Hi everyone,

we will have our first tea talk on this Friday.

Please NOTE that this tea talk is scheduled at **13:30-14:30** in **AA6214**.

We are in a transition process of moving the tea talk time slot from 11:00-1200 to 13:30-14:30.

Professor Brendan Frey from U of T will tell us about his work on applying machine learning to detect and treat genetic disease. If anyone is interested in meeting with Brendan, please tell Dima or me, we will host a short meeting after his talk.

Who   : Professor Brendan Frey

When : 20/1/2017 13:30-14:30

Where: AA6214

Title: Using Machine Learning to Detect and Treat Genetic Disease

Abstract:

Diseases and corresponding treatments often have to do with genetic modifications, such as changing a T to a G at a particular location within DNA. In 2015, my University of Toronto group spun out a startup, Deep Genomics, which is using machine learning to model how these changes impact cellular processes involved in disease, such as cancer and neurological disorders. For example, to train our splicing model, we are using 9661 different datasets, each with a number of training cases that varies from 8 million to 220 million. In this talk, I'll describe some of the machine learning challenges that, if solved, will completely change the field of medicine, save hundreds of thousands of lives, and improve the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people.

Biography:

Brendan Frey is the CEO and Co-Founder of Deep Genomics and a Professor in Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He has made fundamental contributions in the areas of machine learning and genome biology, and is widely known for his work on using machine learning to understand how genetic variation leads to disease. Dr. Frey has received numerous distinctions and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a John C. Polanyi Fellow. He recently co-founded a University of Toronto spinoff, Deep Genomics, which is using machine learning to bring about a new approach to genomic medicine. Dr. Frey has consulted for several industrial research and development laboratories in Canada, the United States and England, and has served on the Technical Advisory Board of Microsoft Research. His former students and postdoctoral fellows include professors, industrial researchers and developers at universities and industrial laboratories from across Canada, the United States and Europe.

Best,

--Junyoung