Special ET-I3 Seminar on Tuesday 10:30 GWC 308: Title: Knowledge Management in Bioinformatics: An Inter-disciplinary 'Killer-App' for CS Research

[Subbarao Kambhampati <rao@asu.edu>]

There is going to be a special ET-I3 seminar on this coming Tuesday (Nov 
12th) at 10:30am in GWC 308.
This is co-sponsored by the AI lab--of which the speaker used to be a 
denizen (and thus munchies may be available aplenty).


(other information on et-i3 seminars can be found at 
http://rakaposhi.eas.asu.edu/et-i3 ).



Title: Knowledge Management in Bioinformatics: An Inter-disciplinary 
'Killer-App'
       for CS Research

Speaker: Biplav Srivastava, Ph.D.
         IBM India Research Laboratory
         sbiplav@in.ibm.com

Abstract:

There is good research and there is successful research. What makes good 
individual
research projects successful is not just their technical depth but also how
they are put together for solving a pressing need. The vision to put a man 
on moon
and bring him successfully back, was one such need, which collectively 
drove many
research projects and technologies across a variety of disciplines to
success in the 60s.

What is such a pressing need today ? In this talk, we introduce knowledge 
management
in bioinformatics as one 'killer-app' that can drive much of CS research in 
this
decade. A number of exciting developments ranging from near completion of 
the Human
Genome project, microarrays that can measure the expression levels of 
thousands of
genes simultaneously, easy access to all kinds of biological data, 
well-structured
collection of domain ontologies, and IT requirements more challenging than 
Moore's
law, provide the context in which a hapless biologist must make sense of 
biological
phenomena and pursue goals like drug discovery or personalized medicine. 
The aim is
to technologically empower the biologist in a manner that relegates IT/ CS 
details
to behind the scene.

The talk will present the general problem and identify entailed issues for CS
research in systems (databases, networking, security), AI (planning, 
ontologies/KR,
NLP, self-management), multi-media and data mining. We will specifically 
focus on
infrastructure where the IBM vision of a Life Sciences Framework will be 
presented
followed by details of a first-step prototype that facilitates KM with gene
expression, literature, protein and pathways data.

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