Christopher Hillar

 MSRI/NSF Postdoc fellow

 NSA Young Investigator

Addresses:
Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience
University of California, Berkeley
575A Evans Hall, MC 3198
Berkeley, CA 94720-3198
Office: 573 Evans Hall
Phone: (510) 642-7252
FAX: (510) 642-7206

MSRI: Mathematical Sciences Research Institute
17 Gauss Way
Berkeley, CA 94720-5070
FAX: (510) 642-8609

Email: chillarmsri.org

Ph.D. U.C. Berkeley (Mathematics, 2001 - 2005)
B.S. Yale University (Mathematics, Computer Science, 2000)


NSF Joint Institutes Postdoctoral Fellowship: I was awarded this at MSRI with the following proposal. MSRI is awesome.

NSA Grant: I was awarded an NSA Young Investigators Grant. My proposal can be found here.

Careers in Math: If you've ever wondered what you could do with a math degree (undergrad or otherwise), I highly recommend you check out SIAM's careers in math brochure

Theoretical Neuroscience: I have a Joint Math Institutes Postdoctoral Fellowship (NSF/MSRI) and also work at the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at UC Berkeley. Some projects so far:

(1) with Sohl-Dickstein and Koepsell, we are working on Hopfield networks.

(2) With Guy Isely and Friedrich Sommer, we are working on sparse coding combined with compressed sensing as a principle of brain communication and compression. (NIPS 2010 accepted spotlight submission pdf)

New: Theory paper preprint: Ramsey theory reveals the conditions when sparse coding on subsampled data is unique. pdf | arxiv.

(3) With Lek-Heng Lim, we are working on some complexity problems involving tensors. Most tensor problems are NP-Hard. pdf (a journal article is in preparation).

(4) With Kilian Koepsell, we are developing computational models of retinal processing.

Research Interests: Structured polynomial systems, computational algebraic geometry, combinatorics, matrix analysis, applications of mathematics to neuroscience