Information foraging with an oracle.

During ecological decisions, such as when foraging for food or selecting a weekend activity, we often have to balance the costs and benefits of exploiting known options versus exploring novel ones. Here, we ask how individuals address such cost-benefit tradeoffs during tasks in which we can either explore by ourselves or seek external advice from an oracle (e.g.

On the number of trials needed to distinguish similar alternatives.

A/B testing is widely used to tune search and recommendation algorithms, to compare product variants as efficiently and effectively as possible, and even to study animal behavior. With ongoing investment, due to diminishing returns, the items produced by the new alternative B show smaller and smaller improvement in quality from the items produced by the current system A. By formalizing this observation, we develop closed-form analytical expressions for the sample efficiency of a number of widely used families of slate-based comparison tests.

Modes and cuts in metabolic networks: complexity and algorithms.

Constraint-based approaches recently brought new insight into our understanding of metabolism. By making very simple assumptions such as that the system is at steady-state and some reactions are irreversible, and without requiring kinetic parameters, general properties of the system can be derived. A central concept in this methodology is the notion of an elementary mode (EM for short) which represents a minimal functional subsystem.