Welcome to Matt Patitz's home page

Hello! My name is Matt Patitz and I am a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University. I'm a member of the Laboratory for Nanoscale Self-Assembly, where you can read about my research interests and the work we've done.

This page contains a brief summary of my academic activities and some more information about me. You can contact me via email at mpatitz "at" cs "dot" iastate "dot" edu.

Education

I graduated from Adel DeSoto Minburn High School waaaaayyyy back in the spring of 1994. That fall I came to Ames, Iowa where I came to ISU and got my B.S. in Computer Science in December of 1998 and then my M.S., also in Computer Science. After completing the courses for my Master's, I left ISU to work as a software engineer for about 5 years. Then, in January of 2005, I decided to come back and pursue my PhD in Computer Science, which I have been doing since then.
My major professor is Dr. Jack Lutz.

 B.S., Computer Science   Iowa State University; received 12/19/1998
 M.S., Computer Science   Iowa State University; received 12/21/2002
 PhD, Computer Science   Iowa State University; 1/10/2005-present

Research

While working on my M.S., I was a research assistant for Dr. Akhilesh Tyagi working on reconfigurable processor architectures.
From January to August of 2005 I was a research assistant for Dr. Chou (who was my major professor when I started working on my PhD) in the ISU Complex Computation Lab. A more detailed breakdown of my research work follows, broken down into areas of interest and in order of increasingly recent work:

 Processor Architecture 
Modified the SUIF Compiler System and MachineSUIF Compiler Extension to evaluate a proposed architecture involving reconfigurable floating point computational units acting as extensible FIFO queue register sets (M.S. thesis)
Cellular Automata 
Work with Trend, a general purpose cellular automata simulator written by Dr. Chou:
  • Ported to cross-platform windowing system wxWidgets
  • Implemented full support for simulation and visualization of three-dimensional models
  • Added support for non-deterministic models
  • Added support for automated cellular automata space analysis
Cellular automata modeling:
  • Created a two-dimensional, self-reproducing and mutating ‘worm’ model to study evolvability of simple cellular automata replicators
  • Created a three-dimensional self-replicator with pseudo-genome encoding
 Nanoscale Self-Assembly 
  • Created a cellular automata model for the Trend simulator to allow simulation of generic two- and three-dimensional DNA tiling self-assembling systems, following both the abstract Tile Assembly Model and the kinetic Tile Assembly Model (kTAM)
  • Implemented a three-dimensional kTAM model of a layered Sierpinski triangle to analyze error rates of three-dimensional assemblies
  • Designed, developed, and released a C++ library and several software packages (along with source code) for algorithmically generating tilesets for the Tile Assembly Model. To see descriptions and to download them, go here
  • Designed, developed, and released a simulator and graphical tile type editor which can also be found here

Publications