INTERDISCIPLINARY STOCHASTIC PROCESSES COLLOQUIUM Tuesday September 18, room 60 Evans, 4.10 - 5.00pm Speaker: Ashish Goel (Management Science and Engineering, Stanford) Title: Towards programmable self-assembly and molecular machines DNA Self-assembly has emerged as an important technique for molecular computation and nano-technology. At these scales, self- assembly is governed by simple (and local) probabilistic rules for growth, making it amenable to algorithmic techniques. We will discuss two important challenges in algorithmic self-assembly: robustness and efficiency. This talk will present recent results, and also attempt to provide a road-map of open problems. There has been significant recent experimental progress in designing simple molecular machines using restriction enzymes, which are molecules that recognize and cleave specific DNA sequences. We present simple theoretical constructions which can use restriction enzymes to implement complicated functionality such as Turing machines. Probabilistic analysis is an important (perhaps the most important) piece of the puzzle.