Professional

From Ilya Nemenman

Contents 1 Overview 2 My Research 3 Links 3.1 Project Pages 3.2 Conferences Organized 3.3 Other Conferences 4 Other Humans 4.1 Lab Members 4.2 Collaborating Laboratories 4.3 Friends and Mentors

Overview

What is physics? ... -- The idea ... that the world is understandable.

John J. Hopfield, APS News 16 (8):8 (2007).

When I examined myself and my methods of thought, I came to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

Albert Einstein

I am a theoretical physicist educated mostly at Belarusian State and Princeton Universities and further trained as a postdoc at NEC Research Institute and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. I am working to understand how biological systems, such as molecular circuits, entire cellular networks, single neurons, and whole brains, learn from their surrounding environment and respond to it (we call this "biological information processing"). Put differently, what are the computational primitives employed by living organisms to compute their way through life? The dream is that this may lead eventually to understand human cognition and, ultimately, human consiousness.

My research is very interdisciplinary, built on an interface between physics, biology, and computer science. Correspondingly, I am now working in the Computational Biology team, in a very interdisciplinary CCS-3 group, at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

My Research

• Research projects
• About our work

Other Information:

CV in PDF format Publications Presentations Teaching

Open positions Publications about our research Internal Lab Pages Group seminar / Journal club

Links

Project Pages

• External Project Pages
• Internal Lab Pages

Conferences Organized

The q-bio Conference and Summer School, Aug 2007-2009 Principles of Biological Computation, May 2008 28th CNLS Annual Conference: Information Science and Technology, May 2008 RECOMB Satellite on Systems Biology, Nov-Dec 2007 (Program commitee).

The Second Dream Conference, Dec 2007 (Program committee). Unconventional Computation: Quo Vadis?, Mar 2007 Grand Challenges in Neural Computation, Feb 2007 NIPS'03 workshop on Entropy Estimation, Dec 2003

Other Conferences

NIPS COSYNE RECOMB 2007

ICSB 2007 ICMSB 2006 CNS

Other Humans

Lab Members

• Postdocs:

Nikolai Sinitsyn, LANL Director's Postdoctoral Fellow

Golan Bel, Postdoctoal Associate

Brian Munsky LANL Director's Postdoctoral Fellow

• Summer Students:

2006: Sean Escola (Columbia), Michael Vidne (Columbia)

2007: Aly Pesic (Stanford)

2008: Misha Shashkov (Berkeley), Pradeep Bandaru (Columbia)

2009: Misha Shashkov (Berkeley), Bryan Daniels (Cornell)

• Visitors: Swagatam Mukhopadhyay (2007)

Collaborating Laboratories

In alphabetical order:

Peter Balsam William Bialek Andrea Califano

Randy Gallistel William Hlavacek Andre Levchenko

Rob de Ruyter van Steveninck William Ryu Yuhai Tu

Michael Wall Chris Wiggins

Friends and Mentors

As they say in Russian: Tell me who your friend is, and I will tell you who you are. True, indeed... So, without further ado, this is a (partial) alphabetical list of people I have worked with and have learned from.

Ronald Adler, Nilanjana Banerjee, William Bialek, Stanislav Boldyrev, Andrea Califano, Curtis Callan, Leonid Demikhovsky, Adrienne Fairhall, Gerald Fisher, Sergei Gukov, William Hlavacek, Timothy Holy, Ilya Mandel, Adam Margolin, Akakii Melikidze, Jonathan Miller, Andrei Mikhailov, Albert Minkevich, Olexei Motrunich, John Naud, Vipul Periwal, Mikhail Polozov, Alexander Polyakov, Valentin Rusak, Rob de Ruyter van Steveninck, Susanna Still, Gustavo Stolovitzky, Timur Shutenko, Alex Silbergleit, Anatoly Spitkovsky, late Howard Stone, Naftali Tishby, Michael Wall, Kai Wang, Chris Wiggins, Betty Young.