Bio

Rajat Mani Thomas has wide and varied interests in science, technology, and economics. Starting off as an electronics and communications engineer in India, he moved to Sweden to study and work on space technology and radio astronomy. Toward the end of his training in Sweden, he was offered a project at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany to work on the detection of extra-solar planets. His passion for astrophysics led him to the Netherlands, where he did his PhD on developing theoretical models of the early evolutionary stages of our universe. He is associated with the building of what will be the world’s largest radio telescope, which will eventually probe the validity of his models of the universe. After getting his PhD, he worked as a visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo and then moved to the University of Toronto. In a few months, he will be starting a new position and a totally different line of research (neuroscience) at the University of Amsterdam.

Project: What Rule Is It?: Deconvolution of a CA

Given a sequence s and a column of rule r, determine the underlying rule r. The task, therefore, is to design signal processing algorithms, entropy measures, or “pattern recognizers” that could reliably select one or a set of rules (r) as being the generator of s. Possible applications: detection of signals in nature, outer space, or electronic devices that do not have obvious harmonics (if they did, one of the myriad harmonic analysis techniques would suffice).

Project-Related Demonstrations

Density Mapping of Elementary Cellular Automata

Favorite Four-Color Totalistic Cellular Automaton

Rule 221000