Carver Mead is emblematic of the Caltech scholar. The ability to reinvent himself
it's the sort of secret sauce at Caltech. I have felt the effects of the adventurous
spirit that Carver Mead has displayed his entire career. He is a visionary. He
doesn't follow trends. He embodies everything that's interdisciplinary
about Caltech. The Carver Mead Fund is really about supporting faculty to, in a
risk-free way, really explore something new–high-risk, high-return projects that
can change the world. Yisong Yue is collaborating with Frances Arnold to
use novel machine learning algorithms for directed evolution. Directed
evolution is a method that Frances Arnold and her group have been
pioneering for a long time. It utilizes the mechanisms of mutation and selection
in order to direct the evolution of proteins towards some desired function.
How do you take sunlight and carbon dioxide and turn that into fuel? How do
you make non-toxic pest control agents? Essentially we breed molecules in the
laboratory like you breed cats and dogs. My group developed methods for speeding
up evolution. It's not hundreds of millions of years, it's days. One of the
challenges of directed evolution is that the mutations are, to a large extent,
random. What I do is I use machine learning and artificial intelligence to
speed up directed evolution, to make it even more efficient and cost-effective.
One great example of the seed funding really leading to success was a
collaboration between Andrew Stuart and Tapio Schneider around climate modeling.
Computer models that we use to describe the world around us are imperfect.
Understanding the planet involves a combination of physics, chemistry, biology.
All of these processes interact in very complicated ways.
The different models that currently exist are all very strong, but they're
all imperfect. Unless scientists make bold moves, real advances don't happen.
How shall we design a model right from the bottom up? One of the projects that's
been supported by the fund is collaborative work that I have ongoing
with Laura Doval and Federico Echenique. Laura is really an expert on matching
markets and school choice. One thing that economists do that I don't know if many
people know about is that we're actually engineers of markets. With this funding
we were able to have students working with us that are helping parse through
the wealth of the data that's generated by the deployment of the algorithm in
the open enrollment system. There's very few funding opportunities for research
ideas that are making baby steps, but actually that's when the funding really
matters. Sometimes it just takes too long to convince government agencies or
industry leaders. I believe our faculty are visionary and can see that something
is important before anybody else. Mental health has become a major social problem.
Major depressive disorder is affecting hundred million population around the
world. Wearable biosensors play an important role in personalized medicine
because it can continuously collect data from our body and tell us what's
going on and what's going wrong with our health. We received the Carver Mead New
Adventure Fund to develop a platform that can analyze multiple depression
biomarkers for continuous and dynamic mental health assessment. The initial
support from this fund could be very important for me to demonstrate the
proof-of-concept. This fund provides the tools for
researchers to come at problems from many directions. To be able to take the
ideas that come out and translate them into technologies that help improve
people's lives. These are the best experts in the world who come together
to change direction and find new areas of research. We enable breakthroughs by
supporting people to work on hard problems. It was a great honor to be a
recipient and working together with other innovators at Caltech on the big ideas
and why the idea would have the potential to change the world. Carver
Mead has been an inspiration for my research. I hope that I can, you know in
some small way, follow in his footsteps