New ECE Seminar Announcement
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Title: Species Signatures and their Application
Khalid Sayood
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Date: 3/7/2008
Time: 11:00 am
Location: 4164 Harold Frank Hall
Abstract: Biological sequences, such as DNA molecules that make up genes and genomes and amino acid sequences which make up proteins, carry within their structure many different kinds of information. One piece of information is the evolutionary history of the organism. By using various information theoretic measures we can obtain numerical characterization of these sequences. If these characterizations are both discriminatory and pervasive we can treat them as "signatures" of the species. These signatures can be can be used in a variety of applications including the identification of biological materials of unknown origin, reconstruction of genomic sequences from environmental samples, and molecular phylogeny. In this talk we present a number of different species signatures and describe how they have been used.
Biography: Khalid Sayood received his BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester in 1977 and 1979 respectively, and his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University in 1982. He joined the University of Nebraska in 1982 where he currently serves as the Henson Professor of Engineering. From 1995 to 1996 he served as the founding head of the Computer Vision and Image Processing group at the Turkish National Research Council Informatics Institute. He spent the 1996-1997 academic year as a Visiting Professor at Bogazici University, Turkey. He is the author of Introduction to Data Compression, 3rd ed., (Morgan Kaufmann, 2005), Understanding Circuits: Learning Problem Solving Using Circuit Analysis (Morgan Claypool 2005), Learning Programming Using MATLAB (Morgan Claypool 2006), and the editor of Lossless Compression Handbook (Academic Press, 2002).
In recent years his research has shifted more from compression to bioinformatics. His plenary lecture at EUSIPCO 2005 was "Data Compression and Bioinformatics: Searching for structure in all kinds of places." He was awarded a K25 Career Award from NIH which allows him to spend five years reinventing himself as a computational biologist.
Departmental Host: Professor Jerry D. Gibson
Submitted by: Jerry Gibson (gibson@ece.ucsb.edu)