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Summary

Curriculum Vitae

My name is Craig Fouts :-) I’m an enthusiastic scientist/engineer interested in building data-driven mechanistic models of living systems and exploring how host-microbiome network topology drives immune responses. As a PhD student in the Biological Control Systems Lab at Imperial College London, I'm currently developing in silico methods for inferring structural design principles and control strategies in amphibian holobionts subject to chytridiomycosis. Previously, I worked in the New York Genome Center's Tech Innovation Lab, where I created statistical models and machine learning tools used to characterize genomic morphology in spatial transcriptomics data. Before that, I received my MSc in applied math from Columbia University after studying computer science and theoretical math 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. 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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