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Workshop
Machine Learning in Computational Biology
Jean-Philippe Vert · Anna Goldenberg · Sara Mostafavi · Oliver Stegle

Tue Dec 10 07:30 AM -- 06:30 PM (PST) @ Harvey's Zephyr
Event URL: http://www.mlcb.org »

The field of computational biology has seen dramatic growth over the past few years, both in terms of new available data, new scientific questions, and new challenges for learning and inference. In particular, biological data are often relationally structured and highly diverse, well-suited to approaches that combine multiple weak evidence from heterogeneous sources. These data may include sequenced genomes of a variety of organisms, gene expression data from multiple technologies, protein expression data, protein sequence and 3D structural data, protein interactions, gene ontology and pathway databases, genetic variation data (such as SNPs), and an enormous amount of textual data in the biological and medical literature. Furthermore, next generation sequencing technologies and high-throughput imaging techniques are yielding terabyte scale data sets that require novel algorithmic solutions. New types of scientific and clinical problems require the development of novel supervised and unsupervised learning methods that can use these growing resources.

The goal of this workshop is to present emerging problems and innovative machine learning techniques in computational biology. We will invite several speakers from the biology/bioinformatics community who will present current research problems in computational biology, and we will invite contributed talks on novel learning approaches in computational biology. We encourage contributions describing either progress on new bioinformatics problems or work on established problems using methods that are substantially different from established alternatives. Kernel methods, graphical models, feature selection, non-parametric models and other techniques applied to relevant bioinformatics problems would all be appropriate for the workshop. We are particularly keen on considering contributions related to the prediction of functions from genotypes and to applications in personalized medicine, as illustrated by our invited speakers. The targeted audience are people with interest in learning and applications to relevant problems from the life sciences, including NIPS participants without any existing research link to computational biology.

Author Information

Jean-Philippe Vert (Google)
Anna Goldenberg (SickKids/University of Toronto)

Dr Goldenberg is a Senior Scientist in Genetics and Genome Biology program at SickKids Research Institute, recently appointed as the first Varma Family Chair in Biomedical Informatics and Artificial Intelligence. She is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, faculty member and an Associate Research Director, Health at Vector Institute and a fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Child and Brain Development group. Dr Goldenberg trained in machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, with a post-doctoral focus in computational biology and medicine. The current focus of her lab is on developing machine learning methods that capture heterogeneity and identify disease mechanisms in complex human diseases as well as developing risk prediction and early warning clinical systems. Dr Goldenberg is a recipient of the Early Researcher Award from the Ministry of Research and Innovation. She is strongly committed to creating responsible AI to benefit patients across a variety of conditions.

Sara Mostafavi (University of British Columbia)
Oliver Stegle (EMBL-EBI)

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