[Colloquium] Talks at TTIC: Aly Khan, Univ of Chicago

[Dawn Ellis]

When:    Thursday, February 27th at 11am

Where:    TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room #526

Speaker:  Aly Khan, Univ of Chicago

Title:       New computational approaches for old biological challenges.

The explosion of high-throughput methods in biology has created exciting
opportunities for computer science.  For example, one of the biggest
success stories of computer science applied to biology has been the use of
approximate string matching algorithms to assemble genomes. These
algorithms use high-throughput sequences of DNA fragments to find matching
overlaps, which are then stitched together to assemble a whole genome. Yet
despite successfully assembling hundreds of genomes, biologists still do
not fully understand how information in the genome sequence is used by the
cell to regulate gene expression, and how regulated gene expression
determine cellular function and disease.

My talk focuses on two machine learning problems aimed at decoding the
regulatory mechanisms underlying gene expression. First, I will describe a
regularized regression based approach to model signaling networks in
cancer.  Second, I will introduce a new max-margin based approach to model
and predict miRNA gene-target interactions in the immune system. The talk
will briefly present necessary background on biology and experimental data
types in order to make the machine learning problems understandable to a
computer science audience. I will conclude my talk by introducing a few
open problems in computational biology and their implications towards
improving human health.

Host: Jinbo Xu,  j3xu at ttic.edu

-- 
*Dawn Ellis*
Administrative Coordinator,
Bookkeeper
773-834-1757
dellis at ttic.edu

TTIC
6045 S. Kenwood Ave.
Chicago, IL. 60637
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