Galois is pleased to host the following tech talk.
These talks are open to the interested public–please join us!
(There is no need to pre-register for the talk.)
title:
Inferring Phylogenies Using Evolutionary Algorithms
speaker:
Erlend Hamberg
time:
Tuesday, 12 March 2013, 10:30am.
location:
Galois Inc.
421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300,
Portland, OR, USA
(3rd floor of the Commonwealth building)
abstract:
An important problem in genetics is phylogenetic inference: Coming up with good hypotheses for the evolutionary relationship between species – usually represented as a “family tree”. As the amount of molecular data (e.g. DNA sequences) quickly grows, efficient algorithms become increasingly important to analyze this data. A maximum-likelihood approach with models for nucleotide evolution allows us to use all the sequence data, but is a computationally expensive approach. The number of possible trees also grows rapidly as we include more species. It is therefore necessary to use heuristic search methods to find good hypotheses for the “true” tree. Evolutionary algorithms (EA) is a class of such search/optimization algorithms that has been shown to perform well in other areas where the search space is large and irregular. I will explain my approach and my findings from using an evolutionary algorithm for inferring phylogenies from molecular data.
bio:
Erlend Hamberg obtained his M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in 2011. For his Master’s thesis research he worked on the problem of inferring phylogenies (i.e. the evolutionary relationship between species) from molecular data. He was previously at ARM where he worked on the drivers for Mali series of GPUs.