[CSEE-colloq] CSEE Colloquium Talk - Friday, February 10, 2012 @ 1:00p.m. in ITE 325B

[Keara Fliggins]

CSEE COLLOQUIUM

University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Friday, February 10, 2012
ITE Building, Room 325B
1:00 p.m.

An Integrated Machine Learning Framework for Analyzing Protein-Ligand 
Interaction Data


Dr. Huzefa Rangwala
Assistant Professor, Computer Science & Engineering
George Mason University

Abstract:
Proteins have a vast influence on the molecular machinery of life. 
Stunningly complex networks of proteins perform innumerable functions in 
every living cell.  Small organic molecules (a.k.a. ligands) can bind to 
different proteins and modulate (inhibit/activate) their functions. 
Understanding these interactions provides insight into the underlying 
biological processes and is useful for designing therapeutic drugs.

In this talk I will describe our work related to the analysis of 
information associated with proteins and their interacting molecule 
partners (protein-ligand activity matrix). The underlying hypothesis of 
our approach is that by extracting information from protein-ligand 
activity matrix, we are drawing bridges between the structure of 
chemical compounds (chemical space) and the structure of the proteins 
and their functions (biological space).  I will present an approach used 
for mining relational data, especially when the data is sparse and high 
dimensional. I will also present methods that are based on the 
principles of multi-task learning and semi-supervised learning.

Biography:
Huzefa Rangwala is an Assistant Professor at the department of Computer 
Science & Engineering, George Mason University. He holds affiliate 
positions with the Department of Bioengineering and the Department of 
Bioinformatics & Computational Biology. He received his Ph.D. in 
Computer Science from the University of Minnesota in the year 2008. His 
core research interests include bioinformatics, machine learning, and 
high performance computing. Specifically, he is working on developing 
new data mining algorithms and applying them to the fields of genomics, 
structural bioinformatics, drug discovery and social media analysis.


Host: Dr. Marie desJardins, mariedj at cs.umbc.edu