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Summary

Curriculum Vitae

My name is Craig Fouts :) I’m a passionate scientist/bioengineer interested in building data-driven mechanistic models of living things and exploring nascent dynamics in host-microbiome ecosystems subject to dysbiosis. As a PhD student in the Biological Control Systems Group at Imperial College London, I'm currently developing in silico methods for identifying structural design principles and control schemes in amphibian holobionts threatened by parasitic fungi. Previously, I worked in the New York Genome Center's Technology Innovation Lab, where I created statistical models and machine learning tools to explain genomic morphology in heterogeneous transcriptomics data. Before that, I received my MS in applied mathematics from Columbia University after studying computer science and theoretical mathematics at The Ohio State University. Outside of academia, I enjoy inline skating, playing the violin, and building cool stuff.

Projects

Project Ant Farm

Some experiments with self-organizing systems and emergent behavior. Current methods include a Brownian motion algorithm, a Vicsek active matter model, and a branching-annihilating random walk. Also a test bed for RunTime, a framework for building real-time interactive environments in Jupyter notebooks.

Project Asterism

Semantic segmentation models and dimension reduction algorithms applied to point cloud data. Current methods include variations of latent Dirichlet allocation, some amortized topic models, and a neural clustering process. Also a test bed for ATLAS, a nonparametric topic model for discovering spatial structures.

Project Automata

Experiments with generalizing neural cellular automata (NCA) to dynamic point clouds using graph convolutional networks. The model is trained to parameterize a nonlinear recurrence relation that, provided an initial "seed" state, converges in finite time to a unique target configuration via local message propagation.

Project Robotnik

A knowledge-based web application for robotic access and retrieval using IBM Watson. It provides an interface for textual communication with a Webots simulation of two robots collaboratively operating a virtual warehouse. Users can query the warehouse's contents via the app and submit items for deposit/retrieval.

Project Space Rat

A webcam-based utility designed to provide an accessible mode of computer interaction for people with impaired mobility. The user can perform ASL-inspired hand gestures for 3D control in Autodesk Fusion and general mouse control in Microsoft Windows. Created for HackOHI/O 2021, where it won first place.

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