The CIPRES Project: Inferring the Tree of Life
Speaker: Tandy Warnow , Dept of CS, University of Texas at Austin
Date: March 29 2004
Time: 11:30AM to 12:45PM
Location: 2-338
Host: P Clote- BC & B Berger MIT-CSAIL
Contact: Kathleen Dickey, 617 253 3037, kvdickey@mit.edu
Relevant URL: http://www-math.mit.edu/compbiosem/
The Tree of Life initiative -- to reconstruct the evolutionary history of all organisms -- is the
computational grand challenge of evolutionary biology. Current methods are limited to problems
several orders of magnitude smaller and also fail to provide sufficient accuracy at the high end of
their range.
The Cyberinfrastructure for Phylogenetic Research (CIPRes) project, recently funded by a
$11.6M Information Technology Grant from the NSF, funds 33 investigators from 13 institutions,
to help develop the computational infrastructure for evolutionary biologists so that they can
analyze large datasets. The group contains biologists, mathematicians, statisticians, and
computer scientists, working together to formulate more meaningful stochastic models of
sequence and genome evolution, to develop novel algorithms to analyze large datasets, and to
develop novel database technology appropriate for phylogeny reconstruction.
In this talk, I will describe the activity in the CIPRES project, and show progress my group is
making towards enabling highly accurate phylogenetic analyses of large datasets under the major
NP-hard optimization problems, Maximum Parsimony and Maximum Likelihood. Our current
techniques are able to analyze datasets contains thousands of taxa much faster than the current
best methods available.
The seminar is co-hosted by Professor Peter Clote of Boston College's Biology and Computer Science
Departments and MIT Professor of Applied Math Bonnie Berger. Professor Berger is also affiliated with
CSAIL & HST.
See other events that are part of Bioinformatics Seminar Series Spring 2004
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