I have given several talks for the general public, and even more for scientific audiences. Here are slides from some of these talks. They are organized into the following broad areas:
| Title | Audience | Length | Description |
| Ethical analysis of US health care(ppt, pdf) | general public | 10 minutes | Presents a formal analysis of the ethics of the current and proposed US health care systems. The analysis method is broadly useful for public policy analysis. (full analysis here) |
| The data flood: we need a bigger boat (keynote, pdf) | biologically literate general public | 30 minutes | next generation sequencing gives us much more data than we know how to handle. To avoid drowning, we need new techniques. |
| Bugs in the Arctic: how do soil bacterial communites change as glaciers retreat? | microbial ecologists, bioinformaticists, students, general public | 50 minutes | techniques for data reduction of 454/FLX metagenomic study of microbial populations from soil in a transect below a receding glacier in Spitsbergen |
| Guide trees and alignment quality for multiple sequence alignment (in power point) | bioinformaticists, students | 20 minutes | Guide trees for progressive multiple sequence alignments are correlated with alignment quality, but have only minor effect |
| Power versus efficiency in microbial communities (in keynote) | microbial ecologists | 20 minutes | Summarizes research project testing the ability of bacterial species to coexist as a function of their protein translation strategy. |
| Microbial Diversity at the Marine Biology Lab (in keynote) | General public | 45 minutes - 1 hour | My summer school at the Marine Biology Lab in Woods Hole. Has lots of pretty pictures of bacterial colonies. |
| Philosophy meets Biology | General public | 50 minutes | New biological problems that strain current philosophical assumptions. |
| Evolutionary Computation | |||
| Evolutionary computation (keynote) | evolutionary biologists, general public | 30 minutes | reviews how evolution is a process, and EC can be used to answer ill formed questions with lots of data. Presented at Evolution 2009, 6/14/09. |
| Introduction to evolutionary computation | computer science students | 50 minutes | Using simulated evolution to solve problems computationally (GA, GP, etc.) |
| Using evolution to build computing software and hardware | Biologists, computer scientists, or general public | 15, 30 or 50 minutes | Evolutionary computation (EC) techniques, including genetic algorithms (GA) and genetic programming (GP), for building computer programs and computing circuits |
| EC hardness | EC researchers | 50 minutes | thoughts on how to measure problem hardness in EC. |
| Robustness of evolved circuits | EC researchers | 15 minutes | Evolved sorting networks are fail less catastrophically than hand-designed ones when subjected to point circuit failures. |
| Using GAs for building stock market portfolios | computer scientists | 50 minutes | Solving multi-objective functions (e.g. risk, return) with subtractive constraints (e.g. long and short positions), stock market portfolio example |
| What machines can never learn | general public | 50 minutes | inductive inferencing: computational limits to what machines can learn |
| Pseudo randomness | computer science students | 50 minutes | Different techniques for generating pseudorandom number sequences, measuring their quality |
| DNA computing | general public | 50 minutes | Computing with DNA |
| Quantum computing | general public | 50 minutes | how to use quantum mechanics to speed up computations |
| Doing proofs | computer science students | 50 minutes | Strategies for doing mathematical proofs |
21 October, 2008 10:03