Phone: 416-581-7443
Email: abeweb - AT - cs PERIOD toronto PERIOD edu
Webpage: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~aheifets/
PhD Computer Science student, University of Toronto.
MEng, Computer Science, Cornell University.
BS, Computer Science, Cornell University.
Pharmaceutical production requires efficient chemical assembly lines. Therefore, a core problem in chemistry is determining the best sequence of chemical reactions to create a desired molecule. While tools for this Chemical Synthesis Planning problem have been built (Corey and Wipke, Science, 1969), no such software has been widely adopted. Unfortunately, the scope of modern chemistry threatens to outgrow the capabilities of pencils and paper; for example, it would be a challenge for a human to remember all 11.8 million PubChem compounds submitted by chemical vendors, yet these are the starting materials for any synthesis. I am building a new generation of Computer-Aided Organic Synthesis tools to address these challenges. .
I enjoy algorithms over discrete graphs such as heuristic search, automated planning and reasoning, (approximations for) maximal common subgraphs, dynamic programming and branch-and-bound, and compiler optimizations. I am particularly interested in AND/OR graph search and A* search in domains with large branching factors.