June 09, 2010 –
From left: Baldi, Lopes and Li
Pierre Baldi, Crista Lopes and Chen Li, CALIT2-affiliated professors in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, have notched notable accomplishments recently.
The Italian Neural Network Society awarded Baldi, Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science and director of the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, the 2010 Eduardo R. Caianiello Prize for Scientific Contributions to the Field of Neural Networks.
The prize, named for late Italian physicist Eduardo Caianiello, is awarded for significant contributions to the field of neural networks – circuits of biological or artificial neurons that can be used to build artificial intelligence systems. Caianiello was a pioneer in the field and founder of the Italian Institute for Advanced Studies.
Baldi studies intelligence in natural and artificial systems. His current projects include developing machine learning and other statistical approaches for AI and large-scale data mining, developing chemistry expert systems, predicting protein properties, comparing genomes and understanding gene regulation, and computationally screening and designing new drugs and chemical interactions.
Lopes, informatics associate professor, was elected a Senior Member of IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
IEEE, the world’s leading professional association for the advancement of technology, confers Senior Member status only on approximately eight percent of its members – those who have attained outstanding research accomplishments and performed exceptional service to the scientific community.
Lopes, a co-inventor of “aspect-oriented programming” also conducts research in software engineering, specifically large-scale source code search and analysis, and architectures for massive multi-user systems.
Li, associate professor of computer science, and ICS colleague Xiaohui Xie were awarded a $100,000 grant from Intel to support research on genome compression and direct querying of compressed genomic data. The two researchers are collaborating with China’s Northeastern University.
Genomic data play a large role in the new medical paradigm of personalized medicine, where storage and the ability to search these data sets are critical. Li and Xie are compressing the huge data sets to less than 4 megabytes – small enough to send as an email attachment – without losing any information.
The Intel grant supports their efforts to further optimize their compression algorithms, as well as a new research project focused on querying human genomes.
