Abdullah Akce

Introduction to DNA Origami

Abdullah — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 22:12:38 +0000

About eighteen months ago, I made a class presentation about “DNA Origami”. It is the art of designing a set of DNA molecules that can self-assembly into a desired two- or three- dimensional shape at the nanoscale. It was developed by P. Rothemund at Caltech and published as a Nature cover article in 2006 with title: “Folding DNA to create nanoscale shapes and patterns”. The slides I used in the presentation are available here: http://www.akce.name/presentations/2009-akce-dnaorigami.pdf

I am also glad that, recently, Eric Drexler (researcher, author, and an expert on molecular nanotechnology) featured my presentation in his blog: http://metamodern.com/2010/08/28/the-best-introduction-to-dna-nanotechnology/.

I hope you find my presentation useful.

2010 ICPR Conference in Istanbul, Turkey

Abdullah — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:31:45 +0000

The 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition was held in Istanbul, Turkey, August 23-26, 2010. I presented my paper titled “A Probabilistic Language Model for Hand Drawings”. Our objective is to enable users with impaired sensory-motor function to draw pictures. Towards this end, in this paper, we proposed a symbolic language for describing smooth planar curves and constructed a probabilistic language model. In future work, we plan to use this language model to implement an efficient interface for drawing. Here are the links for the abstract, the paper and my presentation slides.

The plenary talks were amazing. In particular, “Embracing Uncertainty: The New Machine Intelligence” by Christopher Bishop, “Computational Cameras: Redefining the Image” by Shree Nayar, “The Quantitative Analysis of User Behavior Online Data, Models and Algorithms” by Prabhakar Raghavan. The talks were in the Istanbul Convention and Exhibition Center. Below is a photo of the Anadolu auditorium from my camera.

2010 School of Information Theory

Abdullah — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:00:02 +0000

The 2010 North American School of Information Theory was held at USC in Los Angeles. I gave a poster presentation in Information Theory applications track. The poster file is available as a pdf in the school website or as a png file here. The lectures given by leading experts are also available in the school website. My favorite lectures were “Information Theory of Data Matrices: Recovery from Incomplete and Corrupted Entries” given by Emmanuel Candes and “Probability Estimation over Large Alphabets” given by “Alon Orlitsky”.

2010 BCI Meeting in Asilomar, California

Abdullah — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 23:06:06 +0000

The Fourth International Brain-Computer Interface Meeting was held in Asilomar, California, May 31 – June 4, 2010. I participated in two workshops: BCI Applications that Restore Communication and Control, and Using BCIs to Control Neuroprostheses, Robotic Arms, and Other Complex Devices. We presented the poster titled “Feedback Information-Theoretic Paradigms for Designing Brain-Machine Interfaces”.

2010 ICRA Conference in Anchorage, Alaska

Abdullah — Thu, 27 May 2010 23:01:04 +0000

The 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA2010) was held in Anchorage, Alaska, May 3 – 8, 2010. I presented the paper “Remote Teleoperation of an Unmanned Aircraft with a Brain-Machine Interface: Theory and Preliminary Results”. After the conference, we visited the Denali National Park. Below is a picture of me with the snowman we built on top of the Primrose Ridge.

My research poster chosen as the most Outstanding Poster presentation

Abdullah — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 01:20:04 +0000

I participated in the 2010 Spring CS Grad Expo, an event hosted by Facebook and the Computer Science department to showcase the research happening in department. My research poster titled “Remote Teleoperation of an Unmanned Aircraft with a Brain-Machine Interface”, was chosen as the most Outstanding Poster presentation.

News article on our brain-machine interface research

Abdullah — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:28:06 +0000

University of Illinois Engineering and Coordinated Science Laboratory homepages published a news article on our brain-machine interface research that allows subjects to control systems with complex dynamics by just thinking either left- or right-hand movement. Below are the links to the article:

http://engineering.illinois.edu/news/2010/03/25/researchers-take-eeg-research-new-heights

http://csl.illinois.edu/news/bretl-takes-eeg-research-new-heights

Engineering Open House Exhibit

Abdullah — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 22:03:56 +0000

We have participated in the University of Illinois’ Engineering Open House on March 12-13. Our exhibit was on novel brain-machine interfaces based on EEG technology.These interfaces allow a human subject to spell a sentence or control a mobile robot (in this case, an unmanned aircraft in simulation) using just thought. Below is a photo of me (standing) and Ray (sitting) taken during the exhibit. Check out the videos here.

Inspiring talks

Abdullah — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 04:25:24 +0000

Towards personal medical care using wireless technology:

http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_topol_the_wireless_future_of_medicine.html

X-Prize for genomics on obtaining 100 human genomes in 10 days:

http://genomics.xprize.org/

Bill Gates on reducing CO2 emission to zero by 2050:

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

Hello world!

Abdullah — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 16:09:53 +0000

Finally, I moved my website to WordPress. It is difficult to maintain a website but with the help of WordPress, hopefully, it won’t be that difficult. Check out the “About” page to learn more about me.