Students in the course contribute to a class-wide project documented on the course wiki Web site that provides decision-making tools for global and local technology development and deployment in the categories of Personalized Medicine, New Energy Sources, and Biocomplexity and Randomness. Student project topics are listed below.
What is Personalized Medicine?
A Putative Scale of Personalized Medicine
List of Treatments, from Least to Most Personal
Possible Ways of Quanitifying How Personal a Method Is
Personalizedness Quotient
Technology Development Present and Future
Genome sequencing and resequencing
Genome-based assessment: functional and comparative genomics
Diagnostic tools
Medical informatics
Drugs (Imatinib)
- Implementation: past lessons, economic analysis, access to care, data collection, privacy concerns
- Medical Misdiagnosis: types of misdiagnosis, number of patients affected, monetary costs
Personal Genome Project
Global Energy Demand and Supply: Now and In the Future
Natural Biofuel Sources
Biomass-oil Needs and Recommendations
Critical Parameters for Each Biofuel Source
Metabolic Engineering: Optimizing Biofuel Production
Environmental Models
Economic Incentives
Biocomplexity and Randomness
We want a metric that helps us measure complexity and randomness in a way that is congruent with our intuition of complex systems. Some examples of real-world test cases:
Autonomous agents (systems that act on their own behalf) should have a high measure
Stock markets should have a high measure.
Natural language should have a high measure
Single-celled organisms should have a high measure
Multicellular organisms should have a higher measure
Some large-scale software systems should have a high measure
Ecosystems should have a high measure
Internet traffic should have a high measure.
Ideal gases should have a low measure
Perfect crystals should have a low measure.
White noise should have a low measure
A constant pitch tone should have a low measure
Stephen Wolfram's Rule 110 should have a low measure
Stephen Wolfram's Rule 30 should have a lower measure.
irreducible, structureless, incompressible strings should have a low measure
repeated patterns of irreducible, structureless, incompressible strings should have a higher measure.
Cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generators should have a low measure
The digits of pi should have a low measure
Quantum randomness should have a low measure
Output produced from the logistic equation should have a low measure.