Bud Mishra
Prof of CS and Math, Courant Inst.
The dream of a powerful integrated computational framework, only hinted at in Ibn Sina’s Canon, can now be
fulfilled at a global scale as a result of many recent advances: foundational advances in statistical
inference; hypothesis-driven experiment design and analysis and the dissemination of peer-reviewed
publications among communities of scientists; distributed large-scale databases of scientific and auxiliary
experimental data; algorithmic approaches to model building and model checking; machine learning approaches to
generate large number of hypotheses, and multiple hypotheses testing to tame computational complexity and
false-discovery rates, etc. More specifically, in the area of biomedical sciences, there has been an explosion
of new technological advances: genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics; web interfaces allowing patients to
keep personal logs; genome-wide association studies; detailed analyses of hereditary, genetic and ancestral
history of patients’ genomes; construction of phenomenological models of disease initiation and progression;
type-level and token-level analysis of the causal bases of human diseases; translational systems biology for
biochemical explanations of diseases; and the accessible integration of these capabilities into a multi-faceted
system with specific attention to the ethical use of medical data, patient privacy, powerful hardware and
software infrastructure and cognitive consonance with biomedical scientists, physicians and care-givers. We will
focus on an application centered on cancer – “the emperor of all maladies.”
Hosted by Drs. Doron Betel and Olivier Elemento