Title: Robust Self-Assembly

			Ho-Lin Chen
    Center for the Mathematics of Information
       California Institute of Technology

ABSTRACT: Self-assembly is the ubiquitous process by which objects
autonomously assemble into complexes. DNA self-assembly is emerging as
a key paradigm for nano-technology, nano-computation, and several
related disciplines. In nature, DNA self-assembly is often equipped
with explicit mechanisms for both error prevention and error
correction. For artificial self-assembly, these problems are even more
important since we are interested in assembling large systems with
great precision.

In this talk, I will first describe some recent progress on DNA
self-assembly and show some issues on these achievements. Then I will
present a simple self-assembly system and show how different error
correction systems can help achieve a better outcome for this
example. I will also briefly describe how these error correction
techniques can apply to general systems and how to make a general
framework for proving the effectiveness of these error correction
systems.