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TUTORIAL II
Opportunities and Challenges in Computational Biology
Srinivas Aluru
Iowa State University
M. Vidyasagar
Tata Consultancy Services

Audience: This tutorial is meant for computer professionals, software developers, researchers, educators, graduate students, and employees from software companies interested in targeting computational biology as an application area.

Course Description: Computational biology is emerging as a major thrust area for academic research and industrial application in the 21st century. The goal of this tutorial is to provide a comprehensive introduction to the field of computational biology to an audience with a computing background that is interested in participating in research and/or commercial applications in this field. Major subareas in computational biology including sequence alignments, mapping, fragment assembly, microarray data analysis and protein folding will be covered in the tutorial. Current progress on genome-scale projects will be discussed and information on resources available on the internet including genomic and protein data-bases and software tools will be provided. Potential applications of high performance computing to computational biology will be highlighted. Important open problems and opportunities for development of software systems will be discussed. No background in biology is assumed.

Lecturers: Srinivas Aluru is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engg. and the Lawrence H. Baker Center for Bioinformatics and Biological Statistics at Iowa State University. He received his B. Tech degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 1989 and his M. S. and Ph. D. degrees in Computer Science from Iowa State University, in 1991 and 1994, respectively. He has held academic positions at New Mexico State University (1996 - 1999) and Syracuse University (1994 - 1996). His research interests include parallel algorithms and applications, computa-tional biology, and scientific computing. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award.

Mathukumalli Vidyasagar received the B. S., M. S., and Ph. D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin in 1965, 1967, and 1969, respectively. He taught at Marquette University (1969-70), Concordia University (1970-80), and the University of Waterloo (1980-89). From 1989 to 2000, he served as the Director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics in Bangalore, India. In 2000, he took up his current assignment as Executive Vice President (Advanced Technology) in Tata Consultancy Services. He is the author or co-author of seven books and more than one hundred and twenty journal papers. He is a Fellow of IEEE, the Indian Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, the Indian National Academy of Engineering, and the Third World Academy of Sciences. His current research interests are control theory, machine learning, and cryptography.