[Colloquium] Talk by Andrey Rzhetsky on Wednesday November 14, 2007

[Margery Ishmael]

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE - TALK

Date: Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Time: 2:30 p.m.
Place: Ryerson 251

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Speaker: ANDREY RZHETSKY

From: Department of Medicine and Computation Institute, University of  
Chicago

Web page: http://genome6.cpmc.columbia.edu/andrey/andrey.html

Title: Text-mining, pathways, and human disease

Abstract: Picture a tribe of bright, but ignorant, cave people trying  
to understand
the work of a modern car by analyzing a collection of damaged cars  
produced
by various makers. After many hours of hard manual labor, the cave  
people
disassemble the cars into myriad small parts. Some parts are damaged,
whereas some are intact.  A few interact with each other, while  
others do
not. Some pieces are different in different cars, yet apparently have  
the
same function. The leap to understanding the whole from knowing the  
parts
requires compilation of many pieces of information into a comprehensive
³computable² model. Researchers in the field of molecular biology are  
in a
situation similar to that of the junkyard cave people, save that they  
are
contemplating a collection of diverse pieces of cellular machinery‹the
number of those cellular components is way greater than the number of  
parts
in a typical car‹the number of nodes in human molecular networks is  
measured
in hundreds of thousands when all substances (genes, RNAs, proteins, and
other molecules) are considered together. These numerous substances  
can be
in turn present or absent in dozens of cell types in humans‹clearly, the
complexity is too great to yield to manual analysis.

The information overload in molecular biology is a mere example of the
status common to all fields of the current science and culture: An
ever-strengthening avalanche of novel data and ideas overwhelms  
specialists
and non-specialists alike, unavoidably fragments knowledge, and makes
enormous chunks of knowledge invisible/inaccessible to those who  
desperately
need it.

The help of relieving the information overload may come from the text- 
miners
who can automatically extract and catalogue facts described in books and
journals.

My talk will touch the following six questions: What is text-mining?  In
what ways is text-mining useful? What can large-scale analyses of  
scientific
literature tell us about both active and forgotten knowledge? What  
can such
analyses tells us about the scientific community itself?  How do
mathematical models help us to differentiate true and false  
statements in
literature?  How will text-mining help us to find cures for human and
non-human maladies?

***The talk will be followed by refreshments in Ryerson 255***

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Host:  Ian Foster

People in need of assistance should call 773-834-8977 in advance.

For information on future CS talks: http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/events


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