[CS] Ashka Shah Candidacy Exam/Nov 13, 2025

[via cs]

This is an announcement of Ashka Shah's Candidacy Exam.
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Candidate: Ashka Shah

Date: Thursday, November 13, 2025

Time:  9 am CST

Remote Location: https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/94893877469?pwd=TbVRL5BJEoMG8XLLJLPiQRRRWa89JT.1 
Meeting ID: 948 9387 7469 Passcode: 980712

Location: JCL 298

Title: Causal Discovery for Biological Mechanism Inference and AI-guided Experimental Design

Abstract: Mechanism discovery is a central objective in science. Biological mechanisms — the causal cascade of events resulting in an observable feature— can unearth cellular programming, explain diseases, and identify targets for therapeutics. Despite advances in experimentation, which give us genome-level insight into cellular processing, and the advent of deep learning models in biology, data-driven mechanism discovery remains elusive. Our work examines the current state of causal discovery (algorithms for inferring cause-effect relationships from data) and its application to biological mechanism discovery. Our contributions address three themes: (a) scale, (b) structural priors, and (c) experimental design, which we view as fundamental to applying causal discovery to real scientific problems.

Advisor: Rick Stevens

Committee: Rick Stevens, Ian Foster, Bryon Aragam