Dr. Dukka KC, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Wichita State University, will present a talk on Wednesday, May 5, 2021, at 3:00 p.m.
Dr. KC will discuss some past and ongoing projects in his lab related to machine learning/deep learning-based approaches for an important problem in Bioinformatics: protein post-translational modification.
Talk Title
Bioinformatics as an emerging field of Data Science: Protein post-translation modification prediction using Deep Learning
Talk Abstract
In this talk, I will be presenting about some of the past and ongoing projects in my lab especially related to Machine Learning/Deep Learning based approaches for one of the important problems in Bioinformatics – protein post-translational modification.
Especially, I will focus on our endeavors to get away from manual feature extraction (hand-crafted feature extraction) from protein sequence, use of notion of transfer learning to solve problems where there is scarcity of labeled data in the field, and stacking/ensemble-based approaches.
I will also summarize our future plans for using multi-label, multi-task and multi-modal learning for the problem. I will highlight some of the ongoing preliminary works in disaster resiliency. Finally, I will provide my vision for strengthening data science related research, teaching, and service for MTU’s college of computing.
Biography
Dr. Dukka KC is the Director of Data Science Lab, Director of Data Science Efforts, Director of Disaster Resilience Analytics Center and Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) in the Department of EECS at Wichita State University. His current efforts are focused on application of various computing/data science concepts including but not limited to Machine Learning, Deep Learning, HPC, etc. for elucidation of protein sequence, structure, function and evolution relationship among others.
He has received grant funds totaling $4.25M as PIs or Co-PIs, spanning 17 funded grants. He was the PI on the $499K NSF Excellence in Research project focused on developing Deep Learning based approaches for Protein Post-translational modification sites.
He received his B.E. in computer science in 2001, his M.Inf. in 2003 and his Ph.D. in Informatics (Bioinformatics) in 2006 from Kyoto University, Japan. Subsequently he did a postdoc at Georgia Institute of Technology working on refinement algorithms for protein structure prediction. He then moved to UNC-Charlotte and did another postdoc working on functional site predictions in proteins. He was a CRTA Fellow in National Cancer Institute at National Institutes of Health where he was working on intrinsically symmetric domains.
Prior to his arrival at WSU, he was associate professor and graduate program director in the Department of Computational Science and Engineering at North Carolina A&T State University.
Dr. KC has published more than 30 journal and 20 conference papers in the field and is associate editor for two leading journals (BMC Bioinformatics and Frontiers in Bioinformatics) in the field. He also dedicates much of his efforts to K-12 education, STEM workforce development, and increasing diversity in engineering and science.