CRISPR-based Bistable Switch

The genetic bistable switch is a fundamental element forming a memory unit in synthetic gene circuit. I am building a genetic bistable switch with the CRISPR/dCas9 system. In the bistable switch, ZEV4, a beta-extradiol sensitive activator, can bind to the promoter pGALZ4 and then activate the synthesis of small guide RNA Ri; the dCas9 protein fused with activator VP64 and degron, which can be degraded by FBox protein in the presence of auxin, is guided to the targeting site on pGALZ4 by Ri to activate pGALZ4, forming a positive feedback loop. The positive feedback loop can be turned off in the presence of auxin. CRISPR/dCas9 system makes the bistable switch more modular, so that it can be used as a block when building larger gene circuits.

Music Recommendation Based on Artist Novelty and Similarity

Most music recommendation systems recommend only popular songs since they are most easily accepted. However, if a system can recommend a song which the listener might like but had never heard before, the song's newness, its unfamiliarity, might better appeal to many listeners' desire to "discover" new music and share it with their friends. Based on artists similarity and popularity, we built a system that can recommend new songs.

• Ning Lin, Ping-Chia Tsai, and Homer H. Chen, "Music Recommendation Based on Artist Novelty and Similarity," 2014 IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP).
  
• Poster

Gaze Tracking

If we can accurately track a person's gaze direction, we can find out what object he/she is looking at. I helped with developing new methods to improve gaze tracking precision in Professor Yi-Ping Hung's Image and Vision Lab. The goal is to apply gaze tracking technique to interactive multimedia, education, and business. Current application is the Smile Wall, which interacts with user and transmits the concept of happiness to users through gaze tracking.

Mind Map

It is hard to record the thoughts of participants during brainstorming. Mind Map is an iOS app on iPad which attempts to help people record and organize their thoughts or flow of minds during brainstorming. Besides the general writing function, this app (to serve as a product prototype) provides different styles and colors for nodes. There is also a drawing function to make it more convenient to record participants' thoughts. This is the final project of Mobile Phone Programming (NM5216).

Poster:

• Ping-Chia Tsai, Yan-Chun Chen, Jhao-Ting Chen, and Mike Y. Chen, "Mind Map," Poster Presentation, National Taiwan University, 2013.

Simulation of Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) Code

This is the simulation of the well-known LDPC code used in 802.11n. By encoding incoming signals by multiplication with a large-scale sparse matrix, it can significantly reduce the error rate of the original code. This is the final project of Electrical Engineering Lab Topics on Communication System (EE3018).

• Report:

Functionally Reduced And-Inverter Graph (FRAIG)

This is a C++ program, which can parse digital circuits described in the AIGER format. It provides optimizations functions to reduce the circuit size and simulation time by finding functionally equivalent candidate (FEC) pairs. In this project, I designed my own data structure to identify FEC pairs and to perform Boolean logic simulations, used hash to detect structurally equivalent signals in a circuit, and called Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) solver to prove functionally equivalence. This is the final project of Data Structure and Programming (EE3011).

• Source code: