Interdisciplinary student teams receive seed grants from Center for Science of Information

The Center for Science of Information has awarded student collaborative seed grants to four project teams of undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and faculty advisors.

"The seed grants RFP resulted in students from seven institutions collectively developing proposals," says Brent Ladd, education director for the center. "Such an experience increases the capacity of these students and postdoctoral scholars to formulate their ideas in terms of problem statements, plan of action, literature review, expected outcomes, and accountability through reporting, mentorship, and peer involvement. Perhaps the largest benefit will be the experience and challenge of working in interdisciplinary teams."

The four project teams and their members and universities are:

"Investigation of Metabolic Phenomena Using Information Theory"
-- Student principal investigator: Frank DeVilbiss (chemical engineering, Purdue; advisor: D. Ramkrishna)
-- Student principal investigator: Pablo Robles-Granda (computer science, Purdue; advisor: Jennifer Neville)
-- Student principal investigator: Mohan Gopaladesikan (statistics, Purdue; advisor: Mark Daniel Ward)
-- Faculty advisor: D. Ramkrishna, chemical engineering, Purdue
-- Faculty advisor: Maxim Raginsky, electrical and computer engineering, University of Illinois

"Graph Inference based on Random Walks"
-- Postdoctoral principal investigator/advisor: Thomas Courtade (electrical engineering, Stanford and Princeton universities)
-- Student principal investigator: Victoria Kostina (electrical engineering, Princeton University; advisor: Sergio Verdu )
-- Student principal investigator: Suvidha Kancharla (computer science, Purdue; advisor: Jennifer Neville)
-- Faculty advisor: Jennifer Neville (computer science and statistics, Purdue)

"Understanding Information-Energy Interactions"
-- Postdoctoral principal investigator and advisor: Pulkit Grover (electrical engineering, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon University)
-- Student principal investigator: Karthik Ganesan (electrical engineering and computer science, UC Berkeley; advisor: Jan Rabaey)
-- Student principal investigator: George Alexandrov (electrical engineering, Stanford; advisor: Andrea Goldsmith)

"A Fresh Look at Boolean Functions"
-- Postdoctoral principal investigator/advisor: Thomas Courtade (electrical engineering, Stanford and Princeton)
-- Postdoctoral principal investigator/advisor: Pulkit Grover (electrical engineering, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon)
-- Student principal investigator: Madars Virza (electrical engineering and computer science, MIT; advisor: R. Rivest)

The teams will present overviews of their project plans to their peers during a student research workshop at 10 a.m. Dec. 3 in Lawson Computer Science Building, Room 3102.

On Dec. 4, a keynote presentation will be given by David Tse, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Tse will speak on the emerging field of the science of information and its connection with life sciences at 2 p.m. in Lawson Computer Science Building, Room 1142. A research poster session will follow at 3 p.m. in Lawson Commons. The keynote and poster session are open to the public.

A National Science Foundation science and technology center, the Center for Science of Information is based at Purdue and has nine university partners in the U.S. Purdue and its partners support the center's mission of advancing science and technology through a new quantitative understanding of the representation, communication and processing of information in biological, physical, social, and engineered systems.

More about the center and members is at http://soihub.org.