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.
Personalized Medicine
- 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
New Energy Sources
- 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.