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 make a quick review on how to do error correction
in linear systems and describe the necessary properties to extend the scheme
to handle general 2-dimensional input systems. Then I will describe a
3-dimensional error correction scheme that can keep the size of
shape/pattern formed by the input tile system. In the end, I will describe
self-healing schemes which are originally designed to handle another type of
error in DNA self-assembly. Besides its original functionality, this kind of
error correction schemes might help removing some of the assumptions
required in the previous proofs.