Approximately 500 million tweets are sent everyday. Scientists monitor these tweets to predict the spread of disease, better allocate social welfare services, help first responders during natural disasters, and many other important tasks. A key step in each of these tasks is estimating the location the tweet was sent from. In this talk, I discuss how to combine machine […]
Online social networks and other networks of interest are known to exhibit community structure, where a community is defined to be a highly interconnected group of nodes with possibly shared traits or features. However, classic network models, such as the preferential attachment model, do not account for community structure. In this talk, I will present […]
Measurement error, formally defined as the difference between the measured value and the true value of a quantity of interest, is ubiquitous. When a doctor takes your blood pressure, the instrumentation may not be properly calibrated and the reading is subject to error. When completing an online Harry Potter Sorting Hat quiz, you may accidentally […]
One very important concept in understanding a dynamical system is coherent structure. Such structure segments the domain into different regions with similar behavior according to a quantity. When we try to partition space-time into regions according to a Lagrangian quantity advected along with passive tracers, such class of coherent structure is called the Lagrangian coherent […]
I will present mathematical and computational methods used to model interactions between a viscous fluid and elastic structures in biological processes. For example, microfluidic devices carry very small volumes of liquid through channels and may be used to gain insight into many biological applications including drug delivery and development, but mixing and pumping at this […]
We study the problems of clustering covariance stationary ergodic processes and locally asymptotically self-similar stochastic processes, when the true number of clusters is priorly known. A new covariance-based dissimilarity measure is introduced, from which efficient consistent clustering algorithms are obtained. As examples of application, clustering fractional Brownian motions and clustering multifractional Brownian motions are respectively performed to illustrate the asymptotic consistency of […]
The traditional method of treating most human diseases is to direct a therapy against targets in the host patient, whereas conventional therapies against infectious diseases are directed against the pathogen. […]
In this presentation, some fundamentals of electrostatics in biology will be discussed with focus on the fact that most biological macromolecules including nucleic acids, carbohydrates, and proteins are negatively-charged. Electroneutrality […]
Abstract: Remember smoking? What’s the new public health problem? In the US, we are currently entangled within three converging and intertwined complex problems: Cancer, Obesity, Aging. There are over 16 […]
Linear evolution equations, such as the heat equation, are commonly studied on finite spatial domains via initial-boundary value problems. In place of the boundary conditions, we consider “multipoint conditions”, where one specifies some linear combination of the solution and its derivative evaluated at internal points of the spatial domain, and “nonlocal” specification of the integral […]
Data is exploding at a faster rate than computer architectures can handle. For that reason, mathematical techniques to analyze large-scale data need be developed. Stochastic iterative algorithms have gained interest due to their low memory footprint and adaptability for large-scale data. In this talk, we will study the Randomized Kaczmarz algorithm for solving extremely large […]
Knotting in proteins was once considered exceedingly rare. However, systematic analyses of solved protein structures over the last two decades have demonstrated the existence of many deeply knotted proteins, and researchers now hypothesize that the knotting presents some functional or evolutionary advantage for those proteins. Unfortunately, there is very little known (whether experimentally, through […]
