Research
My PhD work, with Sara Walker at ASU, is on applied algorithmic complexity. Measures like Kolmogorov complexity depend on a choice of reference machine, the language in which a computation is described. I work on making that choice principled: formalizing interpretable, substrate-specific languages of computation, developing assembly spaces as a basis for physical complexity, and building software that makes these analyses usable. I apply these methods to identify and characterize hierarchical structure in biological systems.
Earlier, I worked on observational astrophysics and instrumentation: a search in LIGO data for signatures of a physics without the continuum (testing the Born rule), NASA's EXCLAIM balloon telescope, the Tianlai radio array, and millisecond pulsars at Arecibo.
Publications
- Assembly Spaces as a Basis for Physical Complexity in preparation
- Assembly Spaces and Formal Grammars: a General Correspondence and Fast Bounds on Assembly Indices In Revision
- Practical Assembly Theory, Including Protocols, and a Python Toolkit under review
- A Firefly-inspired Model for Deciphering the Alien
- Rapid Exploration of the Assembly Chemical Space of Molecular Graphs
- Single-Pulse Studies of Three Millisecond-Pulsars
- Modeling the Optical System of NASA's EXCLAIM Mission
- Experiment for Cryogenic Large-Aperture Intensity Mapping: Instrument design
- The Tianlai Dish Pathfinder Array: design, operation and performance of a prototype transit radio interferometer
- Optical design of the EXperiment for Cryogenic Large-Aperture Intensity Mapping (EXCLAIM)
- Overview and status of EXCLAIM, the experiment for cryogenic large-aperture intensity mapping
Also on Google Scholar.
Talks
- Computer Languages and the Physical World
- Using Semantics to Select Reference Machines
- Mapping the Space of Programming Languages
- Avoiding Agnosticism: When Can a Threshold for Life be Meaningfully Defined?
- Alien Life: Will We Know It When We See It?
- Abiotic Limits in Assembly Theory
- Why Assembly Theory
- String Assembly
- The Tianlai Array, a radio cosmology experiment
- Constraining the Expansion of the Universe by Mapping Neutral Hydrogen
- Modeling the Optical System of NASA's EXCLAIM Mission
- Tianlai Periodicity Search
- Multifrequency Single-Pulse Study of Millisecond Pulsars
- Multifrequency Single-Pulse Analysis of Millisecond Pulsars
Selected honors
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
- Barry Goldwater Scholarship
- Astronaut Scholarship
- IPAM travel funding, Mathematics of Intelligences: Theory and Practice of Deep Learning
The full list is in my CV.