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Hi! My research interests are in:
- Project GATTACA: Computational molecular virology. Retroviruses like HIV and RNA viruses like Influenza evolve at a much higher rate than DNA life forms. This is a formidable challenge to vaccine design and antiviral drug development, but is also an opportunity to observe evolution as it happens. We use the fast growing databases of viral sequences to build descriptive and generative models of viral molecular evolution. We also use them to infer viral envelope properties and suggest potential antigenic targets that cannot easily mutate away. In collaboration with virologists/immunologists, we try to correlate isolate sequence composition to important biological properties of the isolate, such as pathogenicity, infectivity and neutralizability. Along the way we design and develop visualization tools for multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) and other biological sequence data.
- Modeling the evolution of viral epidemics.
- Information and
Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D),
and specifically Spoken Language Technologies for Development (SLT4D), which
is the term we coined for our own subfield of ICT4D: finding ways to use
spoken language technologies (like automatic speech recognition, speech
synthesis, and human-machine dialog systems) to aid socio-economic
development around the world. Our current project, HealthLine, investigates
the use of a telephone-based automated dialog system for access to
healthcare information by community health workers in
Publications Teaching
Current PhD Students: Alona
Fyshe (MLD),
Chuang Wu (Comp Bio).
Current Undergraduate Students: Andy “Ko” Wing-Hong (CS, Math), Fang “Mark” Qiao (CS).
Graduated PhD Students: Jahanzeb Sherwani (CSD), Yong Lu (CSD), Dan Bohus (CSD), Stefanie Tomko (LTI), Jerry (Xiaojin) Zhu (LTI, MLD), Lin Chase (RI).
Past Post-docs: Andy Walsh (computational virology), Xiaojin Wang (machine learning), Stan F. Chen (language modeling), Pierre DuPont (language modeling).