Quasars, light sources powered by black holes, are amongst the brightest objects in the universe, and are used as searchlights to illuminate the contents of the universe between earth and the quasar. Historically features in these quasars were detected by visually inspecting the spectra! However, astronomers now have surveys containing 10^5 quasars, which makes this...

While autonomous systems that perform solo missions can yield significant benefits, greater efficiency and operational capability will be realized from teams of autonomous systems operating in a coordinated fashion. Potential applications for networked multiple autonomous systems include environmental monitoring, search and rescue, space-based interferometers, hazardous material handling, and combat, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems. Networked multi-agent...

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) allows for the detection structural changes due to disease or inspection of neural patterns that underlie cognition. Prior hardware and software limitations kept the dimensionality of MRI datasets low and reduced the statistical power of MRI datasets. However, recent technological advancements in MRI have allowed for the development of large scale...

Since the sequencing of the first human genome in 2001, more than 3000 human genomes have been sequenced and more than 150 million SNPs have been identified in those genomes. Many of the SNPs lie in regions of genes that encode proteins and potentially impact function and contribute to disease. However, the vast majority of...

Texts are increasingly used to make causal inferences: either with the document serving as the treatment or the outcome. We introduce a new conceptual framework to understand all text-based causal inferences, demonstrate fundamental problems that arise when using manual or computational approaches applied to text for causal inference, and provide solutions to the problems we...

Robot motion planning and control in real-world settings is hindered, in part, by uncertainty. Dealing with uncertainty is a difficult problem because it invalidates the performance guarantees often available in deterministic cases, while its precise effect on motion cannot be predicted. Further, (autonomous) robot performance often emerges through the interaction of multiple components, mainly including...

Hunter-gatherer adaptations are tied to the way that climate and environment shape the food and technological resource base. Discovering the relation between climate and environmental change and human origins must be grounded in a causal understanding of the connection between climate, environment, resource patterning, and human behavior. To better understand the origins of modern humans...

Multielectrode arrays (MEA) allow recording of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals from multiple sites simultaneously. We have implemented skull surface MEA in a mouse model of Fragile X syndrome (Fmr KO mouse). This enables unprecedented electrophysiological characterization of normal vs. Fmr KO mice. In this presentation, we will describe the rationale and our early data implementing MEA...

Food intake and energy balance are controlled by a dynamic interplay of gut-brain signaling pathways that are poorly defined. Recent work from the DiPatrizio lab, however, suggests that our bodies' own cannabis-like signaling molecules, the endocannabinoids, control gut-brain signaling important for food intake. Furthermore, this signaling becomes upregulated in diet-induced obesity and causes overeating. These...

De novo genome assembly is a challenging computational problem due to the high repetitive content of eukaryotic genomes and the imperfections of sequencing technologies. Several assembly tools are currently available, each of which has strengths and weaknesses in dealing with the tradeoff between maximizing contiguity and minimizing assembly errors (e.g., mis-joins). In order to obtain...