Ian Wood

Hi everyone,

I just finished my first year as a PhD student in the Complex Systems track of the Informatics PhD program at Indiana University-Bloomington. My undergraduate degree is a BS in Computer Science from Clemson University. I enjoy programming and know my way around computers; although this often seems to mean that I can break my computer in new and baffling ways, I always solve the problem. I know a number of programming languages including C, Java, and Python, and I've spent a lot of time recently learning R, igraph, and the Gephi Java API.

I've not yet decided on a specific research area, but through my class work I've found myself drifting to agent-based modeling of game simulations, networks, and bio-inspired computing methods. In particular I've tried to analyze icosystem.com's Game in terms of the mutual information entropy shared between players, and the evolutionary dynamics of strategies in the iterative prisoner's dilemma played on different network structures. I've also just started working to further develop a document classifier that uses a model of T-Cell cross-regulation for binary document classification. Previous research has shown that such an algorithm is competitive with other state-of-the-art techniques for document classification, and the highly decentralized model could be beneficial for distributed computing and could suggest insight into how real immune systems operate.

I'm excited to see everyone's work on the projects, and I hope that through heterogeneous mixing with people in other disciplines I might develop a better understanding of what I'm doing. If you think I could be a good fit for your project's working group, feel free to email me at ibwood@indiana.edu.