Nathan A. Barker
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Professional Background
I am currently a Graduate Student at the University Of Utah working towards my Doctoral Degree in Computer Science.
Myers Research Group
I am currently doing research for the Myers Research Group. This group focuses on timing and verification of asynchronous circuit design. Recently Chris Myers expanded this research into the biological domain. He noticed that cellular activities could be thought of as a type of asynchronous circuit. I am currently developing methods to model and learn genetic regulatory networks of biological systems.
Conference and Workshop Papers:
N. Barker, C. Myers, H. Kuwahara, Learning Genetic Regulatory Network Connectivity from Time Series Data, in The 1st Annual Mountain West Biomedical Engineering Conference, September, 2005.
H. Kuwahara, C. Myers, N. Barker, M. Samoilov, and A. Arkin, Asynchronous abstraction methodology for genetic regulatory networks, in The Third International Workshop on Computational Methods in Systems Biology, April, 2005. (pdf)
Other Research Interests
I have many interests among which is an algorithm that can find the minimum length solution to the Rubik's Cube, which is speculated to be at most depth 21. To better show the state space search that would be involved, take a look at 2 visual representations that I created. The first is a tree like structure at depth 4. The second is a flat representation at depth 5.
Personal Interests
Currently one of the favorite ways I spend my weekend is by Geocaching. People all over the world have placed 'treasure' boxes in various places. Some places are remote, others could be in your backyard or in your favorite park. The people who placed the boxes get the coordinates with a GPS and post them on the web. One of the most popular web posting sites is www.geocaching.com. Anyone can then get the coordinates and go find the 'treasure' using a GPS. In order for the 'geocache' to always contain items, the 'cacher' should take an item, and place another item in the cache.