Postdoctoral fellow: Dr. Hamid Usefim, Mathematics, University of Toronto
Lead faculty member: Dr. Kumar Murty, Mathematics, University of Toronto
Protecting copyright is one of the hottest topics in information and media technology at the moment. Digital technology enables perfect copying on amateur equipment. Digital Fingerprinting is an emerging technology to protect multimedia from unauthorized redistribution. It embeds a unique ID into each user's copy, which can be extracted to help identify culprits when an unauthorized leak is found. Thereby any emerging illegitimate copy can be traced back to the guilty party. A major challenge is to make this system secure against coalitions of pirates.
The goal of the MITACS-funded research program on reverse-engineering cellular complexity is to develop new mathematical tools and algorithms for analyzing genetic switching networks. Many genes operate as switches and are turned on and off, like light bulbs, when needed. Understanding the regulatory circuits that control this switching behaviour would improve our ability to modulate gene activity, provide clues to fundamental biological design principles, and lead to better synthetic circuits for biotechnological applications.
