Some Computer Science Techniques in Bioinformatics

By

Prof. Wen-Lian Hsu
Distinguished Research Fellow, Institute of Information Science,
Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Date: Nov 18, 2008 (Tuesday)

Time: 10:30a.m - 11:30a.m

Venue: Rm. 121, Ho Sin Hang Engineering Building, CUHK

Abstract :

Tens of thousands of computer scientists have now devoted to helping speed up biological discovery. What roles should CS people play, what kind of techniques can we really adopt to solve biological problems? In this talk, I will share with you my own experiences in this area. We shall touch upon a basic nature of biological computing V dealing with noises, by going through several examples: DNA sequence assembly, NMR backbone assignment, de novo sequencing, protein quantitation, and biological literature mining.

Biography :

Professor Wen-Lian Hsu is a Distinguished Research Fellow in the Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica. He received a B.S. from the Department of Mathematics, National Taiwan University in 1973 and a Ph.D. in operations research from Cornell University in 1980, respectively. He then joined Northwestern University, and was promoted to tenured associate professor in 1986. In 1989, he joined the Institute of Information Science as a research fellow. Earlier in his career, Dr. Hsu focused on theoretical graph algorithms and frequently published papers in top-notch journals, such as JACM, SIAM Journal on Computing. After returning to Taiwan, he started research on automatic conversion of Pinyin to characters. In 1993, he invented a Chinese natural input method, ۵MJk, which has since attracted two million users and revolutionized the phonetic input for Chinese in Taiwan. Later, he moved into question answering, and bioinformatics. He is currently the Director of the International Graduate Program in Bioinformatics in Academia Sinica. Dr. Hsu received many awards including the Distinguished Research Fellow award of the National Science Council, K. T. Li (깩) breakthrough award, IEEE Fellow, Academia Sinica Investigator Award, and Teco Technology award (F޼). From 2001 to 2002, he was the President of the Artificial Intelligence Society in Taiwan.