Justin Uang
Perception, or the ability to perceive the world, is one of the remaining missing components for allowing robots to enter our daily environments. However, its current state-of-the-art performance is far from accurate. This summer, I will explore several machine learning techniques for improving perception. For instance, I will use distance metric learning to improve upon the euclidean distance that is widely used for comparing data points. Preliminary results show that algorithms such as Large Margin Nearest Neighbor can greatly improve k-nearest-neighbor performance for SIFT features, improving perception performance. I also […]
Kevin Lin
My research is focused on a protein tyrosine kinase called Zeta-associated protein of 70kDa (ZAP-70), which plays a crucial role in initiating T-cell signaling. An inhibitor specific for ZAP-70 would be clinically significant in treating autoimmune diseases via downregulation of signaling in T-cells that attack the bodys own cells. Our collaborator at UCSF, Arthur Weiss, is using chemical genetics to study ZAP-70s role in T-cell signaling and development. The Weiss lab has developed a mutant version of ZAP-70 that can be selectively inhibited by a derivatized kinase inhibitor. My goal […]
Gabriel Weingart
Lipid droplets are vital organelles present in various cell types that act as a site for energy and vitamin storage, lipoprotein and cholesterol synthesis, and detoxification. Abnormalities related to lipid droplets in liver cells have been shown to correlate to the pathogenesis of fatty liver disease and diabetes. Copper also plays an indispensable role in the body, functioning as a cofactor for several key proteins, the improper regulation of which has been linked to Wilsons disease, Menkes disease, and diabetes as well. Previous work from our lab has demonstrated that […]
Edwin Liu
Sickle Cell Disease is a disorder in which a point mutation in the -globin gene causes a structurally unstable form of hemoglobin (HbS). This instability generates higher levels of superoxide and hydrogen peroxide that cause rapid oxidation of erythrocyte (Red Blood Cell) membranes, and subsequently promotes polymerization of HbS, forming the sickling in Sickle Cell Disease. The pro-oxidant effects of the HbS mutation lead to rapid hemolysis, blockage of microvasculature, and release of reactive agents that further cause peripheral tissue damage. HbS is more redox active and more prone to […]
Sarah Weng
One of the leading causes of death by an infectious agent, Tuberculosis (TB) currently affects roughly 1/3 of the worlds population. However, a majority of these infected individuals carry a latent disease state within the lungs, and are asymptomatic. While it is widely known that the bacteria eventually infects macrophage cells within the lungs in order to actively propagate the disease, the first couple days following infection are less well understood. My project this summer will study an infected mouse model in order to characterize the initial infection profile of […]
Matthew Melissa
This summer, I will be using MATLAB to investigate the development of spatiotemporal dynamics in 8-week kittens and adult cats. Previously, the cats were presented with a series of visual stimuli, and electrode measurements were taken to identify the neurons receptive fields, which characterize the response of each neuron to each point in space and time. I will be applying various computational techniques to determine how these receptive fields change over short time intervals, providing insight into how course-fine tuning and binocular vision is achieved. By comparing these spatiotemporal dynamics […]
Andrew Whalen
Culture has played a large role in human’s abilities to adapt to the environment. By learning from other people, novices are able to skip the steps of trial and error learning that may be costly, or even fatal. One of the primary ways that culture is transmitted between generations is through social learning. Beginning in the 1990s some scholars have noted that social learning may be disadvantageous if a majority of people have erroneous views about the environment. In this setup, populations may descend into rational “herds” in which people, […]
Mark Mullan
Circadian clocks are endogenous timers that allow organisms to anticipate daily changes in their environment, and adapt accordingly. In plants, growth, photosynthetic activity, and flowering time are all processes through which circadian regulation plays an integral role. Over the summer, I will be working with Arabidopsis thaliana, one of the model organisms used for plant genetics. The population has mutations in their warm acute response of prr7 (warp) genes, causing them to have acute responses to temperature signals that set circadian rhythms. My objective is to determine both how warp2 […]
Ziang Xie
A key challenge in bringing robots out of the manufacturing setting and into homes and offices is that of perception: though many robots are equipped with numerous sensors, there is currently no reliable computer algorithm which can take as input images of unpredictable, cluttered environments and identify each object in the image and estimate its 3D pose.Recently, there have been many advances in the field of unsupervised feature learning via neural networks, specifically in the learning of sparse features. Given the vast amount of data online, as well as the […]
Jared Nathanson
All land plants undergo an alternation of generations. This alternation occurs between a haploid gametophyte and a diploid sporophyte. In the early-diverging lineages of land plants, such as liverworts, hornworts, and mosses, the haploid gametophyte is dominant in the life cycle. However, in later-diverging lineages, such as gymnosperms and angiosperms, the diploid sporophyte is dominant while the haploid gametophyte is transient. It is possible that this evolution of sporophyte dominance may have been caused by a delay in Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2)-triggered meiosis in the sporophyte generation. PRC2 functions […]