Three graduate students from the Genomic Signal Processing laboratory of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University won awards from the Texas A&M Science of Information Days Workshop.
Mohammad Shahrokh Esfahani (left) won the first place poster presentation for his poster entitled “Prior Probability Construction Using Biological Signaling Pathways.” In this poster Esfahani presents his new method for quantifying the prior knowledge in the biological signaling pathways from a Bayesian perspective, whose final output is a prior probability on an uncertainty class of models. His work has been supervised by Dr. Edward Dougherty.
Esmaeil Atashpaz-Gargari (center) and Priyadharshini (Prya) S. Venkat (right) won the second and third places respectively for the best poster presentations Gargari’s poster, entitled “Improved Branch-and-Bound for U-curve optimization problem,” presented his new algorithm for feature selection inspired by a well-known phenomenon called peaking phenomenon. His method provides the best set of features based on an optimization framework. His work has been supervised by Dr. Ulisses Braga-Neto and Dr. Edward Dougherty.
Venkat 's poster, entitled “Belief Propagation in a Probabilistic Graphical Model of the Pancreatic Cancer Signaling Pathway,” introduces their work on using belief propagation to infer the state of genes from data obtained from biological techniques, whereas as an application the method is applied on Pancreatic Signaling Pathways. Her work has been supervised by Dr. Aniruddha Datta.
The Texas A&M Science of Information Days Workshop was sponsored by National Science Foundation Center for Science of Information and the Texas A&M electrical and computer engineering department and Computer Engineering and Systems group
Esfahani received the B.S. degree from the University of Tehran, Iran, in 2007 and the M.S. degree from Sharif University of Technology, Iran, in 2009, all in electrical engineering. Since 2009, he has been a Ph.D. student in the Genomic Signal Processing Laboratory. He has been awarded the Dwight Look College of Engineering Travel Award in 2013 and the Second-Place Top Poster Presentation from the Eight Mid-south Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS) Conference in 2011. His current research interests include uncertainty quantification, and small sample classification with the application in genomics.
Atashpaz-Gargari received his electrical engineering B.S. degree from Tabriz University, Iran, in 2004 and M.Sc. degree from the University of Tehran, Iran, in 2007. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the Genomic Signal Processing Laboratory His current research includes Proteomics and error estimation in small-sample classification problems.
Venkat also is a PhD student in the department. Her research is primarily focused on genomic signal processing. She graduated from the Indian Institute of Science in 2012 with Master’s degree in Instrumentation.