Matt Patitz Paper Accepted at FOCS 2016

Matt PatitzAssistant professor Matthew Patitz, current PhD student Trent Rogers, and former PhD student Jacob Hendricks (now an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls), had their paper titled Universal Simulation of Directed Systems in the abstract Tile Assembly Model Requires Undirectedness accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the 57th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2016) .  FOCS is consistently ranked as one of the top two conferences for theoretical computer science and algorithms in the world.  Their paper demonstrates fundamental impacts of nondeterminism inherent in the abstract Tile Assembly Model (a mathematical model which is an abstraction of DNA-based molecular "tiles" which self-assemble to form structures and perform computations), and develops powerful new theoretical tools for analyzing the powers of these systems.  The paper will be presented during the conference October 9-11, 2016, in New Brunswick, New Jersey.  

Self-assembly is the process by which a collection of relatively simple components, beginning in a disorganized state and without external guidance, autonomously combine to form more complex structures and/or perform computations.  Dr. Patitz and his research group, the Algorithmic Self-Assembly and Natural Computing group, develop mathematical models of self-assembling systems, and computational simulation software to simulate the self-assembly of DNA-based molecular building blocks.  More details of their research can be found on their web site here:  http://self-assembly.net

 

 



-August 2016