Temple Faculty Research Award for 2008-2009

Dr. Zoran Obradovic has been named as the recipient of the Temple University Faculty Research Award for 2008-2008.
The official presentation of the award was made at the Faculty Awards Convocation on April 28th 2009 in the Great Court of Mitten Hall.
The following article on Dr. Obradovic's work that has earned him this year's Temple University Research Award appeared in Temple Times of April 17, 2009 http://www.temple.edu/newsroom/2008_2009/04/stories/obradovic.htm.

IST Center Welcomes Dr. Yuhong Guo

In January 2009 Dr. Yuhong Guo has joined the IST Center and the CIS Department as an Assistant Professor. She has just completed a post-doctoral training in machine learning at the Australian National University. Previously, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Alberta where in 2007 she received her Ph.D. while working in the laboratory of Prof. D. Schuurman. Dr. Guo is a recipient of 2005 IJCAI Distinguished Paper Award (1323 papers submitted to this conference, of which 240 were accepted and 3 were honored with this award). Her primary area of research is machine learning and she is also interested in bioinformatics.

Dr. Obradovic gives a keynote lecture at BIBM 2008

On Nov. 04 Dr. Zoran Obradovic, Director of Center for Information Science and Technology, gave a keynote lecture at the IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine. This multidisciplinary conference brought together computational scientists from several disciplines and from several continents who exchanged research results in databases, algorithms, interfaces, visualization, modeling, simulation and ontology as applied to high throughput data-rich areas in biology and biomedical engineering.

In his keynote lecture &qout;Functions of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins and Relationship with Human Disease Network," Dr. Obradovic described their award winning predictor of protein disorder (CASP 7) and explained how they recently used it to provide a leap jump in understanding relationship between protein disorder and protein function. In particular, he discussed their characterization of 238 Swiss-Prot functional categories as strongly positively correlated with predicted long intrinsically disordered regions. He also presented the results of their most recent large scale analysis of intrinsic disorder in genes implicated in Human Disease Network. This new study found that intrinsic disorder in disease genes is mainly involved in protein-protein interactions. Genes related to several classes of diseases were found to have significantly higher occurrence of alternative splicing (AS), and strong evidence was provided that intrinsic disorder, together with AS, plays an important role in these classes of diseases.

IST Center Welcomes Dr. Haibin Ling

Haibin Ling whose research interests are in Computer Vision, Medical Imaging, Human Computer Interaction, Machine Learning has joined the CIS Department.

Professor Ling received the B.S. degree in mathematics and the MS degree in computer science from Peking University, China, in 1997 and 2000, respectively, and the PhD degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, in Computer Science in 2006.

From 2000 to 2001, he was an assistant researcher in the Multi-Model User Interface Group at Microsoft Research Asia. From 2006 to 2007, he worked as a postdoctoral scientist at the University of California Los Angeles. After that, he joined Siemens Corporate Research as a research scientist. Since Fall 2008, he has been an Assistant Professor at Temple University.

Dr. Ling's research interests include computer vision, medical image analysis, human computer interaction, and machine learning. He received the Best Student Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) in 2003.

SIAM SDM 09

Dr. Zoran Obradovic is serving as a Program Chair for 2009 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 09) which is one of the premier peer-reviewed forums for sharing research results related to knowledge extraction from large, complex and noisy datasets. Jointly with his program co-chair Prof. Huan Liu from Arizona State University, Prof. Obradovic selected an outstanding expert team of 13 area chairs and 148 program committee members working at academia and industry around 5 continents who will help reviewing manuscripts submitted for SDM07 consideration. Deadline for SDM09 submissions is Oct. 03, 2008 Oct. 06, 2008, while the conference will be held April 30 - May 2, 2009 at a resort near Reno, Nevada.

For more information, visit the conference website, or our Updates page.

Recruiting: Tenure-Track Assistant Professor

The Department of Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) and the Center for Information Science and Technology (IST) at Temple University are recruiting for a tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor level. The position is contingent upon completion of a Ph.D. in computer science or a related field by August 15, 2008. ... READ THE FULL AD ...

IST Center Welcomes Dr. Alexander Yates

Dr. Alexander P. Yates has joined the CIS Department and the IST Center as Assistant Professor. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington while working in the laboratory of Dr. Oren Etzioni. Dr. Yates'research interests include computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, specifically information extraction from the Web, entity resolution, natural language interfaces, parsing, machine learning, and probabilistic methods.

The ISTZORAN Group wins the Protein Disorder Prediction category at regions at the seventh Critical Assessments of Structure Prediction experiments meeting (CASP 7), Nov. 26-30, 2006.

The VSL2 predictor of intrinsically disordered protein regions developed by the ISTZORAN group has been rated as the best model at the 7th Critical Assessments of Structure Prediction experiments meeting (CASP 7). An older version of this model was the best model at CASP6.

You can try the VSL2 predictor or download the VSL2 predictor package and set it up on your own machine (detailed instructions). You can choose whether to use computationally demanding features derived from PSI-BLAST profiles and/or secondary structure predictions.

Citation: Peng K., Radivojac P., Vucetic S., Dunker A.K., and Obradovic Z., Length-Dependent Prediction of Protein Intrinsic Disorder, BMC Bioinformatics 7:208, 2006.

Information Science and Technology Center Report for Sept 2000 - Sept 2005 Period

September 2005 marked five years from inauguration of Information Science and Technology (IST) Center at Temple University. The main mission of the IST Center is advanced research and education aimed toward solving challenging problems in data mining, machine learning, multimedia databases, data compression, biomedical informatics, pattern recognition, computer vision, robot mapping, computational genomics, and artificial intelligence. The results of investigations at the IST Center in 2000-2005 period were published as about 60 journal papers, 123 refereed conference papers, and 9 refereed book chapters. The awarded research funding for projects that involve investigators from IST Center was near 6 million dollars. Specific activities at the IST Center of the first five year period are summarized in this report. Read the full report: HTML or PDF