Function SIG Meetings:

Function-SIG 2017 will be held on July 24-25, 2017 as part of ISMB/ECCB 2017.

Function-SIG 2017 Keynote Speakers

Hagit Shatkay, University of Delaware

Talk Title: Tell Us where You are Going: Pondering Literature, Locations, Life and Proteins.

Speaker Bio: Hagit Shatkay is an Associate Professor and Director of the Computational Biomedicine and Machine Learning Lab at the Dept. of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Delaware, with cross-appointments at the Dept. of Biomedical Engineering, and the Delaware Biotechnology Institute. Prior to joining the University of Delaware (2010) she was an Associate Professor and Director of the Computational Biology and Machine Learning Lab at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Before moving to academia, she was an Informatics Research Scientist with the Informatics Research group of Celera Genomics, and a post-doctoral fellow at NCBI.
She holds a PhD in Computer Science from Brown University, and an MSc and BSc in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Her research aims to develop and to employ machine learning and data-mining methods for addressing data-intensive problems in biology and medicine. She has been among the first, leading researchers in the area of biological text mining, working in the area for about 20 years now, and has co-authored (with Mark Craven) the book “Mining the Biomedical Literature” (MIT Press, 2012). She also works along with her colleagues and graduate students toward developing computational tools that can utilize data from diverse sources, including sequence, image and time-series data, in order to gain better understanding of protein location and function, and to better identify/predict certain medical conditions and disease.

John Moult, University of Maryland

Talk Title: Community Driven Critical Assessment: how well does it work, what have we learned, and what next?

Speaker Bio: John Moult is a Fellow of the Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research at the University of Maryland and Professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics. He is co-founder and chair of CASP (Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction), an organization that conducts large-scale experiments in protein structure modeling, and co-founder and co-chair of CAGI, which conducts community wide experiments to advance genome interpretation. His research interests include the relationship between genetic variation and human disease, computer modeling of protein structure and function, and large scale community experiments.