Tutorial - Bioinformatics Basics with Applications for Computational Intelligence

Presenters: Clare Bates Congdon and Daniel Ashlock

Description

This tutorial is aimed at researchers interested in learning about the field of bioinformatics and some of the biological background needed to undertake computational intelligence work in this area. It presumes no particular background in biology and is intended to equip newcomers with the necessary background to participate in the sessions for the Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.

Topics covered will include the "central dogma" of biology, gene and protein structure, and problems such as sequence alignment, motif inference, phylogenetics, and DNA barcoding. A brief survey of the techniques of computational intelligence in the context of bioinformatics will be included.

Clare Bates Congdon received a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from The University of Michigan in 1995. She is now a Research Scientist in the Computer Science Department at Colby College and is funded by the NIH INBRE program for her project "Machine Learning for Phylogenetics and Genomics".

Daniel Ashlock received a PhD in Mathematics from Caltech in 1990. He is now a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Guelph where he holds a Chair in Bioinformatics. He is currently funded by the NSF to work on the sequencing of the maize genome and on the analysis and display of biological networks. He also is funded by the NIH to work on recombination in retroviruses. Dr. Ashlock is a senior member of the IEEE and an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation.