oscillations, a generalization of PageRank to incorporate sources and sinks, and a probabilistic cost-based metric for spike trains.
Kevin W. Boyack, Ph. D. Kevin Boyack is a Principal Member of Technical Staff in the Computation, Computers, and Mathematics Center at Sandia National Laboratories. He is an expert in analysis using Sandia’s VxInsight® knowledge visualization tool with various types of data (literature, patent, genome, etc.). He has produced and analyzed science maps or domain visualizations from literature and patent sources on many topics. He is also interested in semantics, augmented cognition, and the application of mathematical tools to information spaces. Kevin is working with us on a project to measure the growth and memory of science, as well as another one on metrics of similarity between papers.
Mike Brown, Ph. D. Mike is in the Computational Biology Department at Sandia National Labs. He is working with us on optimal representations using neural networks.
Elebeoba May, Ph. D. Chi-Chi May is a Senior Member of Technical Staff in the Computational Biology Department at Sandia National Laboratories and Research Assistant Professor at UNM. Her work includes mathematical methods for analysis of neural data and coding theory as applied to biology.
Alex Slepoy, Ph.D. Alex is in the Computational Materials and Molecular Biology Department at Sandia National Labs, and is working with us on a new type of consensus-achieving recurrent neural networks.

 

                                                                   

Shawn Martin, Ph.D. Shawn is in the Computational Biology Department at Sandia National Labs. He is working with us on unsupervised algorithms to estimate a dataset's intrinsic dimensionality.

 

                                                                   

Hamiton Link Hamilton is in the Advanced Information and Control Systems Department at Sandia National Labs. He is working with us on achieving invariance for perception using dynamic neural networks.

Steve Wedig Steve is a graduate student at UCLA. He is developing a new approach to learning meaning combining elements of hypergraph theory, percolation theory and more.

Ulrik Beierholm Ulrik is a graduate student at Caltech. He is working with us on the mathematics of coexistence in ecology & evolution.

Joerg Hipp Joerg is a graduate student from the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. He is working with us on self-organizing maps, learning and neural networks.

Joseph E. Gonzalez Joseph is an undergraduate at Caltech, where he is studying Computer Science, Biology and Physics, and the recipient of the Perpall Award. He hopes to apply concepts in biology and physics to computational problems to develop new algorithms and technologies. He is working on the development of an artificial research assistant using a computational model of curiosity.

 

                                                                   

Alfonso Pérez Escudero Alfonso is a student at the University of Valladolid in Spain, where he is studying Physics. He is working with us on algorithms to detect different types of evolutionary selection pressure using single genomes, and on asymmetries in optimal variance estimation.

 

                                                                   

Alan Rubink Alan is a student at Caltech, where he is studying Mathematics. He is implementing a query-specific web search results ranking algorithm.

 

                                                                   

Mehran Shahir Mehran is a student at Caltech. He is developing a novel content-independent approach to combat spam.

 

                                                                   

Chris Wetzel Chris is an Applied & Computational Mathematics student at Caltech. He is performing experiments on visual invariances in early cognitive development, and, on a separate project, on the development of social networks. He is also performing computational experiments to test a novel theory of ours on the selective advantage of aging.

 

                                                                   

Daniel Yi Daniel is studying Applied & Computational Mathematics at Caltech. He is performing experiments to test whether perceptual adaptation occurs during sleep, testing psychophysics of odor intensity perception, and working on efficient algorithms for the computation of multi-neuron cost-based metrics.

Brian Droncheff Brian is a student at Los Angeles City College. He is working with us on experiments on rationality, discounting, pain-avoidance, impatience and behavior.

 

                                                                   

 

Alumni:

Craig J. Rothman Craig spent a summer with us while an undergraduate at MIT, where he is studying Biology and Computer Science. He worked on a model of the development of mapping between nose and brain.

Argo & Quine The Argo & Quine teams developed automatic ontology generation tools and a prototype for a next-generation search engine that is both more precise and more intelligent than current technologies.