Early next week we have an extra talk by *Berton Earnshaw*, Senior Director of Data Science Research at *Recursion Pharmaceuticals* giving a talk on *Monday August 6 2018* at *12pm - 1pm* in room *AA3195.* This will be a lunch talk and mingle with *food served!*
Will this talk be streamed https://mila.bluejeans.com/809027115/webrtc? Yes
Want to meet with Berton in the afternoon? https://calendar.google.com/calendar/selfsched?sstoken=UVBVTVF0X25Nd09LfGRlZ...
Come for the food and machine learning, stay because the talk will be awesome. Michael
*TITLE *Representation learning in human cellular biology
*KEYWORDS* bioinformatics, representation learning
*ABSTRACT* The automated labs at Recursion Pharmaceuticals currently run more than 100,000 experiments every week, and each experiment involves imaging the morphology of human cells under various biological and chemical perturbations. The resulting data set is the largest and most diverse of its kind, and is used to train networks that learn to predict which compounds treat which diseases, and why. In this talk, I will describe the challenges of learning on biological image sets, discuss some approaches we have taken to learning representations of these images, and describe how we use these representations to discover candidate treatments for disease.
*BIO * Berton earned a PhD in math from the University of Utah in 2007, where he designed biophysical models of protein trafficking at synapses during episodes of learning and memory formation. In 2010, after two post-docs at Utah and Michigan State University spent developing the theory of non-autonomous master equations, Berton took some time off of academia and co-founded the call center software company Perfect Pitch where he led as CTO. In 2012 he joined the founding team of Red Brain Labs as Director of Operations and Data Science, where he worked to optimize call centers using machine learning and simulation. In 2014, Red Brain Labs was acquired by Savvysherpa where, as a Senior Scientist and Principal, Berton led various research projects applying machine learning to insurance claims and medical records with the goal of improving healthcare outcomes. In 2017, Berton joined Recursion Pharmaceuticals as Senior Director of Data Science Research, where he leads the research team in applying deep learning to millions of images of human cells in search of treatments for hundreds of diseases.
*COMPANY BIO* At Recursion Pharmaceuticals, we have raised over $80M to apply machine learning to one of the most unique datasets in existence - tens of millions of images of cells under a huge number of biological and chemical perturbations, generated in our own labs - in order to find treatments for hundreds of diseases. Our long term mission is to decode biology to radically improve lives - we want to understand biology so well that we can fix most things that go wrong in our bodies.