Nils Napp, June 2011

Nils Napp will be visiting from Harvard on 27 June (Mon). He will give a talk in my group meeting on some of his recent work at Harvard.

Schedule

Monday:

• 9:45a - 10:30a: Open (if all other slots are full)
• 10:30a - 11:15a: Open (if all other slots are full)
• 11:15a-12p: Richard, 109 Steele
• 12p-1p: Group meeting presentation, 214 Steele
• 1:15p - 2:00p: Genti Buzi
• 2:00p - 2:45p: Open
• 3:00p - 4:00p: Elisa Franco PhD defense, 107 ANB
• 4:00 - 4:45p: Necmiye Ozay, CDS Library

Research description

Broadly, my research focuses on the control of stochastically interacting things. My goal is to steer global system behavior in the face of random, but tunable, behavior of individual sub components. How do natural systems achieve high reliability while being built from unreliable, stochastic sub components? What is the right level of abstraction for modeling such systems, especially when the number of sub components is large? I've worked mostly with robotic test-beds where randomness is introduced by choice to give robustness, scalability, or simply to explore control strategies. However, many of the ideas come from my interactions with the synthetic biologists in our research group. Currently, I'm thinking about control strategies for a particular system model, Stochastic Reaction Networks.