Summer research presentation: Dodds/Libeskind-Hadas students

Colloquium

Speaker(s)
research students
Date
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Time
4:15 PM – 5:30 PM
Location
Galileo Pryne

The students who worked on summer research projects with professor Zach Dodds and professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas will discuss their work.


Title: Range from Textures
Speakers: Sabreen Lakhani, Anatole Paine, and Zeke Koziol
Research Adviser: Prof. Zach Dodds
Abstract:
Humans intuit range-to-obstacles from single images effortlessly. We will present an overview of our summer’s work on automating this process. Our experiments used two types of neural networks atop a new Roomba-based platform. Although excited by the results so far, we probably would not describe them as “effortless.”

Title: Gophers, Lice, and Algorithms
Speakers: Chris Conow, Daniel Fielder, and Yaniv Ovadia
Research Adviser: Ran Libeskind-Hadas
Abstract:
Biologists frequently find evidence that two species have co-evolved. This is particularly prevalent in the case of parasites that evolve to specialize to their hosts. Given two evolutionary (phylogenetic) trees, one for the host and one for the parasite species, how do we find the most plausible “alignment” of these trees? We will describe new theoretical and practical results for this cophylogeny reconstruction problem.