ESP Biography



NATHAN HUNT, Grad student: computer science & ~biology




Major: 6

College/Employer: MIT

Year of Graduation: G

Picture of Nathan Hunt

Brief Biographical Sketch:

Academic things: I'm a 1st year grad student majoring in computer science. My current research involves using machine learning (models that learn from past data) to predict good antibodies for binding particular targets. If you're wondering if computer science would be for you, or how you might combine it with another passion, I'm happy to talk after class!

Personal things: I'm married (my beautiful wife is in the picture), and we have a three month old son! Also Mormon =)



Past Classes

  (Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

C12564: Graph Search and 15-Puzzles in Splash 2018 (Nov. 17 - 18, 2018)
We'll learn what a graph is (hint: this kind is more like cities connected by roads than an x and y axis) and how we can find good paths in graphs. Then we'll see how we can represent a 15-puzzle as a graph and solve it by finding the right path. I'll provide the starter code, and you'll implement the graph search (in the Python programming language). This class should help you learn more about algorithms / computer science and how fun and useful they are. You'll see how graph general techniques can be applied to real world problems and have fun programming one yourself. See here (https://neighthan.github.io/graphs_and_games/eight_puzzle.html; just click play) for what this sort of puzzle looks like.


C11821: Graph Search and 15-Puzzles in Splash 2017 (Nov. 18 - 19, 2017)
We'll learn what a graph is (hint: this kind is more like cities connected by roads than an x and y axis) and how we can find good paths in graphs. Then we'll see how we can represent a 15-puzzle as a graph and solve it by finding the right path. I'll provide the starter code, and you'll implement the graph search (in the Python programming language). This class should help you see how graph techniques could be applied to real world problems and have fun programming one yourself. See here (https://neighthan.github.io/graphs_and_games/eight_puzzle.html; just click play) for what this sort of puzzle looks like.


C11268: Introduction to Sorting (w/ Python) in Spark 2017 (Mar. 11 - 12, 2017)
Sorting algorithms are a great introduction to computer science-style thinking. Join us to learn different ways to sort a list (of, e.g., numbers): slowly or very fast! See how even efficient algorithms can be beautifully simple and easy to understand. At the end, we'll implement some of these algorithms in Python (if you don't know any Python yet, I'll try to teach you, but that's not the focus of this class, so you'll be at a disadvantage. You can easily learn enough Python for this class, though! You can Google for a tutorial or use this one: https://www.learnpython.org/ (if you make it through the functions lesson, you should be set for class!)).