Shweta Bansal

Past Research


  • University of Texas at Austin
    Dr. Oscar Gonzalez: Department of Mathematics
    • Dynamics of DNA filament in a fluid
      The goal of this work was to explore the correlation between the shape of a closed (or cyclic) DNA filament and its migration speed in a uid. The basic problem was to determine how the average migration behavior of a filament is in uenced by features of its shape. Given a shape, we would like to find bounds on the migration speed. Conversely, given a speed, we would like to characterize the possible shapes.
    Phylo Lab: Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
    • Computational Phylogenetics
      A phylogenetic network is a model used to describe the evolution of a set of species with cross-species interaction. We studied the theory of triangulated graphs to understand how they could be applied to solve the Character Compatibility Problem on phylogenetic networks.

  • NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA
    Computational Sciences Division: Smart Systems Research Lab
    • Breast Cancer Diagnostics
      This project was for the development of a non-surgical system for detection of breast cancer (with specific application aboard the International Space Station). I designed a non-invasive diagnostic system that performed real-time image processing on results from an ultrasound monitor. Experiments were performed on tumored mice for optimization of the system.
    • Space Shuttle Docking
      Performed research for application of an automated docking system for the US Space Shuttle by studying shuttle systems and data provided by them; performed research on sensor fusion/data mining techniques (e.g. Kalman filtering); assisted in development of a data mining/data visualization tool for application to the International Space Station.
    Aviation Systems Research & Technology Division: Center-TRACON Automation System Group
    • Optimized Trajectories ("EGADS")
      Solely responsible for design and development of an error analysis tool that assists in the optimization of airplane trajectory predictions to be used for a suite of software tools (CTAS) for air traffic control (ATC) and flight management (FMS). Experience with software design issues, aeronautics and ATC problems, C, Matlab, Unix shell scripts.

 
  • Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA.
    Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
    • Senior Honors Thesis with Professor Glenn Appleby and Nicholas Tran
      Genome Rearrangements and Sorting by Reversals
      Abstract
    • Numerical PDEs with Professor Dan Ostrov
      Assisted research by computing numerical solutions of first-order nonlinear partial differential equations. These (Hamilton-Jacobi) equations were applied to photographic shape-from-shading (reconstructing a 3D surface based on a black+white photo of the surface) for discontinuous images.
    • Function Visualization with Professor Frank Farris
      Contributed with some basic development work to assist with the visualization of complex-valued functions in the plane using domain-coloring diagrams (each pixel in a domain is colored according to the output value of the function at that point in the domain).
    • Computational Phylogenetics with Professor Nicolas Tran
      Assisted research on finding a polynomial time method, using a randomized algorithm, for the sorting-by-reversals (SBR) problem that has applications in computational molecular biology.