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Ankit B. Patel
Ph.D. Candidate in Applied Mathematics/Computer Science |
About me |
My name is Ankit Patel and I am a graduate student in Computer Science and Applied Math at Harvard University. I am a member of the Self-Organizing Systems Research (SSR) Group, led by my adviser Radhika Nagpal.
Ever since I was young, I have always been fascinated with life, living things, and why we are here. That curiousity has driven me to study mathematics for its simplicity, and more recently, biology for its complexity. I enjoy sitting on the fence between theory and experiment, hoping to learn something new from both disciplines.
I've outlined my research interests along with a list of publications and a link to my resume.
Research Interests |
- Local-to-Global phenomena , self-organization, and emergent phenomena
- Emergence of epithelial topology in the fruitfly
- Desynchronization of pulse-coupled oscillators (the "inverse" of the Mirollo-Strogatz problem)
- Markov Chains
- Establishment of developmental proportions and precision in early Drosophila embryo
- P vs NP: studying compexity from the point of view of many locally-interacting agents
- Quantum physics via (non-)local rules
I have broad interests in mathematical biology, biologically-inspired computing, and, in general, local-to-global phenomena. I am fascinated by systems where many "dumb" agents interact locally to produce coherent global order.
Recently, I have become more and more interested in the developmental process that cells undergo in order to form an organism. Studying the fruitfly has been instrumental in showing me that the sheer complexity of biology isn't completely incomprehensible. If you look hard enough and long enough, patterns do emerge, pardon the pun.
Beyond just the fun and curiosity that are a natural part of studying the unknown, I think I just like pretty images and neat-looking simulations. This also drives alot of my work, especially at times when I am feeling tired and worn out. :-)
Publications |
Accepted Work:
- The emergence of geometric order in proliferating metazoan epithelia. Ankit B. Patel, Matthew C. Gibson, Radhika Nagpal & Norbert Perrimon. Nature 442 , 1038-1041, August 31, 2006. [PDF] [TALK] [POSTER]
- Desynchronization: Self-Organizing Algorithms for Periodic Resource Scheduling. Ankit Patel , Julius Degesys, Radhika Nagpal. 1st IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO). Boston, MA. July 2007. [PDF] [TALK]
- DESYNC: Self-organizing Desynchronization and TDMA on Wireless Sensor Networks. Julius Degesys, Ian Rose, Ankit Patel , Radhika Nagpal. International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN). Boston, MA. April 2007. [PDF]
- Firefly-Inspired Sensor Network Synchronicity with Realistic Radio Effects. Geoff Werner-Allen, Geetika Tewari, Ankit Patel, Matt Welsh, Radhika Nagpal. ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys'05), November 2005. [PDF]
Submitted or otherwise Unpublished Work:
- Local-to-global regulation of cell shape in proliferating epithelia.
Research |
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Emergence of geometric order in the fruitfly wing. We use a simple Markov Chain Model to show why many different multicellular organisms all have the same epithelial cell topology. In other words, if you were to count how many neighbors each cell has, you would find the same distribution in all of these organisms! The organisms we examined include the fruitfly (Drosophila melanogaster), the frog (Xenopus), and the Hydra (Hydra). Since these are each on different brnaches of multicellular tree of life, we conclude that this distribution of cells is universal. That is, we expect it to show up in the epidermis of all multicellular animals. |
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Desynchronization of pulse-coupled oscillators. We designed a simple local rule for an all-to-all network of pulse-coupled oscillators to desynchronize their phases. The algorithm is simple, decentralized, and self-adjusts to the entrance and departure of agents. It has wide applications in decentralized resource scheduling. |
Resume |
Resume/CV: pdf
Past Research Projects |
- A Self-Organizing Algorithm for Center Maintenance in an Amorphous Computer. [PDF] [TALK]
- WHASSUPP: A Novel Approach to Query-by-Sketch Using Wavelet Coefficients and Color Histograms. [PDF] [HTML]
- Lossless Sound Compression Using the Discrete Wavelet Transform. [PDF]
- Bounded Manipulation of Median Mechanisms in d Dimensions. [PDF]
- Query-By-Image Client. [HTML]
Links |
Friends: Daniel Rudoy (Harvard), Sourav Dey (MIT)
Last Updated: October 11, 2007