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Note: Starting in Fall
2007, the Machine Learning (15-681) course is being renumbered to 10-601. Here is the web page.
Hi! My research interests are in:
- Project GATTACA: Computational molecular virology and vaccine design. 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, 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 they way we design and develop visualization tools for multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) and other biological sequence data.
- Computational Molecular Biology and more specifically Computational Biolinguistics. Many of the problems in this area involve statistical modeling of long sequences of symbols/building blocks (nucleotides or amino acids) and their relationship to proteins and their function. This is very similar to the problem of modeling natural language: long sequences of symbols (letters, words), and their relationship to the deep structure and meaning of sentences. We are hoping that some of the models and techniques we have developed in the past decade for language modeling will prove useful in the biological domain. Current projects include computational molecular evolution, computational virology, and multi-species gene-expression analysis.
- Speech and Language
Technology for Development (SLT4D) is the term we coined for our own
subfield of ICT4D:
finding ways to use speech and language technologies (like automatic
speech recognition and human-machine dialog systems) to help people around
the world help themselves. Our current project, HealthLine, investigates the
use of spoken language interfaces for community health workers across
Publications Teaching
Current PhD Students: Yong Lu (CSD), Jahanzeb Sherwani* (CSD), Chuang Wu (Comp Bio).
Current Post-Doc: Andy Walsh (computational virology).
Graduated PhD Students: Lin Chase*(RI), Jerry (Xiaojin) Zhu* (LTI, MLD), Stefanie Tomko (LTI), Dan Bohus*(CSD).
Past Post-docs: Pierre DuPont (language modeling), Stan F. Chen (language modeling), Xiaojin Wang (machine learning).